In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

The introduction of new energy technologies may lead to public resistance and contestation. It is often argued that this phenomenon is caused by an inadequate inclusion of relevant public values in the design of technology. In this paper we examine the applicability of the value sensitive design approach. While VSD was primarily introduced for incorporating values in technological design, our focus in this paper is expanded towards the design of the institutions surrounding these technologies, as well as the design of (...) stakeholder participation. One important methodological challenge of VSD is to identify the relevant values related to new technological developments. In this paper, we argue that the public debate can form a rich source from which to retrieve the values at stake. To demonstrate this, we have examined the arguments used in the public debate regarding the exploration and exploitation of shale gas in the Netherlands. We identified two important sets of the underlying values, namely substantive and procedural values. This paper concludes with two key findings. Firstly, contrary to what is often suggested in the literature, both proponents and opponents seem to endorse the same values. Secondly, contestation seems to arise in the precise operationalization of these values among the different stakeholders. In other words, contestation in the Dutch shale gas debate does not arise from inter-value conflict but rather from intra-value conflicts. This multi-interpretability should be incorporated in VSD processes. (shrink)

Various Value-Conscious Design frameworks have recently emerged to introduce moral and ethical intelligence into business and technical design contexts, with the goal of proactively influencing the design of technologies to account for moral and ethical values during the conception and design process. Two attempts to insert ethical intelligence into technical design communities to influence the design of technologies in ethical- and value-conscious ways are described, revealing discouraging results. Learning from these failed attempts, the article identifies three key challenges of pragmatic (...) engagement with technical design communities: confronting competing values; identifying the role of the values advocate; and the justification of a value framework. Addressing these challenges must become a priority if one is to be successful in pragmatically engaging with real-world business and design contexts to bring moral and ethical intelligence to bear in the design of emerging information and communication technologies. (shrink)

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. What’s more, given the stage of their development and lack of (...) standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the future. (shrink)

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. What’s more, given the stage of their development and lack of (...) standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the future. (shrink)

Although applications are being developed and have reached the market, nanopharmacy to date is generally still conceived as an emerging technology. Its concept is ill-defined. Nanopharmacy can also be construed as a converging technology, which combines features of multiple technologies, ranging from nanotechnology to medicine and ICT. It is still debated whether its features give rise to new ethical issues or that issues associated with nanopharma are merely an extension of existing issues in the underlying fields. We argue here that, (...) regardless of the alleged newness of the ethical issues involved, developments occasioned by technological advances affect the roles played by stakeholders in the field of nanopharmacy to such an extent that this calls for a different approach to responsible innovation in this field. Specific features associated with nanopharmacy itself and features introduced to the associated converging technologies- bring about a shift in the roles of stakeholders that call for a different approach to responsibility. We suggest that Value Sensitive Design is a suitable framework to involve stakeholders in addressing moral issues responsibly at an early stage of development of new nanopharmaceuticals. (shrink)

Recently, there is increased attention to the integration of moral values into the conception, design, and development of emerging IT. The most reviewed approach for this purpose in ethics and technology so far is Value-Sensitive Design (VSD). This article considers VSD as the prime candidate for implementing normative considerations into design. Its methodology is considered from a conceptual, analytical, normative perspective. The focus here is on the suitability of VSD for integrating moral values into the design of technologies in a (...) way that joins in with an analytical perspective on ethics of technology. Despite its promising character, it turns out that VSD falls short in several respects: (1) VSD does not have a clear methodology for identifying stakeholders, (2) the integration of empirical methods with conceptual research within the methodology of VSD is obscure, (3) VSD runs the risk of committing the naturalistic fallacy when using empirical knowledge for implementing values in design, (4) the concept of values, as well as their realization, is left undetermined and (5) VSD lacks a complimentary or explicit ethical theory for dealing with value trade-offs. For the normative evaluation of a technology, I claim that an explicit and justified ethical starting point or principle is required. Moreover, explicit attention should be given to the value aims and assumptions of a particular design. The criteria of adequacy for such an approach or methodology follow from the evaluation of VSD as the prime candidate for implementing moral values in design. (shrink)

The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) has declared that to achieve accredited status, “engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility.” Many engineering professors struggle to integrate this required ethics instruction in technical classes and projects because of the lack of a formalized ethics-in-design approach. However, one methodology developed in human-computer interaction research, the Value-Sensitive Design approach, can serve as an engineering education tool which bridges the gap between design and ethics (...) for many engineering disciplines. The three major components of Value-Sensitive Design, conceptual, technical, and empirical, exemplified through a case study which focuses on the development of a command and control supervisory interface for a military cruise missile. (shrink)

This article offers a discussion of the connection between technology and values and, specifically, I take a closer look at ethically sound design. In order to bring the discussion into a concrete context, the theory of Value Sensitive Design (VSD) will be the focus point. To illustrate my argument concerning design ethics, the discussion involves a case study of an augmented window, designed by the VSD Research Lab, which has turned out to be a potentially surveillance-enabling technology. I call attention (...) to a “positivist problem” that has to do with the connection between the design context and the use context, which VSD seems to presuppose, and I argue that it is necessary to clearly distinguish between the two, since the designers’ intentions do not always correspond with the users’ practice; in fact, the relation between design and use is very complex and principally unpredictable. Thus, a design theory must accept that foresight is limited to anticipation rather than prediction. To overcome the positivist problem, I suggest a phenomenological approach to technology inspired by Don Ihde’s concept of multistability. This argument, which is general in nature and thus applies to any theory of design ethics, is intended as a constructive criticism, which can hopefully contribute to the further development of design ethics. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show (...) how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life. (shrink)

In philosophy of emerging media, several scholars have insisted on the fact that the “new” of new technologies does not have much to do with communication, but rather with the exponential growth of recording. In this paper, instead, the thesis advanced is that digital technologies do not concern memory, but imagination, and more precisely, what philosophers from Kant onwards have called productive imagination. In this paper, however, the main reference will not be Kant, but Paul Ricoeur, who explicitly refers to (...) the Kantian productive imagination in his works, but also offered an externalized, semioticized, and historicized interpretation of it. The article is developed in three steps. In the first section, it deals with Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, based on the notions of mimesis and mythos. In the second section, it is first argued that human imagination is always-already extended. Second, it will be shown how mimesis and mythos are precisely the way software works. In the third section, the specificity of big data is introduced. Big data is the promise of giving our actions and existences a meaning that we are incapable of perceiving, for lack of sensibility and understanding. Scholars have used the Foucauldian concepts of panopticon and confession for describing the human condition in the digital age. In the conclusion, it is argued that big data makes any form of disclosure unnecessary. Big data is an ensemble of technological artifacts, methods, techniques, practices, institutions, and forms of knowledge aiming at taking over the way someone narratively accounts for himself or herself before the others. Hence, another Foucauldian notion is representative of this age: the parrhesia, to speak candidly, and to take a risk in speaking the truth, insofar as such a possibility is anesthetized. (shrink)

With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the (...) act/omission distinction. In all of these contexts, rapid, intuitive judgments make a great deal of sense, but sometimes produce moral mistakes that are replicated in law and policy. One implication is that moral assessments ought not to be made by appealing to intuitions about exotic cases and problems; those intuitions are particularly unlikely to be reliable. Another implication is that some deeply held moral judgments are unsound if they are products of moral heuristics. The idea of error-prone heuristics is especially controversial in the moral domain, where agreement on the correct answer may be hard to elicit; but in many contexts, heuristics are at work and they do real damage. Moral framing effects, including those in the context of obligations to future generations, are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation. Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that (...) present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, intra methods, dealing with technology design, and ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I. (shrink)

In philosophy of emerging media, several scholars have insisted on the fact that the “new” of new technologies does not have much to do with communication, but rather with the exponential growth of recording. In this paper, instead, the thesis advanced is that digital technologies do not concern memory, but imagination, and more precisely, what philosophers from Kant onwards have called productive imagination. In this paper, however, the main reference will not be Kant, but Paul Ricoeur, who explicitly refers to (...) the Kantian productive imagination in his works, but also offered an externalized, semioticized, and historicized interpretation of it. The article is developed in three steps. In the first section, it deals with Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, based on the notions of mimesis and mythos. In the second section, it is first argued that human imagination is always-already extended. Second, it will be shown how mimesis and mythos are precisely the way software works. In the third section, the specificity of big data is introduced. Big data is the promise of giving our actions and existences a meaning that we are incapable of perceiving, for lack of sensibility (i.e., data) and understanding (i.e., algorithms). Scholars have used the Foucauldian concepts of panopticon and confession for describing the human condition in the digital age. In the conclusion, it is argued that big data makes any form of disclosure unnecessary. Big data is an ensemble of technological artifacts, methods, techniques, practices, institutions, and forms of knowledge aiming at taking over the way someone narratively accounts for himself or herself before the others. Hence, another Foucauldian notion is representative of this age: the parrhesia, to speak candidly, and to take a risk in speaking the truth, insofar as such a possibility is anesthetized. (shrink)