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Philosophy of technology

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010)

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  1. Thinking like an engineer: studies in the ethics of a profession.Michael Davis - 1998 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Michael Davis, a leading figure in the study of professional ethics, offers here both a compelling exploration of engineering ethics and a philosophical analysis of engineering as a profession. After putting engineering in historical perspective, Davis turns to the Challenger space shuttle disaster to consider the complex relationship between engineering ideals and contemporary engineering practice. Here, Davis examines how social organization and technical requirements define how engineers should (and presumably do) think. Later chapters test his analysis of engineering judgement and (...)
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  • Philosophy of technology: an introduction.Don Ihde - 1993 - New York: Paragon House.
    Technology's impact on and implications for the social, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions of our world must be seriously considered and addressed. Philosophy of Technology is a clear introduction to one of philosophy's newest issues. Don Ihde critically examines the impact of technological developments on various cultures throughout history-from the earliest feats of engineering and architecture to the cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence- with an aim to understanding the human implications within a world technological culture. Using a wide variety of (...)
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  • We have never been modern.Bruno Latour - 1993 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and ...
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  • Redistribution or recognition?: a political-philosophical exchange.Nancy Fraser (ed.) - 2003 - New York: Verso.
    This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to ...
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  • Technology and the character of contemporary life: a philosophical inquiry.Albert Borgmann - 1984 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    Blending social analysis and philosophy, Albert Borgmann maintains that technology creates a controlling pattern in our lives.
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  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
    Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.
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  • Future directions in engineering ethics research: Microethics, macroethics and the role of professional societies.Joseph R. Herkert - 2001 - Science and Engineering Ethics 7 (3):403-414.
    Three frames of reference for engineering ethics are discussed—individual, professional and social—which can be further broken down into “microethics” concerned with individuals and the internal relations of the engineering profession and “macroethics” referring to the collective social responsibility of the engineering profession and to societal decisions about technology. Few attempts have been made at integrating microethical and macroethical approaches to engineering ethics. The approach suggested here is to focus on the role of professional engineering societies in linking individual and professional (...)
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  • Aristotle on technology and nature.Joachim Schummer - 2001 - Philosophia Naturalis 38 (1):105-120.
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  • Philosophical Perspectives on Risk.Sven Ove Hansson - 2004 - Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 8 (1):10-35.
    In non-technical contexts, the word “risk” refers, often rather vaguely, to situations in which it is possible but not certain that some undesirable event will occur. In technical contexts, the word has many uses and specialized meanings. The most common ones are the following.
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  • Ethical criteria of risk acceptance.Sven Ove Hansson - 2003 - Erkenntnis 59 (3):291 - 309.
    Mainstream moral theories deal with situations in which the outcome of each possible action is well-determined and knowable. In order to make ethics relevant for problems of risk and uncertainty, moral theories have to be extended so that they cover actions whose outcomes are not determinable beforehand. One approach to this extension problem is to develop methods for appraising probabilistic combinations of outcomes. This approach is investigated and shown not to solve the problem. An alternative approach is then developed. Its (...)
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  • Killer robots.Robert Sparrow - 2007 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (1):62–77.
    The United States Army’s Future Combat Systems Project, which aims to manufacture a “robot army” to be ready for deployment by 2012, is only the latest and most dramatic example of military interest in the use of artificially intelligent systems in modern warfare. This paper considers the ethics of a decision to send artificially intelligent robots into war, by asking who we should hold responsible when an autonomous weapon system is involved in an atrocity of the sort that would normally (...)
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  • The responsibility gap: Ascribing responsibility for the actions of learning automata. [REVIEW]Andreas Matthias - 2004 - Ethics and Information Technology 6 (3):175-183.
    Traditionally, the manufacturer/operator of a machine is held (morally and legally) responsible for the consequences of its operation. Autonomous, learning machines, based on neural networks, genetic algorithms and agent architectures, create a new situation, where the manufacturer/operator of the machine is in principle not capable of predicting the future machine behaviour any more, and thus cannot be held morally responsible or liable for it. The society must decide between not using this kind of machine any more (which is not a (...)
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  • Computer systems and responsibility: A normative look at technological complexity.Deborah G. Johnson & Thomas M. Powers - 2005 - Ethics and Information Technology 7 (2):99-107.
    In this paper, we focus attention on the role of computer system complexity in ascribing responsibility. We begin by introducing the notion of technological moral action (TMA). TMA is carried out by the combination of a computer system user, a system designer (developers, programmers, and testers), and a computer system (hardware and software). We discuss three sometimes overlapping types of responsibility: causal responsibility, moral responsibility, and role responsibility. Our analysis is informed by the well-known accounts provided by Hart and Hart (...)
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  • Computer systems: Moral entities but not moral agents. [REVIEW]Deborah G. Johnson - 2006 - Ethics and Information Technology 8 (4):195-204.
    After discussing the distinction between artifacts and natural entities, and the distinction between artifacts and technology, the conditions of the traditional account of moral agency are identified. While computer system behavior meets four of the five conditions, it does not and cannot meet a key condition. Computer systems do not have mental states, and even if they could be construed as having mental states, they do not have intendings to act, which arise from an agent’s freedom. On the other hand, (...)
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  • On the morality of artificial agents.Luciano Floridi & J. W. Sanders - 2004 - Minds and Machines 14 (3):349-379.
    Artificial agents (AAs), particularly but not only those in Cyberspace, extend the class of entities that can be involved in moral situations. For they can be conceived of as moral patients (as entities that can be acted upon for good or evil) and also as moral agents (as entities that can perform actions, again for good or evil). In this paper, we clarify the concept of agent and go on to separate the concerns of morality and responsibility of agents (most (...)
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  • Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology.André Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.) - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    But what are functions? Here, 15 leading scholars of philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology present new essays on functions.
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  • Computer Ethics.Deborah G. Johnson - 2003 - In R. G. Frey & Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 608–619.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Technology, Ethics, and the Instrumentation of Human Action The Genus‐Species Account Avoiding the Mistake of Unique Technology Avoiding the Mistake of the Applied Ethics Model Conclusion Acknowledgment.
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  • The Nature of Applied Ethics.Tom L. Beauchamp - 2003 - In R. G. Frey & Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), A Companion to Applied Ethics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 1–16.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Historical Background Problems of Definition Problems of Moral Content Problems of Method and Justification Problems of Specification Problems of Conflict and Disagreement Conclusion.
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  • Robot Ethics 2.0: From Autonomous Cars to Artificial Intelligence.Patrick Lin, Keith Abney & Ryan Jenkins (eds.) - 2017 - Oxford University Press.
    As robots slip into more domains of human life - from the operating room to the bedroom - they take on our morally important tasks and decisions, as well as create new risks from psychological to physical. This book answers the urgent call to study their ethical, legal, and policy impacts.
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  • The human condition [selections].Hannah Arendt - 2013 - In Timothy C. Campbell & Adam Sitze (eds.), Biopolitics: A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
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  • The moral status of technical artefacts.Peter Kroes (ed.) - 2014 - Springer.
    This book considers the question: to what extent does it make sense to qualify technical artefacts as moral entities? The authors’ contributions trace recent proposals and topics including instrumental and non-instrumental values of artefacts, agency and artefactual agency, values in and around technologies, and the moral significance of technology. The editors’ introduction explains that as ‘agents’ rather than simply passive instruments, technical artefacts may actively influence their users, changing the way they perceive the world, the way they act in the (...)
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  • Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences.Anthonie Meijers (ed.) - 2009 - Elsevier/North Holland.
    The Handbook Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences addresses numerous issues in the emerging field of the philosophy of those sciences that are involved in the technological process of designing, developing and making of new technical artifacts and systems. These issues include the nature of design, of technological knowledge, and of technical artifacts, as well as the toolbox of engineers. Most of these have thus far not been analyzed in general philosophy of science, which has traditionally but inadequately regarded technology (...)
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  • Climate Justice and Geoengineering: Ethics and Policy in the Atmospheric Anthropocene.Christopher J. Preston (ed.) - 2016 - Rowman & Littlefield International.
    A collection of original and innovative essays that compare the justice issues raised by climate engineering to the justice issues raised by competing approaches to solving the climate problem.
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  • Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism.John Finnis, Joseph M. Boyle & Germain Grisez - 1989 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 51 (3):560-561.
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  • Why is a Wing Like a Spoon? A Pluralist Theory of Function.Beth Preston - 1998 - Journal of Philosophy 95 (5):215.
    Function theorists routinely speculate that a viable function theory will be equally applicable to biological traits and artifacts. However, artifact function has received only the most cursory scrutiny in its own right. Closer scrutiny reveals that only a pluralist theory comprising two distinct notions of function--proper function and system function--will serve as an adequate general theory. The first section describes these two notions of function. The second section shows why both notions are necessary, by showing that attempts to do away (...)
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  • A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind.Beth Preston - 2012 - Routledge.
    This book focuses on material culture as a subject of philosophical inquiry and promotes the philosophical study of material culture by articulating some of the central and difficult issues raised by this topic and providing innovative solutions to them, most notably an account of improvised action and a non-intentionalist account of function in material culture. Preston argues that material culture essentially involves activities of production and use; she therefore adopts an action-theoretic foundation for a philosophy of material culture. Part 1 (...)
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  • The Cambridge handbook of information and computer ethics.Luciano Floridi (ed.) - 2010 - Cambridge University Press.
    Information and Communication Technologies have profoundly changed many aspects of life, including the nature of entertainment, work, communication, education, healthcare, industrial production and business, social relations and conflicts. They have had a radical and widespread impact on our moral lives and hence on contemporary ethical debates. The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, first published in 2010, provides an ambitious and authoritative introduction to the field, with discussions of a range of topics including privacy, ownership, freedom of speech, responsibility, (...)
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  • An Ethical Framework for Evaluating Experimental Technology.Ibo van de Poel - 2016 - Science and Engineering Ethics 22 (3):667-686.
    How are we to appraise new technological developments that may bring revolutionary social changes? Currently this is often done by trying to predict or anticipate social consequences and to use these as a basis for moral and regulatory appraisal. Such an approach can, however, not deal with the uncertainties and unknowns that are inherent in social changes induced by technological development. An alternative approach is proposed that conceives of the introduction of new technologies into society as a social experiment. An (...)
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  • Drones and Responsibility: Legal, Philosophical and Socio-Technical Perspectives on the Use of Remotely Controlled Weapons.Ezio Di Nucci & Filippo Santoni de Sio (eds.) - 2016 - Routledge.
    How does the use of military drones affect the legal, political, and moral responsibility of different actors involved in their deployment and design? This volume offers a fresh contribution to the ethics of drone warfare by providing, for the first time, a systematic interdisciplinary discussion of different responsibility issues raised by military drones. The book discusses four main sets of questions: First, from a legal point of view, we analyse the ways in which the use of drones makes the attribution (...)
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  • Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms.Kristin Shrader-Frechette - 1991 - University of California Press.
    Who is right? In Risk and Rationality, Kristin Shrader-Frechette argues that neither charges of irresponsible endangerment nor countercharges of scientific illiteracy frame the issues properly.
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  • Ascribing Functions to Technical Artefacts: A Challenge to Etiological Accounts of Functions.Wybo Houkes & Pieter E. Vermaas - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2):261-289.
    The aim of this paper is to evaluate etiological accounts of functions for the domain of technical artefacts. Etiological theories ascribe functions to items on the basis of the causal histories of those items; they apply relatively straightforwardly to the biological domain, in which neo‐Darwinian evolutionary theory provides a well‐developed and generally accepted background for describing the causal histories of biological items. Yet there is no well‐developed and generally accepted theory for describing the causal history of artefacts, so the application (...)
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  • Ethics and the Built Environment.Warwick Fox (ed.) - 2000 - Routledge.
    Much has been written in recent years on environmental ethics relating to the more general 'natural' environment but little specifically written about ethics of the built environment. Ethics and the Built Environment responds to this need and offers a debate on the ethical dimension of building in all its forms from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and approaches. This book should be of interest to architects, students of building and building design, environmentalists, politicians and general readers with an interest in (...)
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  • Handbook of Risk Theory: Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics, and Social Implications of Risk.Sabine Roeser (ed.) - 2012 - Springer Science & Business Media.
    Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. But the topic of risk also leads to more fundamental questions such as: What is risk? What can decision theory contribute to the analysis of risk? What does the human perception of risk mean for society? How should we judge whether a risk is morally acceptable or not? Over the last couple (...)
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  • “Ain’t No One Here But Us Social Forces”: Constructing the Professional Responsibility of Engineers. [REVIEW]Michael Davis - 2012 - Science and Engineering Ethics 18 (1):13-34.
    There are many ways to avoid responsibility, for example, explaining what happens as the work of the gods, fate, society, or the system. For engineers, “technology” or “the organization” will serve this purpose quite well. We may distinguish at least nine (related) senses of “responsibility”, the most important of which are: (a) responsibility-as-causation (the storm is responsible for flooding), (b) responsibility-as-liability (he is the person responsible and will have to pay), (c) responsibility-as-competency (he’s a responsible person, that is, he’s rational), (...)
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  • Artifacts, art works, and agency.Randall R. Dipert - 1993 - Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
    This is the first philosophical study of artifacts that is book length. In it Randall Dipert develops a theory of what artifacts are and applies it extensively to one of the most complex and intriguing kind of artifacts, art works. He presents his own account of what agents, intentions, and actions are, then uses these notions to clarify what it is for an agent to "make" something. From this starting point, he develops a full theory of artifacts and other artificial (...)
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  • New Atlantis.Francis Bacon - 1992
    New Atlantis is an incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon, published in 1627. In this work, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit" are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the mythical Bensalem. The plan and organization of his ideal college, Salomon's House (or Solomon's House), (...)
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  • A network approach for distinguishing ethical issues in research and development.Sjoerd D. Zwart, Ibo van de Poel, Harald van Mil & Michiel Brumsen - 2006 - Science and Engineering Ethics 12 (4):663-684.
    In this paper we report on our experiences with using network analysis to discern and analyse ethical issues in research into, and the development of, a new wastewater treatment technology. Using network analysis, we preliminarily interpreted some of our observations in a Group Decision Room session where we invited important stakeholders to think about the risks of this new technology. We show how a network approach is useful for understanding the observations, and suggests some relevant ethical issues. We argue that (...)
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  • “Things that went well — No serious injuries or deaths”: Ethical reasoning in a normal engineering design process.Peter Lloyd & Jerry Busby - 2003 - Science and Engineering Ethics 9 (4):503-516.
    We argue that considering only a few ‘big’ ethical decisions in any engineering design process — both in education and practice — only reinforces the mistaken idea of engineering design as a series of independent sub-problems. Using data collected in engineering design organisations over a seven year period, we show how an ethical component to engineering decisions is much more pervasive. We distinguish three types of ethical justification for engineering decisions: (1) consequential, (2) deontological or non-consequential, and (3) virtue-based. We (...)
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  • Realism and human kinds.Amie L. Thomasson - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (3):580–609.
    It is often noted that institutional objects and artifacts depend on human beliefs and intentions and so fail to meet the realist paradigm of mind-independent objects. In this paper I draw out exactly in what ways the thesis of mind-independence fails, and show that it has some surprising consequences. For the specific forms of mind-dependence involved entail that we have certain forms of epistemic privilege with regard to our own institutional and artifactual kinds, protecting us from certain possibilities of ignorance (...)
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  • Computer Ethics.John Weckert (ed.) - 2007 - Routledge.
    The study of the ethical issues related to computer use developed primarily in the 1980s, although a number of important papers were published in previous decades, many of which are contained in this volume. Computer ethics, as the field became known, flourished in the following decades. The emphasis initially was more on the computing profession: on questions related to the development of systems, the behaviour of computing professionals and so on. Later the focus moved to the Internet and to users (...)
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  • Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality.Don Ihde & Evan Selinger - 2006 - Human Studies 29 (3):399-403.
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  • On artifacts and works of art.Risto Hilpinen - 1992 - Theoria 58 (1):58-82.
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  • Artifacts and human concepts.Amie Thomasson - manuscript
    Creations of the Mind: Essays on Artifacts and their Representation, ed. Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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  • Of marigold beer: A reply to Vermaas and Houkes.Beth Preston - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (4):601-612.
    Vermaas and Houkes advance four desiderata for theories of artifact function, and classify such theories into non-intentionalist reproduction theories on the one hand and intentionalist non-reproduction theories on the other. They argue that non-intentionalist reproduction theories fail to satisfy their fourth desideratum. They maintain that only an intentionalist non-reproduction theory can satisfy all the desiderata, and they offer a version that they believe does satisfy all of them. I reply that intentionalist non-reproduction theories, including their version, fail to satisfy their (...)
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  • The uniqueness debate in computer ethics: What exactly is at issue, and why does it matter? [REVIEW]Herman T. Tavani - 2002 - Ethics and Information Technology 4 (1):37-54.
    The purpose of this essay is to determinewhat exactly is meant by the claimcomputer ethics is unique, a position thatwill henceforth be referred to as the CEIUthesis. A brief sketch of the CEIU debate is provided,and an empirical case involving a recentincident of cyberstalking is briefly consideredin order to illustrate some controversialpoints of contention in that debate. To gain aclearer understanding of what exactly isasserted in the various claims about theuniqueness of computer ethics, and to avoidmany of the confusions currently (...)
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  • The ethics of artificial intelligence.Nick Bostrom & Eliezer Yudkowsky - 2014 - In . pp. 316-334.
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  • Responsibility without Moralism in Technoscientific Design Practice.Jaap Jelsma & Tsjalling Swierstra - 2006 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 31 (3):309-332.
    While engineering ethics usually addresses the responsibility of engineers in rare cases of whistle blowing, the authors broach the question to what extent engineers can be held responsible in normal practice. For this purpose, they define the conditions under which individuals can be imputable as they prevail in ethics and common sense. From outcomes of science and technology studies research, the authors conclude that these conditions are seldom met in modern technoscientific research practice. By examining such practice in a case (...)
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  • Two Kinds of Climate Justice: Avoiding Harm and Sharing Burdens.Simon Caney - 2014 - Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (2):125-149.
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  • Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective.Paul Thompson - 2007 - Environmental Values 16 (4):544-547.
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  • Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten.Ernst Kapp - 2015 - Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Edited by Harun Maye & Leander Scholz.
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