The use of “levels of abstraction” in philosophical analysis (levelism) has recently come under attack. In this paper, I argue that a refined version of epistemological levelism should be retained as a fundamental method, called the method of levels of abstraction. After a brief introduction, in section “Some Definitions and Preliminary Examples” the nature and applicability of the epistemological method of levels of abstraction is clarified. In section “A Classic Application of the Method ofion”, the philosophical fruitfulness of the new (...) method is shown by using Kant’s classic discussion of the “antinomies of pure reason” as an example. In section “The Philosophy of the Method of Abstraction”, the method is further specified and supported by distinguishing it from three other forms of “levelism”: (i) levels of organisation; (ii) levels of explanation and (iii) conceptual schemes. In that context, the problems of relativism and antirealism are also briefly addressed. The conclusion discusses some of the work that lies ahead, two potential limitations of the method and some results that have already been obtained by applying the method to some long-standing philosophical problems. (shrink)

Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence, in particular machine learning, has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of (...) AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work, we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible or too strict. This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service.’. (shrink)

This article argues that an ethical framework will help to harness the potential of AI while keeping humans in control.

Current advances in research, development and application of artificial intelligence systems have yielded a far-reaching discourse on AI ethics. In consequence, a number of ethics guidelines have been released in recent years. These guidelines comprise normative principles and recommendations aimed to harness the “disruptive” potentials of new AI technologies. Designed as a semi-systematic evaluation, this paper analyzes and compares 22 guidelines, highlighting overlaps but also omissions. As a result, I give a detailed overview of the field of AI ethics. Finally, (...) I also examine to what extent the respective ethical principles and values are implemented in the practice of research, development and application of AI systems—and how the effectiveness in the demands of AI ethics can be improved. (shrink)

Modern digital technologies—from web-based services to Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions—increasingly affect the daily lives of billions of people. Such innovation brings huge opportunities, but also concerns about design, development, and deployment of digital technologies. This article identifies and discusses five clusters of risk in the international debate about digital ethics: ethics shopping; ethics bluewashing; ethics lobbying; ethics dumping; and ethics shirking.

In this article, I analyse deterrence theory and argue that its applicability to cyberspace is limited and that these limits are not trivial. They are the consequence of fundamental differences between deterrence theory and the nature of cyber conflicts and cyberspace. The goals of this analysis are to identify the limits of deterrence theory in cyberspace, clear the ground of inadequate approaches to cyber deterrence, and define the conceptual space for a domain-specific theory of cyber deterrence, still to be developed.

This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping Data Ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing, and use), algorithms (including AI, artificial agents, machine learning, and robots), and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking, and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data Ethics builds on the foundation provided by Computer and Information (...) Ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the Level of Abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even the data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations — the interactions among hardware, software, and data — rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enables them. And it emphasises the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by Data Science. Because of such complexity, Data Ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of Data Science and its applications within a consistent, holistic, and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics Data Ethics will provide the solutions that can maximise the value of Data Science for our societies, for all of us, and for our environments. (shrink)

Despite the increased prevalence of bioethics research that seeks to use empirical data to answer normative research questions, there is no consensus as to what an appropriate methodology for this would be. This review aims to search the literature, present and critically discuss published Empirical Bioethics methodologies.

In this article, I offer an outline of the papers comprising the special issue. I also provide a brief overview of its topic, namely, the friction between cyber security measures and individual rights. I consider such a friction to be a new and exacerbated version of what Mill called ‘the struggle between liberties and authorities,’ and I claim that the struggle arises because of the involvement of public authorities in the management of the cyber sphere, for technological and state power (...) can put individual rights, such as privacy, anonymity and freedom of speech, under sharp devaluating pressure. Finally, I conclude by stressing the need to reach an ethical balance to fine-tune cyber security measures and individual rights. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the scholarly and policy debate on autonomous weapon systems and particularly on the objections to the use of these weapons which rest on jus ad bellum principles of proportionality and last resort. Both objections rest on the idea that AWS may increase the incidence of war by reducing the costs for going to war or by providing a propagandistic value. We argue that whilst these objections offer pressing concerns in their own right, they suffer (...) from important limitations: they overlook the difficulties of calculating ad bellum proportionality; confuse the concept of proportionality of effects with the precision of weapon systems; disregard the ever-changing nature of war and of its ethical implications; mistake the moral obligation imposed by the principle of last resort with the impact that AWS may have on political decision to resort to war. Our analysis does not entail that AWS are acceptable or justifiable, but it shows that ad bellum principles are not the best set of ethical principles for tackling the ethical problems raised by AWS; and that developing adequate understanding of the transformations that the use of AWS poses to the nature of war itself is a necessary, preliminary requirement to any ethical analysis of the use of these weapons. (shrink)

Defence agencies across the globe identify artificial intelligence as a key technology to maintain an edge over adversaries. As a result, efforts to develop or acquire AI capabilities for defence are growing on a global scale. Unfortunately, they remain unmatched by efforts to define ethical frameworks to guide the use of AI in the defence domain. This article provides one such framework. It identifies five principles—justified and overridable uses, just and transparent systems and processes, human moral responsibility, meaningful human control (...) and reliable AI systems—and related recommendations to foster ethically sound uses of AI for national defence purposes. (shrink)

Technologies to rapidly alert people when they have been in contact with someone carrying the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 are part of a strategy to bring the pandemic under control. Currently, at least 47 contact-tracing apps are available globally. They are already in use in Australia, South Korea and Singapore, for instance. And many other governments are testing or considering them. Here we set out 16 questions to assess whether — and to what extent — a contact-tracing app is ethically justifiable.

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

The usefulness of machine learning algorithms has led to their widespread adoption prior to the development of a conceptual framework for making sense of them. One common response to this situation is to say that machine learning suffers from a “black box problem.” That is, machine learning algorithms are “opaque” to human users, failing to be “interpretable” or “explicable” in terms that would render categorization procedures “understandable.” The purpose of this paper is to challenge the widespread agreement about the existence (...) and importance of a black box problem. The first section argues that “interpretability” and cognates lack precise meanings when applied to algorithms. This makes the concepts difficult to use when trying to solve the problems that have motivated the call for interpretability. Furthermore, since there is no adequate account of the concepts themselves, it is not possible to assess whether particular technical features supply formal definitions of those concepts. The second section argues that there are ways of being a responsible user of these algorithms that do not require interpretability. In many cases in which a black box problem is cited, interpretability is a means to a further end such as justification or non-discrimination. Since addressing these problems need not involve something that looks like an “interpretation” of an algorithm, the focus on interpretability artificially constrains the solution space by characterizing one possible solution as the problem itself. Where possible, discussion should be reformulated in terms of the ends of interpretability. (shrink)

In this article, we present a dialogical approach to empirical ethics, based upon hermeneutic ethics and responsive evaluation. Hermeneutic ethics regards experience as the concrete source of moral wisdom. In order to gain a good understanding of moral issues, concrete detailed experiences and perspectives need to be exchanged. Within hermeneutic ethics dialogue is seen as a vehicle for moral learning and developing normative conclusions. Dialogue stands for a specific view on moral epistemology and methodological criteria for moral inquiry. Responsive evaluation (...) involves a structured way of setting up dialogical learning processes, by eliciting stories of participants, exchanging experiences in (homogeneous and heterogeneous) groups and drawing normative conclusions for practice. By combining these traditions we develop both a theoretical and a practical approach to empirical ethics, in which ethical issues are addressed and shaped together with stakeholders in practice. Stakeholders' experiences are not only used as a source for reflection by the ethicist; stakeholders are involved in the process of reflection and analysis, which takes place in a dialogue between participants in practice, facilitated by the ethicist. This dialogical approach to empirical ethics may give rise to questions such as: What contribution does the ethicist make? What role does ethical theory play? What is the relationship between empirical research and ethical theory in the dialogical process? In this article, these questions will be addressed by reflecting upon a project in empirical ethics that was set up in a dialogical way. The aim of this project was to develop and implement normative guidelines with and within practice, in order to improve the practice concerning coercion and compulsion in psychiatry. (shrink)

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the defence domain raises challenges for the ethical governance of these systems. A recent shift from the what to the how of AI ethics sees a nascent body of literature published by defence organisations focussed on guidance to implement AI ethics principles. These efforts have neglected a crucial intermediate step between principles and guidance concerning the elicitation of ethical requirements for specifying the guidance. In this article, we outline the key normative (...) choices and corresponding tradeoffs that are involved in specifying guidance for the implementation of AI ethics principles in the defence domain. These correspond to: the AI lifecycle model used; the scope of stakeholder involvement; the accountability goals chosen; the choice of auditing requirements; and the choice of mechanisms for transparency and traceability. We provide initial recommendations for navigating these tradeoffs and highlight the importance of a pro-ethical institutional culture. (shrink)

Online service providers —such as AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter—significantly shape the informational environment and influence users’ experiences and interactions within it. There is a general agreement on the centrality of OSPs in information societies, but little consensus about what principles should shape their moral responsibilities and practices. In this article, we analyse the main contributions to the debate on the moral responsibilities of OSPs. By endorsing the method of the levels of abstract, we first analyse the moral responsibilities (...) of OSPs in the web. These concern the management of online information, which includes information filtering, Internet censorship, the circulation of harmful content, and the implementation and fostering of human rights. We then consider the moral responsibilities ascribed to OSPs on the web and focus on the existing legal regulation of access to users’ data. The overall analysis provides an overview of the current state of the debate and highlights two main results. First, topics related to OSPs’ public role—especially their gatekeeping function, their corporate social responsibilities, and their role in implementing and fostering human rights—have acquired increasing relevance in the specialised literature. Second, there is a lack of an ethical framework that can define OSPs’ responsibilities, and provide the fundamental sharable principles necessary to guide OSPs’ conduct within the multicultural and international context in which they operate. This article contributes to the ethical framework necessary to deal with and by endorsing a LoA enabling the definition of the responsibilities of OSPs with respect to the well-being of the infosphere and of the entities inhabiting it. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a wealth of literature arguing the need for empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to bioethics, based on the premise that an empirically informed ethical analysis is more grounded, contextually sensitive and therefore more relevant to clinical practice than an ‘abstract’ philosophical analysis. Bioethics has (arguably) always been an interdisciplinary field, and the rise of ‘empirical’ (bio)ethics need not be seen as an attempt to give a new name to the longstanding practice of interdisciplinary collaboration, but (...) can perhaps best be understood as a substantive attempt to engage with the nature of that interdisciplinarity and to articulate the relationship between the many different disciplines (some of them empirical) that contribute to the field. It can also be described as an endeavour to explain how different disciplinary approaches can be integrated to effectively answer normative questions in bioethics, and fundamental to that endeavour is the need to think about how a robust methodology can be articulated that successfully marries apparently divergent epistemological and metaethical perspectives with method. This paper proposes ‘Reflexive Bioethics’ (RB) as a methodology for interdisciplinary and empirical bioethics, which utilizes a method of ‘Reflexive Balancing’ (RBL). RBL has been developed in response to criticisms of various forms of reflective equilibrium, and is built upon a pragmatic characterization of Bioethics and a ‘quasi-moral foundationalism’, which allows RBL to avoid some of the difficulties associated with RE and yet retain the flexible egalitarianism that makes it intuitively appealing to many. (shrink)

Several legal arguments use the notion of ratio legis in order to sustain a normative conclusion, in particular the argument from analogy and some forms of teleological argumentation. However, determining the ratio is often a difficult and controversial task. In this paper we look firstly at the speech acts typically performed by legal practitioners in order to determine the ratio and, secondly, we take into account the argumentative commitments they undertake in so doing and the argumentative constraints put on them. (...) This will lead us to distinguish different uses of the notion of ratio legis and to ask on what conditions each of them is justified. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the conception of discourse ethics that Jürgen Habermas advances in his seminar paper, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification’, is subject to significant revision in later work. The central difference has to do with the status of the universalization principle and its relationship to the ‘rightness’ validity claim. The earlier view is structured by a desire to provide a weak-transcendental defense of the universalization principle. The later revision, however, essentially undercuts the (...) basis of this argument, because it severs the conception of practical discourse from the analysis of speech acts. As a way of responding to the difficulties this creates, I propose a ‘reboot’ of the discourse ethics program. This involves reverting to the earlier, more Durkheimian and less Kantian, formulation of the theory. The result is a program that is no longer encumbered by sterile debates about the correct formulation of the universalization principle, but can plausibly claim to provide insight into the role that language-dependence plays in the development and entrenchment of increasingly pro-social behavior patterns within our institutions. (shrink)

The “struggle between liberties and authorities”, as described by Mill, refers to the tension between individual rights and the rules restricting them that are imposed by public authorities exerting their power over civil society. In this paper I argue that contemporary information societies are experiencing a new form of such a struggle, which now involves liberties and authorities in the cyber-sphere and, more specifically, refers to the tension between cyber-security measures and individual liberties. Ethicists, political philosophers and political scientists have (...) long debated how to strike an ethically sound balance between security measures and individual rights. I argue that such a balance can only be reached once individual rights are clearly defined, and that such a definition cannot prescind from an analysis of individual well-being in the information age. Hence, I propose an analysis of individual well-being which rests on the capability approach, and I then identify a set of rights that individuals should claim for themselves. Finally, I consider a criterion for balancing the proposed set of individual rights with cyber-security measures in the information age. (shrink)