Conceptual engineering is a normative approach to conceptual work aimed at the improvement of concepts through evaluation, design, and implementation. To this end, conceptual engineers need to have a measure of what an adequate concept amounts to. Functionalism offers such a standard. Following the functional approach, concepts have functions and are adequate to the extent that they can fulfil their functions. Functional approaches have traditionally operated on the assumption that conceptual engineers ought to concern themselves with what concepts should do. Recent contributions have advocated a more fine-grained and context-sensitive understanding of conceptual functions, extending beyond proper functions to encompass normative and possible functions. Building of these developments, this paper introduces the notion of conceptual affordances, understood as the potential actions, uses, and thoughts that a concept enables or constrains relative to a given user and within a given context. It is argued that an affordances-informed approach can and should supplement and enrich functionalism. Indeed, by attending to conceptual affordances, conceptual engineers can better capture what concepts enable us to do, thus offering a more holistic and ethically attuned framework for conceptual evaluation, design, and implementation.

The AI Act advances a risk-based approach to the legal regulation of AI systems in the European Union. While we support this development, we argue that adequate AI governance requires paying attention to the broader implications of AI systems on the socio-technical landscape in which they are designed, developed, and used. In addition to risk-based impact assessments, this involves coming to terms with the socially disruptive implications of AI, which should be governed and guided in a dynamic ecosystem of regulation, law, ethics, and evolving human practice. In this paper, we outline a ‘social disruptiveness-based’ approach to AI governance aimed at addressing disruptions by AI that are not easily captured by legal regulation, but that are nonetheless of great societal and ethical concern. We argue that integrating the AI Act risk-based approach with a social disruptiveness-based approach can offer a more nuanced understanding of the dimensions of impact of AI systems on society at large, thus enhancing the governance of AI and other socially disruptive technologies.

Recent work on philosophy of technology emphasises the ways in which technology can disrupt our concepts and conceptual schemes. We analyse and challenge existing accounts of conceptual disruption, criticising views according to which conceptual disruption can be understood in terms of uncertainty for conceptual application, as well as views assuming all instances of conceptual disruption occur at the same level. We proceed to provide our own account of conceptual disruption as an interruption in the normal functioning of concepts and conceptual schemes. Moreover, we offer a multilevel taxonomy thereof, where we distinguish between instances of conceptual disruptions occurring at different levels (conceptual scheme, conceptual clusters, and individual concepts), taking on different forms (conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts), and leading to different degrees of severity (extending from mild to severe). We also provide detailed accounts through historical examples of how conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts can occur at different times in the very same process of conceptual disruption. Finally, we make the case that different kinds of conceptual engineering can provide meaningful ways to assess and overcome distinct types of conceptual disruption.

Considering public moral attitudes is a hallmark of the anticipatory governance of emerging biotechnologies, such as heritable human genome editing. However, such anticipatory governance often overlooks that future morality is open to change and that future generations may perform different moral assessments on the very biotechnologies we are trying to govern in the present. In this article, we identify an ‘anticipatory gap’ that has not been sufficiently addressed in the discussion on the public governance of heritable genome editing, namely, uncertainty about the moral visions of future generations about the emerging applications that we are currently attempting to govern now. This paper motivates the relevance of this anticipatory gap, identifying the challenges it generates and offering various recommendations so that moral uncertainty does not lead to governance paralysis with regard to human germline genome editing.

This chapter provides a theoretical lens on conceptual disruption. It offers a typology of conceptual disruption, discusses its relation to conceptual engineering, and sketches a programmatic view of the implications of conceptual disruption for the ethics of technology. We begin by distinguishing between three different kinds of conceptual disruptions: conceptual gaps, conceptual overlaps, and conceptual misalignments. Subsequently, we distinguish between different mechanisms of conceptual disruption, and two modes of conceptual change. We point out that disruptions may be induced by technology, but can also be triggered by intercultural exchanges. Conceptual disruptions frequently yield conceptual uncertainty and may call for conceptual and ethical inquiry. We argue that a useful approach to address conceptual disruptions is to engage in conceptual engineering. We outline what conceptual engineering involves and argue that discussions on conceptual disruption and conceptual engineering can benefit from closer integration. In closing, we discuss the relevance of studying conceptual disruption for technology ethics, and point to the promise of this line of research to innovate practical philosophy at large.

In this paper, we investigate whether the computational approach for the ethical resolution of the trolley problem proposed by Sommaggio and Marchiori (2020) may be applied to trolley problem-like scenarios that transcend the ethical dimension. Specifically, we draw a parallelism between colliding ethical and legal principles, as well as between MaxSAT and Alexy’s principle theory. We then apply the resolution strategy proposed by the authors to the legal domain, and present the potential benefits and shortcomings of a computational approach to legal reasoning.

The report outlines a revised general approach for legal analysis of emerging technologies. It elaborates and adapts the original approach developed in the SIENNA methodological Handbook which was applied to SIENNA legal studies in human genomics, artificial intelligence and robotics and human enhancement technologies. The proposed approach consists of four general steps: (1) specification of scope of legal analysis; (2) identification of legal issues; (3) analysis of international, regional (including EU) and national legal norms relevant for the identified issues and (4) identification of gaps and challenges in the existing legal frameworks with regard to the identified issues. The annex of the report includes two brief legal case-studies on three-dimensional printing and augmented reality technologies, illustrating how the major points of the revised approach could be applied to emerging technologies.

Taking the cue from research on the bioethical and biolegal debate surrounding access to genetic data from the 1990s, this paper explores the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic from a bioethical as well as biolegal point of view. At first, by illustrating some of the risks associated with measures for the containment and contrast of the spread of the coronavirus. Subsequently, by considering the implications of such measures on people as individuals as well as workers, and by discussing the legal implications of a potential sacrifice of privacy for safety, as opposed to necessity and public interest. In this sense, the concept of genetic counseling initially proposed by Sommaggio (2010) is resumed and updated.

In this paper, we analyse the structure of evolving moral dilemmas with an eye of regard for the increasing importance of the role of artificial intelligence in such context. Starting with the analysis of the famous trolley problem experiment as formulated by Philippa Foot, we consider subsequent variants of this moral dilemma conceived throughout the years, culminating with formulations of the trolley problem concerning artificial intelligence, in which self-driving vehicles will have to make life or death decisions autonomously. In doing so, we investigate the basis for the construction of dilemmatic questions both for humans and machines by considering the problem from a philosophical, social and neuroscientific perspective. After considering and analysing the trolley problem in utilitarian and deontological terms, we follow Rittel and Webber’s footsteps, by highlighting the fallacies of the deontological and utilitarian traditional ‘one-right-answer’ approach, where a solution is undoubtedly right or wrong, and claim that moral problems are not, due to their intrinsic dilemmatic nature, resolvable. By rejecting an aut-aut approach, we find ourselves contemplating the possibility of neither approach being right in an absolute sense. Given these premises, we present a different approach on the matter, arguing for the central and creative role of the tragic as a new tool for enhancing both human and autonomous vehicles’ approach to moral problems.