Women are still disadvantaged in the workplace compared to men: they earn less for the same job and are less likely to achieve higher positions. Besides the gender bias that they face, women also contribute to gender inequality by making different career and family choices than men. What are the causes of these differences?

Difference feminism states that women are simply different from men and therefore want different things; these differences should be celebrated and re-valued. For example, caring for children and family members should be valued as much as a career outside the home. Liberal feminists agree that this may indeed help us overcome certain forms of inequality, but warn us that we should not too readily assume that women really want different things than men. Rather, our culture creates and perpetuates such strong expectations and role models, that our preferences, desires, and aspirations follow suit.

There is a lot of evidence that gender roles are to a large extent socially constructed. Ideas about what women and men are like, tend to vary a lot across space and time and thus cannot be defined without reference to the cultural and historical context. Also, women differ a lot from each other in what they want in life. Furthermore, many women have deviated from society’s expectations which should remind us that there is not one definition of what it is to be a woman.

Gender differences result from nature and nurture. Striving for gender equality, however, does not mean that everyone has to be the same. Rather, it can mean that people are provided with the opportunity to develop in a way that suits them, independently of their sex or gender. This means that we should resist gendered expectations and make no assumptions about men’s and women’s career and family choices.

What happens when two children have to share a cookie? It depends. Chances of getting an equal division are best when one child divides the cookie and the other is allowed to choose first. This is less likely to happen when one child divides the cookie and gives part of it away. This example illustrates the point of a famous thought experiment designed by philosopher John Rawls to explain the ‘veil of ignorance’. Imagine that no one knows what his or her preferences, abilities or position in society will be – because this is covered by a veil of ignorance– what kind of society would we want to live in? This thought experiment invites us to think about fairness, equality and justice. Those who choose to have a society that is very hard on people with few abilities or who are born into a group with a low so cial status, might suffer if they happen to end up as someone with few abilities or belonging to a low-status group. This way of thinking thus helps us transform self-interest into general interest. A similar principle underlies insurances: everybody contributes an equal share, not knowing who will be the one need ing a smaller or larger payment or nothing at all. This justice principle can be threatened when insurances refuse to accept people who are considered high risk (e.g., because they suffer from a chronic illness), or give discounts to those who are unlikely to undergo costly medical treatments (e.g., students).

Few people are willing to significantly adapt their lifestyle in order to reduce their ecological footprint. Several scholars have proposed that the missing link in communication about climate change is the role of emotions in enticing a lifestyle that diminishes climate change. Emotions may affect people’s environmental behaviour in two ways: They lead to greater awareness of the problems, and they increase people’s motivation to do something about climate change. Yet, emotions are generally excluded from communication and political decision-making about risky technologies and climate change, because of the assumption that emotions are irrational and misleading.

However, this assumption is based on a narrow understanding of emotions that is challenged by insights from emotion researchers who emphasize that emotions can be an important source of practical rationality and moral insight. Quantitative approaches to risk only look at net outcomes at a high level of aggregation; they do not look into other ethical issues such as justice, fairness, autonomy and equality. In my research I argue that emotions such as sympathy, compassion, indignation, and feelings of responsibility can more strongly draw our attention to such moral values. For example, by providing people with concrete narratives of those who undergo the effects of climate change, distant others who can otherwise easily be neglected come uncomfortably close, which can elicit compassion, and force people to critically assess their own behaviour. Furthermore, the experience of moral emotions more strongly enhances people’s motivation to act than purely rational, abstract knowledge about climate change, even if it means that we have to make personal sacrifices, such as adjusting our lifestyle. Communication about climate change should appeal to reflective moral emotions such as sympathy and compassion, as these can give rise to critical ethical reflection and motivate us to act in a sustainable way.

AI systems and tools are being implemented at an increasingly rapid rate in society for a variety of purposes such as decision-making, managing job applications, and socializing. These new technologies have a lot of promise but may also introduce new risks by threatening human moral and relational values, as well as values connected to flourishing. Mainstream approaches to risk assessment do not pay sufficient attention to these values. The study of emotions as they are connected to human values can therefore play an important role in risk management. We will contribute to this discussion by introducing the concept of human needs, or what we consider to be the sources of values that constitute emotions. This brings a new perspective to the debate around AI and risk. By combining insights from Martha Nussbaum and Soran Reader, we argue that while emotions are crucial for highlighting what values are activated in a particular situation, the sources of an important part of human values are human needs. This provides for what we call the ‘needs-values-emotions nexus’. We argue that this framework can add to the discussion about the ethical risks of AI in two fundamental ways. First, highlighting the crucial role of needs helps to explain why AI systems cannot develop, feel, nor reason according to human values. On the most basic level, AI systems lack a constitutive part of these values, i.e., they lack needs. The deployment of AI, for example to replace human decision-making, may therefore threaten human values. We discuss this by zooming in on a recent example, the so-called Dutch tax benefit scandal. Second, this paper argues that we need emotions to concretize and deliberate on what values are at risk when developing and using AI technology. Further building on the ‘needs-values-emotions nexus’ developed in this paper, we argue why art is a preeminent medium to elicit emotions and ethical reflection on the risks of AI. Discussing a concrete example, we illustrate how contemporary artists can contribute to ethical risk-assessments by focusing on the societal impact of AI.

Moral (or ethical) sensitivity is widely viewed as a foundational learning goal in engineering ethics education. We have argued in this paper is that this view of moral sensitivity cannot be readily transported from the nursing context to the engineering context on the basis of a care-analogy. The particularized care characteristic of the nursing context is decisively different from the generalized and universalized forms of care characteristic of the engineering context. Through a focus on care and maintenance, the engineering student’s moral sensitivity can be refined, opening up a perceptual awakening and affectivity towards the complex nature of the engineer’s Other. This awakening is in part promoted through an understanding of the ideology of neutrality as a moment in the history engineering. Becoming aware of this ideology as an ideology can then be seen as an activity of dividing loyalties that allows for a reflexive and critical view of the biases and presuppositions inherited within the world of engineering. This process of deepening the engineering student’s moral sensitivity is perhaps as much a process of the student becoming aware of her professional world, how it shapes her understanding of herself, and what it means to be a good engineer.

Risky technologies such as biotechnology, energy technologies, and digital technologies are frequently highly controversial. While such technologies can contribute to people’s well-being, they can also create social disruption. The latter requires approaches for decision-making on how to responsibly design risky technologies. Technology is not value neutral, rather, design choices imply value choices. That is why scholars in risk ethics and philosophy of technology have argued for long that we need value-sensitive design and responsible innovation in order to ensure that value choices are made explicitly and based on sound ethical considerations. This chapter focuses on the contribution that emotions and values can make to the responsible innovation of risky technologies, based on the idea that emotions can play an important role in ethical decision-making about risky technologies. The chapter develops this idea further and expands it to approaches to responsible innovation in the context of the following key stakeholders: universities, industry, policy makers, and the public. The central idea this chapter investigates is that embedding emotions and values in the innovation of risky technologies can enhance the quality of deliberation and decision-making regarding technological risks, can help to overcome stalemates, and can lead to morally and socially more acceptable, as well as responsible technological innovations.

In this chapter, we review and expand on the current ethical research on Human–Robot Collaboration in industrial settings. To date, the ethical issues discussed include: job loss, reorganization of labour, informed consent and data collection, user-involvement in design, hierarchy in decision-making, and coerced acceptance of robots. These wide-ranging issues are a useful starting point for discussion, yet as the number of robots designed and deployed as collaborators in industrial settings grows, ethical research must evolve to allow for more nuance in the previously listed issues as well as a recognition of novel concerns as they arise. In this paper, we suggest new ethical aspects related to collaborative robots in industrial settings, including: emotional impact on workers; effects of limited movement; the potential effects of working with one’s replacement; the ‘chilling effects’ of performance monitoring; the possibility for disclosure of new and unintended information through data collection; and the inability to challenge computerized decisions. Taken together these thoughts are meant to open the door towards new forms of moral learning necessary for assessing the ethical acceptability of human–robot collaborations on the factory floor.

Emotions may play an important role in how citizens respond to public policies, and energy policies in particular. Yet, little insights exist into causes of those emotions. This study investigates ethical concerns as the basis of emotions. We test whether people perceive an unequal distribution of negative outcomes of a local energy project as more unfair than an equal distribution thereof and, in turn, experience stronger negative emotions (hypothesis 1) and whether these effects depend on whether the project has personal consequences or not (i.e. the self-relevance of the project; hypothesis 2). In an experiment with a 2 (equal vs. unequal distribution) by 2 (self-relevant vs. not self-relevant) design (N = 282), we find support for hypothesis 1, but not 2. Furthermore, we find that perceived total amount of harm, an ethical concern about the total amount of negative outcomes bestowed on all people together, is also (marginally significantly) affected by the unequal distribution and relates to the emotions. We argue that justified ethical concerns are at the root of emotions about renewable energy projects and therefore emotions and their underlying ethical concerns should be considered for socially responsible as well as successful energy policy making.

In most countries, including the Netherlands, decision-making about the COVID-19 policy measures was initially based on medical information, and only later did it also include insights from social sciences. However, ethical implications of COVID-19 policy measures have not frequently been explicitly considered. As a result, critical ethical issues have been overlooked, and values, concerns, and emotions have not been considered appropriately. In this chapter, I will argue that emotions can help to make important moral dilemmas around decision-making about COVID-19 explicit and to make ethically justified decisions. I will do so by zooming in specifically on how the Netherlands has handled the pandemic so far. My discussion aims to contribute to morally better and more socially acceptable decision-making about the challenges that COVID-19 poses, as well as to hopefully learn lessons for possible future pandemics.

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking.

Augmentative and Alternative Communication Technology [AAC Tech] is a relatively young, multidisciplinary field aimed at developing technologies for people who are unable to use their natural speaking voice due to congenital or acquired disability. In this paper, we take a look at the role of AAC Tech in promoting an ‘empathic turn’ in the perception of non-speaking autistic persons. By the empathic turn we mean the turn towards a recognition of non-speaking autistic people as persons whose ways of engaging the world and expressing themselves are indicative of psychologically rich and intrinsically meaningful experiential lives. We first identify two ways in which AAC Tech contributes positively to this development. We then discuss how AAC Tech can simultaneously undermine genuine empathic communication between autistic persons and typically developed communicators (or neurotypicals). To mitigate this concern, we suggest the AAC field should incorporate philosophical insights from Design for Emotions and enactive embodied cognitive science into its R&D practices. To make our proposal concrete, we home in on stimming as an autistic form of bodily expressivity that can play an important role in empathic communicative exchanges between autistic persons and neurotypicals and that could be facilitated in AAC Tech designed for autistic people.

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft’s approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach developed at TU Delft is deeply informed by the research of the Section, which is centered around Responsible Research and Innovation, Design for Values, and Risk Ethics. These theoretical approaches are premised on the notion that technologies are inherently value-laden, and as such contain the possibility of fostering or hindering moral values. Each of these approaches encourages students to take a proactive attitude with respect to their projects and profession, thinking creatively about – and taking responsibility for – how to both prevent harm and do good via the technologies they help develop. To explain how this is put into practice, this paper sketches a brief history of ethics teaching at TU Delft, outlines current activities, and presents future plans for Bachelor and Master’s level engineering ethics education at TU Delft.

Elderly care receivers are extensively and profoundly affected by interacting with care robots. This paper focuses on autonomy as a core value in elderly care and demonstrates its complexity. Few studies have been able to address this complexity in elderly care in the robot era. Therefore, a taxonomy of autonomy is introduced to discern the complexity and tailored as a tool to evaluate ethical aspects of the effects of care robots on autonomy in elderly care. It concludes that this taxonomy is instrumental for impact assessments of care robots on care receivers' autonomy both retrospectively and prospectively.

The Code of Conduct gives direction to all members of the TU Delft community on how to act, how to respond to integrity-related issues, and how to maintain a high level of respect for each other, for our world and for the environment.

In this chapter, we argue for broadening the approach of responsible innovation in two respects. First, we contend that responsible innovation should be seen as an ongoing process that continues after the initial development of a new technology; it comprises a technology’s use, its implementation and the end of its life cycle. Second, we argue for taking emotions more seriously in responsible innovation. Sympathy and feelings of responsibility (for instance) can provide moral insights, and thus they should no longer be dismissed as irrational distractions in debates about new technologies. We support these two claims by focusing on responsible innovation in regard to nuclear energy technologies. In addition to the two reforms mentioned above, we believe that for such technologies – and for other technologies with very long-term risks – the value of intergenerational justice needs to be explicitly included in the decision-making. Our argument has direct implications for nuclear power policies. These proposed reforms would help society to move beyond the usual stalemate in the debate about nuclear energy.

Responsible innovation and ethics of technology increasingly take emotions into consideration. Yet, there are still some crucial aspects of emotions that have not been addressed in the literature. In order to close this gap, we introduce these neglected aspects and discusses their theoretical and practical implications. We will zoom in on the following aspects: emotional recalcitrance, affective forecasting, mixed emotions, and collective emotions. Taking these aspects into account will provide a more fine-grained view of emotions that will help to improve current and future approaches and procedures that incorporate emotions.

De gedragscode geeft richting aan alle leden van de TU Delft-gemeenschap, door aan te geven wat de beste manieren zijn om te handelen, te reageren op mogelijke integriteitskwesties, en respectvol met elkaar, onze wereld en het milieu om te gaan.

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations.