This dissertation investigated how sociotechnical visions—defined as discursively articulated images of desirable futures—shape the development, design, and evaluation of sociotechnical systems through the moral objectives they contain. It focuses in particular on the roles of values and ideals in these visions, and on how such moralized visions interact with technological design, feasibility constraints, and processes of value change over time.

This dissertation sets out with the claim that contemporary societies face systemic crises—such as climate change, energy insecurity, and urban sustainability issues—that call for long-term direction rather than incremental problem-solving. Governments, engineers, and designers can use visions of desirable futures to guide sociotechnical change. These visions typically combine normative claims about what constitutes a good society with assumptions about which technologies and systems are necessary to realize that future. Despite their prominence, however, it remains insufficiently understood how the moral content of visions—especially abstract values and seemingly infeasible ideals—actually influences technological design and system development..... ... Read more

This thesis explores the phenomenon of greenwashing, particularly its systemic origins and contributory factors within corporate and regulatory frameworks. Through the analysis of three prominent case studies—Volkswagen, DWS, and Shell—it demonstrates that greenwashing is not merely the result of isolated corporate actions, but a complex, multi-layered symptom of wider sociotechnical influences. The research adopts Rasmussen’s risk management framework alongside Salmon’s systems-thinking approach to identify and map out systemic failures leading to greenwashing. Findings indicate that the most influential factors originate from management policies and regulatory oversight, showcasing the critical role of internal and external governance structures. The study’s conclusions emphasize the need for stricter regulatory audits and the cultivation of transparent corporate cultures. The analysis also provides insights into the ethical implications for sustainability-focused business practices, offering a taxonomy of systemic influences that contribute to greenwashing. This work aims to inform future strategies for regulatory bodies and businesses to mitigate greenwashing and promote genuine environmental responsibility. ... Read more

Energy storage, and energy systems in general, can give rise to local and global injustices, and thus it is important to develop, deploy and regulate energy systems in a just manner. Energy justice scholarship has two aims, namely to (a) understand and explain claims of injustice (descriptive aim) and (b) evaluate energy systems in terms of justice and propose policy and design recommendations (normative aim). However, existing energy justice frameworks have limited capacities to achieve both aims because they insufficiently acknowledge normative uncertainties. Different stakeholders have different ideas about when something is (un)just, and as such, there is normative uncertainty about what ‘energy justice’ implies for energy systems. This dissertation aims to strengthen the conceptual foundations of energy justice in light of normative uncertainties, which helps achieve both aims. To do so, the dissertation leverages social sciences and political philosophy, more specifically Critical Theory. The conceptual contributions in this dissertation help detect, analyse, and evaluate energy conflicts and claims of injustice and include a revisited energy justice framework, a reconceptualization of recognition justice, and the hidden morality heuristic. This dissertation stresses the importance of acknowledging normative uncertainty in energy decision-making, the need for justification of normative claims, and the importance of a critical dialogue on energy justice in academia and society, to help guide decision-making towards more just energy storage systems. ... Read more

This thesis explores the ethical challenges that a potential research program for solar climate engineering via Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) could incur. These ethical challenges are comprised of epistemic hurdles in relation to the research process, as well as societal questions of justice and the value of nature. The thesis proposes a variety of tools and approaches to assess and possibly govern the risks and uncertainties invoked by the research of SAI and its societal implications. The methodological approach is based mainly on ethical and philosophical analysis and reflection and the main findings take the form of discursive argumentation and normative reflection.

SAI is a form of climate engineering that seeks to reduce global warming by increasing the planet’s reflection levels through the injection of reflective agents (aerosols) into the stratosphere. The mere potential of researching a technology that would actively intervene in the global climate is highly contentious and has led to passionate debates throughout the expert community. Designing a research process for such a polarizing technology such as SAI inevitably raises fundamental moral questions, wherein issues of global justice, democracy, the value of and humanity’s relationship with nature, and the societal impacts of technological innovation all intersect. Given these far-reaching consequences, the thesis operates under the assumption that SAI is a highly disruptive idea and technology, that has the potential to challenge and undermine existing societal values and institutions. Accordingly, this work presents a range of philosophical modes of inquiry and assessments, in order to supply any proposed SAI research governance program with the necessary ethical considerations and frameworks.

The thesis is structured along four major inflection points, which form the individual chapters tied together through differing but interrelated research questions. What follows is an overview of the research questions, along with a brief description of how those questions were answered…
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Celsius or 1085 GtC. This thesis explores this significance and points toward prioritizing ecosystem conservation as a highly effective strategy for mitigating climate change. Initiatives such as carbon offsetting, performed by organizations like ‘8 billion trees’ and ‘cool earth’, could provide feasible solutions to enhance carbon sequestration. The EU's Nature Restoration Law is a step in the right direction, advocating for the conservation of existing ecosystems and restoring deteriorated systems, specifically increasing organic stocks in forests and restoring and rewetting drained peatlands of agricultural use and peat extraction sites seem to be compelling aspects in terms of improving the carbon system proposed in this law. I encourage the exploration of similar policy changes globally, underscoring the importance of taking immediate action and ensuring no further deterioration of existing terrestrial carbon systems.

Following the importance of terrestrial carbon storage, the debate remains about who should sacrifice their land. This research has displayed a high sensitivity in land allocation for terrestrial carbon storage when comparing ethical perspectives of justness, also defined as climate justice principles. This sensitivity can be seen as normative uncertainties and represent potential tensions in developing a coherent global policy. In my research, certain countries are more sensitive to these normative uncertainties than others. The Netherlands, Pakistan, China, and Yemen are highly sensitive to terrestrial carbon storage obligations if islands and smaller states are not considered. In the case of the Netherlands, this sensitivity is caused by a high GDP and, therefore, ability-to-pay. Still, when following efficiency prioritized, Dutch agricultural land should be kept for its high agricultural productivity. China is expected to reach a high level of domestic food security. Therefore, they would have to sacrifice their land for terrestrial carbon storage according to a different interpretation of ability-to-pay. Also, the efficiency prioritized principle for China would be ideal because, with their economic growth and innovation, they are expected to reach a high level of agricultural productivity. In the case of Yemen, it is different, Yemen has low agricultural productivity, and efficiency-prioritized will lead to them converting agricultural land to forests. The best interpretation of ability-to-pay for Yemen is the available land that could be converted for terrestrial carbon storage.

In my analysis, I showed proof of principle to include these normative uncertainties in policy analysis to explore areas of consensus. Through this approach, I found countries that should convert or conserve their land for terrestrial carbon storage and countries that arguably could still replace their forests and wetlands for other land covers such as urban- and agricultural land. I propose that climate justice principles should be included as uncertainties in policy-analysis, thus arguing for – additional – simplified models to allow for easy implementation of these uncertainties in the analysis.

To come to these findings, I performed an extensive analysis of the global food-, land cover-, and carbon system, simulating a wide range of scenarios up to the year 2100. The model I have developed operates at a national-detail level and includes 173 countries worldwide. The model considers several factors for each country, such as socioeconomic development, current land cover, agricultural productivity, and food demand. The national systems interact globally to represent global systems such as food change and the carbon cycle.

I tested a wide range of distribution methods on this system for terrestrial carbon storage burden, represented by five policy levers. Additionally, I considered 21 uncertainties in the model and performed 10.000 experiments to ensure the robustness of the proposed policies. In the last phase of the analysis, I created world maps that display the land countries should convert for terrestrial carbon storage according to climate justice principles and the sensitivity per country. These maps allow for an easy understanding and interpretation of the climate justice principles.

I started the research by exploring frequently used climate change policy evaluation in ethics. Ethics literature discusses two main social justice types: distributive and procedural justice. In this study, I focus on distributive justice for its applicability in modelling solutions. I utilize pre-defined climate justice principles and introduce a new principle – efficiency prioritized, based on the utilitarian principle. The ‘principle efficiency prioritized’ allocates agricultural land to countries with the highest agricultural productivity and terrestrial carbon storage burden to the less-productive countries. Selected principles are Ability to Pay (based on available land for terrestrial carbon storage, domestic food supply, and GDP per capita), You-Broke-It-You-Fix-It (based on historical emissions), and Efficiency Prioritized, with different interpretation methods considered for Ability to Pay.

I modeled the system using Vensim, a System Dynamics modeling software. System Dynamics is a quantitative modeling formalism suitable for dealing with complex systems, allowing for exploring relations between system structure and behavior. It helps to understand the complex land use, land-use change, and forestry, food, and carbon system. It also enables the incorporation of parametric and structural uncertainties, testing a wide range of scenarios in systems with deep uncertainty. The model consists of several sub-systems, leveraging existing models from prior research by Auping (2018), and takes data from sources such as the World Bank, FAOSTAT, OECD, and IPCC as input.

To find robust policies in the face of deep uncertainty, I adopted an Exploratory Modelling and Analysis (EMA) approach using the open-source EMA workbench for Python. This approach involves performing a broad range of computational experiments, analyzing the results, and identifying robust policies based on these findings. EMA workbench has a special connection built-in to run experiments with Vensim efficiently. It includes built-in functions for sampling, such as Latin Hypercube Sampling, and scenario discovery, such as PRIM, used in my analysis to find the scenarios of interest.

I visualized the results with Basemap, NumPy, Pandas, and the EMA workbench, among other tools. Creating maps allows for a simple data representation, enhancing understanding and communicating the findings. This approach enables a thorough exploration of climate justice principles, modeling, and experimentation, providing valuable insights for decision-makers facing complex and uncertain climate change challenges.

To summarize, I applied System Dynamics modeling and scenario discovery to explore the global food and carbon system. I proved the importance of terrestrial carbon storage, especially conserving existing forests and wetlands. Terrestrial carbon storage policy also faces policy challenges in implementation, mainly the distribution of the terrestrial carbon storage burden. Because land for terrestrial carbon storage goes at the cost of agricultural and urban land that could provide economic prosperity and food security, there is a trade-off between different Sustainable Development Goals. Several distribution conventions have been evaluated following climate justice principles to find overlapping policies between the principles. I found a significant difference in the distribution of terrestrial carbon storage obligations between the principles, displaying potential complexities and tensions in policy-making. I also found consensus between the principles, defined as non-discriminatory policies. Policy-makers should start with non-discriminatory policies to ensure swift implementation. I recommend that other policy modelers also include ethical perspectives as uncertainties in their models to find non-discriminatory policies and, if necessary, develop simplified models to enable this.
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Voice messages are an increasingly well-known method of communication, accounting for more than 200 million messages a day. Sending audio messages requires a user to invest lesser effort compared to texting while enhancing the meaning of the message by adding an emotional context (e.g., irony). Unfortunately, we suspect that voice messages might provide much more information than intended. In fact, speech audio waves are both directly recorded by the microphone, as well as propagated into the environment and possibly reflected back to the microphone. Reflected waves along with ambient noise are also recorded by the microphone and sent as part of the voice message. In this thesis, we propose a novel attack for inferring detailed information about user location (e.g., a specific room) leveraging a simple WhatsApp voice message. We demonstrated our attack considering 7,200 voice messages from 15 different users and four environments (i.e., three bedrooms and a terrace). We considered three realistic attack scenarios depending on previous knowledge of the attacker about the victim and the environment. Our thorough experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed attack. We can infer the location of the user among a pool of four known environments with 85% accuracy. Moreover, our approach reaches an average accuracy of 93% in discerning between two rooms of similar size and furniture (i.e., two bedrooms), and an accuracy of up to 99% in classifying indoor and outdoor environments.
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Nuclear energy is one of the most sustainable and clean energies in the world. It has been widely applied for electricity generation since 1954. However, the safety issues are always perceived as the big concerns for nuclear power development. Therefore, level 2 PSA has been developed in order to investigate the accident progression and containment response during the severe accident. Currently, most level 2 PSA studies are very detailed and plant-specific, which makes individual analysis difficult to be studied by other similar type NPPs for safety improvements. In addition, due to the lack of the generic model, a lot of analysis data are difficult to be compared and selected for precursor analysis. Therefore, in this research, a generic level 2 PSA model has been developed in order to better facilitate nuclear risk mitigation management. The common safety features of pressurized water reactors have been compared and summarized among different generations. By comparing with different risk study results, the validity of the model has also been tested. Moreover, considering that level 2 PSA studies may overlook the societal and ethical aspects of the risk, social acceptance and ethical acceptability regarding risk mitigation strategies have been discussed. By developing a new risk governance framework, both technical and non-technical risks are well-integrated so that nuclear risk mitigation management can be continuously optimized. ... Read more

The development of nuclear energy technologies in the second half of the 20th century came with great hopes of rebuilding nations recovering from the devasta-tion of the Second World War or recently released from colonial rule. In coun-tries like France, India, the USA, Canada, Russia, and the United Kingdom, nuclear energy became the symbol of development towards a modern and technologically advanced future. However, after more than six decades of experi-ence with nuclear energy production, and in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it is safe to say that nuclear energy production is not without its problems.
Some of these problems have their origins in the very materiality of the technolo-gies involved. For example, not only does the use of highly radioactive materials give rise to risks for the current generation (e.g., in the potential for disaster when reactors melt down) but high-level radioactive waste from nuclear energy production presents a serious intergenerational problem for which an acceptable final solution or its implementation remains elusive. Moreover, nuclear energy technologies have specific social and political consequences. For example, they have been said to be authoritarian technologies (Winner, 1980), requiring cen-tralized authority, secrecy, and technocratic decision-making.
While some of these problems could have been foreseen before nuclear energy technologies were introduced, others only arose after these technologies were already integrated into the social and infrastructural fabric of our lives. Addition-ally, new technologies (e.g., Generation III, III+ and IV reactors) are still being developed, bringing with them new and uncertain hazards and risks. Ignorance and uncertainty about the possible deleterious effects of introducing a new technology are inevitable, especially if the technology is complex, large time-scales are involved, or risks depend on social or political factors unforeseen in the design stage. However, this should not deter us from developing and intro-ducing new technologies. Rather, it should motivate us to organize these ‘exper-iments’ with new technologies in society in such a way that we can learn about their possible hazards and risks as effectively and responsibly as possible (van de Poel, 2011, 2015). In this way, it is possible to minimize risks and avoid unwant-ed moral, social or political developments. However, organizing such experi-ments responsibly also means that one could come to the conclusion that continuing an experiment is no longer responsible or desirable. Should we be prepared for such a scenario, and if so, how could we do that? One possible strategy to tackle this issue is that the technology and its introduction should be reversible. The aim of this thesis is to further explore this strategy by answering the following main research question (RQ) and accompanying subquestions (SQ):

RQ: What are the implications of reversibility for the responsible develop-ment and implementation of nuclear energy technologies?

SQ1: Under what conditions can nuclear energy technologies be considered reversible?
SQ2: Why should nuclear energy technologies be reversible?
SQ3: If so, how could the reversibility of nuclear energy technologies be achieved?

After the introductory chapter 1, the chapters that form the main body of this dissertation each provide a distinct contribution to answering the three subques-tions and, by extension, the main research question. Guided by three historical case studies of nuclear energy technology development (i.e., India, France and the USA), chapter 2 answers the first subquestion by formulating the two condi-tions under which it can be considered reversible, i.e., 1) the ability to stop the further development and deployment of a that technology in society, and 2) the ability to undo the undesirable outcomes (material, institutional or symbolic) of the development and deployment of the technology. Chapter 3 subsequently tackles the second subquestion by establishing the general desirability of technological reversibility by virtue of its relation to responsibility in Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical phenomenology. It argues that technology development is a legitimate response to responsibility but inevitably falls short of the responsibility that inspires it, incessantly calling for technological and political change in the process. Having thus argued that nuclear energy technologies should ideally be reversible, chap-ters 4 and 5 work towards specific strategies to achieve technological reversibil-ity. Chapter 4 first investigates the processes that make it difficult to stop the further development and implementation of a nuclear energy technology in society, thus provid-ing input on how to fulfill the first condition for the reversibility of nuclear energy technologies. To do so, it presents a phenomenological perspective on technology and its adoption based on the work of Alfred Schutz. It also explores different ways in which technology adoption drives the processes of path depend-ence towards technological lock-in. Chapter 5 examines the history of geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste in the USA. It identifies a number of concrete policy pitfalls that could lead to lock-in and that should consequently be avoided. It also presents a number of general design strategies that could facilitate the undoing of undesirable consequences of a technology, thus providing input on how to fulfill the second condition for the reversibility of nuclear energy technol-ogies.
Chapter 6 summarizes the central findings of the thesis and explains how these help to answer the research questions. On top of this, it reflects on a number of complications connected to reversibility considerations. Based on this, it is concluded that the question of irreversibility and reversibility is context- and technology-specific and a matter of degree. The chapter concludes with a reflec-tion on generalizations and limitations of the results. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the implications of this dissertation’s results for responsibly experimenting with nuclear energy technologies in society.
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