Healthcare is becoming increasingly automated with the development and deployment of care robots. There are many benefits to care robots but they also pose many challenging ethical issues. This paper takes care robots for the elderly as the subject of analysis, building on previous literature in the domain of the ethics and design of care robots. Using the value sensitive design approach to technology design, this paper extends its application to care robots by integrating the values of care, values that (...) are specific to AI, and higher-scale values such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The ethical issues specific to care robots for the elderly are discussed at length alongside examples of specific design requirements that work to ameliorate these ethical concerns. (shrink)

The contemporary changes in the countries of western culture include the refutation of the traditional principles of sexual relations; this is treated as a fundamental change which – as the author tries to show – has several entirely different consequences. The new moral situation stimulates.

In general, offers a good discussion of Dworkin's theory of interpretation. Postema is critically concerned with whether Dworkin commits himself to individualistic and privatistic sense of interpretation and how Dworkin articulates the logical independency of pre-interpretive paradigm instances or social facts which form the object of interpretation and the end which is interpretively posited in the act of interpretation. Criticisms, for the most part, appear to be compatible with Dworkin's overall theory and may simply be additional explication of the character (...) of interpretation. "There is nothing in Dworkin's meta-theory of interpretation of social practices that requires attention to the interpretive activities of fellow participants. Herein lies the strong "protestantism" of Dworkin's theory. Not only is each participant encouraged to take up the interpretive enterprise...but each individual participant also has access to the truth, as it were, about what the practice is and requires, though private interpretation of the practice-text. While Dworkin seems to recognize that the practice is common, he counsels participants to live as if each had a private understanding of his own." "It is problematic because it makes interpretation of social practices insufficiently practical, insufficiently intersubjective, and thus insufficiently political." Notes that the interpretive attitude when acting in a practice is relatively rare, usually becoming part of a practice is more like learning a discipline or technique. "[I]t may not be possible intelligibly to separate that point from the activies and rules in which it is expressed. The same meaning may, conceivably, be expressed in some other way, but this does not imply that the meaning is logically independent of the medium of expression." "That is, the behavior is logically separable from its interpretation only on pain of denying that the practice is common activity yielding common principles." "Often an agent may only come to understand his actions long after he has performed them, or may later come to see his actions in a very different light...First, on this view meaningful action is a primitive. Action is expressive of its meaning or purpose, but not resolvable into distinct behavior and purpose. But, since this purpose or meaning may not be fully or clearly articulated, interpretation can be seen as the activity of re-formulating and articulating it. Second, the 'meaning' of an action cannot be regarded as a private matter for the agent alone.". (shrink)

One can determine the nature of something by asking what it is for. For example one understands what a chair is when one understands it is for sitting on. This involves understanding its purpose. One type of corporation is the for-profit-corporation. This seems to indicate that this type of corporation, the business corporation, has as its purpose to make a profit. Is that as obvious as it first appears? The favorite way for philosophers to arrive at the "purpose" of anything (...) is to ask the question "Why?" But there are at least two answers to the question "Why"? when addressed to a social practice such as business. One might be asking for a psychological account (explanation) of "Why" a person does business, and this is primarily answered by discovering the motives behind business activity; or one might be asking for a justificatory reason (justification) for the practice – what purpose legitimates business as a human activity. These two answers are often conflated and thus the purpose of business is often considered to be answered by giving the psychological account of the self-interested profit-making motive. This paper will attempt to highlight the importance of making the distinction between motive and purpose clearly, show what confusions arise when the distinction is ignored, and hint at some of the structural philosophical reasons why the distinction got blurred in the first place. (shrink)