Ethics, Gender, and Agents: The Role of Designers in Conversational Agent Design

Research has shown how people anthropomorphize conversational agents (CA) and unconsciously bring their gender stereotypes into human-agent interaction. For this reason, there has been a long lasted dilemma on whether designers should design CAs that conform to or violate stereotypical expectations. Despite the urgency and importance of...

Addressing Online Gaming Toxicity from a Confucian Perspective

Can Confucian ethics contribute to diagnosing the root causes of video games’ toxicity and formulating design requirements for redressing it? Contemporary Confucian studies on technology have not addressed these questions, although video games have become an important part of contemporary human life. This paper advances Confucian-inspired...

Values for a Post-Pandemic Future

This open access book shows how value sensitive design (VSD), responsible innovation, and comprehensive engineering can guide the rapid development of technological responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Responding to the ethical challenges of data-driven technologies and other tools requires thinking about values in the context of a pandemic as well...

The Just Transition Fund - Is the EU becoming more just?: A theoretical research

In 2018, the European Union laid the foundation for a large-scale energy transition: away from fossil-based energy and towards renewable, sustainable energy solutions. The need for a transition is mainly accepted, but it is questioned whether all European Union citizens benefit from such a change. In fact, the greenhouse gas reduction will lead...

Counter-Terrorism, Ethics and Technology

Touching at a Distance: Digital Intimacies, Haptic Platforms, and the Ethics of Consent

The last decade has seen rise in technologies that allow humans to send and receive intimate touch across long distances. Drawing together platform studies, digital intimacy studies, phenomenology of touch, and ethics of technology, we argue that these new haptic communication devices require specific ethical consideration of consent. The...

How Do Technological Artefacts Embody Moral Values?

According to some philosophers of technology, technology embodies moral values in virtue of its functional properties and the intentions of its designers. But this paper shows that such an account makes the values supposedly embedded in technology epistemically opaque and that it does not allow for values to change. Therefore, to overcome...

Values in responsible research and innovation: from entities to practices

This article explores the understanding of values in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). First, it analyses how two mainstream RRI approaches, the largely substantial one by Von Schomberg and the procedural one by Stilgoe and colleagues, identify and conceptualize values. We argue that by treating values as relatively stable entities,...

The Dawning of the Ethics of Environmental Robots

Environmental scientists and engineers have been exploring research and monitoring applications of robotics, as well as exploring ways of integrating robotics into ecosystems to aid in responses to accelerating environmental, climatic, and biodiversity changes. These emerging applications of robots and other autonomous technologies present...

Taking a Capability Approach to Technology and Its Design: A Philosophical Exploration

What people are realistically able to do and be in their lives, their capabilities, are of central moral importance according to the capability approach (CA) of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Examples are the capabilities to be healthy or to be part of a community. The CA has become an influential normative framework for reflecting on justice,...

What Values in Design? The Challenge of Incorporating Moral Values into Design

Recently, there is increased attention to the integration of moral values into the conception, design, and development of emerging IT. The most reviewed approach for this purpose in ethics and technology so far is Value-Sensitive Design (VSD). This article considers VSD as the prime candidate for implementing normative considerations into design...