Climate change is causing extensive and unprecedented impacts on individuals, societies, and ecosystems. Transformational efforts are increasingly advocated to overcome limits to climate change adaptation, but they can entail difficult and potentially disruptive decisions that depend on the goals that individuals and societies decide to pursue, and thus on the values they wish to prioritise, reconfigure or leave behind in response to radical changes. The call for transformational adaptation revives the impetus for placing values centre stage but also poses key challenges for adaptation research and practice. This perspective outlines three challenges for taking values seriously: understanding what values are, by acknowledging both their descriptive and normative dimensions; accounting for the multiplicity of value holders across space and time; and designing processes through which value conflicts are made explicit and can be legitimately resolved. We outline how ethics can help in determining the relation between what people find valuable and normatively well-grounded values; propose ‘value mapping’ exercises to elicit the values of actors involved in the adaptation process; and stress the potential of deliberative approaches in supporting efforts for more transformative adaptation. These challenges are exemplified through planned relocation, a radical and potentially transformative adaptation response. This paper outlines the distinction between descriptive and normative conceptions of values, a distinction often overlooked in environmental social sciences, and demonstrates its significance for addressing the multiplicity of values and conflicts in transformational adaptation. Rather than prescribing a definitive method for closing the gap between these descriptive and normative conceptions on values, it traces an initial pathway for integrating empirical and ethical perspectives and calls for renewed collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to advance values-based adaptation research and practice.

Franke, in Philosophy & Technology, 37(1), 1–6, (2024), connects the recent debate about manipulative algorithmic transparency with the concerns about problematic pursuits of positive liberty. I argue that the indifference view of manipulative transparency is not aligned with positive liberty, contrary to Franke’s claim, and even if it is, it is not aligned with the risk that many have attributed to pursuits of positive liberty. Moreover, I suggest that Franke’s worry may generalise beyond the manipulative transparency debate to AI ethics in general.

The European Union (EU) Digital Identity Wallet (DIW) intends to give citizens control over personal data sharing. The DIW users will have full and sole control over their data. The EU intends to address the risk to citizens' privacy in cases where data from and about users is gathered and exchanged by online service providers. However, it is unclear how users of the EU DIW can decide what data to share and how to prevent sharing too much data with online service providers. In order to reduce this risk, we need to understand it first. Drawing on expert interviews, this paper presents a novel analysis of the risk of over sharing through the EU DIW. It defines the risk and what aspects influence the risk from literature, documentation and expert interviews. Over-sharing data occurs when users share more data than strictly required for the service or product acquired online and multiple aspects influence this risk, specifically the user capabilities and orientation, the loss of context awareness, the quality of the data and the ease of sharing.

Generative AI enables automated, effective manipulation at scale. Despite the growing general ethical discussion around generative AI, the specific manipulation risks remain inadequately investigated. This article outlines essential inquiries encompassing conceptual, empirical, and design dimensions of manipulation, pivotal for comprehending and curbing manipulation risks. By highlighting these questions, the article underscores the necessity of an appropriate conceptualisation of manipulation to ensure the responsible development of Generative AI technologies.

A series of recent papers raises worries about the manipulative potential of algorithmic transparency (to wit, making visible the factors that influence an algorithm’s output). But while the concern is apt and relevant, it is based on a fraught understanding of manipulation. Therefore, this paper draws attention to the ‘indifference view’ of manipulation, which explains better than the ‘vulnerability view’ why algorithmic transparency has manipulative potential. The paper also raises pertinent research questions for future studies of manipulation in the context of algorithmic transparency.

Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user friendly design, microtargeting, default settings, gamification, and real time profiling. The authors in this volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? •Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? This volume brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. The Philosophy of Online Manipulation will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation.

We propose a fundamental challenge to the feasibility of moral progress: most extant theories of progress, we will argue, assume an unrealistic level of cognitive control people must have over their moral judgments for moral progress to occur. Moral progress depends at least in part on the possibility of individual people improving their moral cognition to eliminate the pernicious influence of various epistemically defective biases and other distorting factors. Since the degree of control people can exert over their moral cognition tends to be significantly overestimated, the prospects of moral progress face a formidable problem, the force of which has thus far been underappreciated. In the paper, we will provide both conceptual and empirical arguments for this thesis, and explain its most important implications.

The standard way to test alternative descriptive theories of moral judgment is by asking subjects to evaluate (amongst others) sacrificial dilemmas, where acting classifies as a utilitarian moral judgment and not acting classifies as a deontological moral judgment. Previous research uncovered many situational factors that alter subject’s moral judgments without affecting which type of action utilitarianism or deontology would recommend. This literature review provides a systematic analysis of the experimental literature on the influence of situational factors on moral judgments in sacrificial dilemmas. It analyses 53 articles in detail and reports mean effect sizes, as well as operationalizations, for 36 situational factors that significantly influence moral judgment. Moreover, the review discusses how the impact of situational factors relates to a dual process theory of moral judgment. It supports the view that utilitarian judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes and shows that the drivers of deontological judgments depend on valence.

Pandemics like COVID-19 confront us with decisions about life and death that come with great uncertainty, factual as well as moral. How should policy makers deal with such uncertainty? We suggest that rather than to deliberate until they have found the right course of action, they better do moral experiments that generate relevant experiences to enable more reliable moral evaluations and rational decisions.