Abstract
This paper explores ethical conundrums and virtual humans through building upon a post-Kantian framework, and one emerging from what is known as New Materialism. It begins by presenting the recent research and literature on virtual humans and suggesting that the central ethical conundrums that need to be examined are those of agency and values. The paper then argues that a combination of Luciano Floridi’s approach and one developed from New Materialism, namely modest ethics, offers a means of engaging with the ethical conundrums of virtual humans. It is argued that as yet there is little evidence for a democratic design process for virtual humans nor is there evidence about the possible impact virtual humans may have on a postdigital society. The paper concludes by suggesting that there need to be more open processes for debate which bring to light the values that are being built into these profound developments by the experts and focuses on using a modest ethics approach.
Highlights
One of the concerns articulated in the paper and supported by work such as that of Bernard Stiegler (2016) is that the current economic and political structures have determined the development and deployment of virtual humans to serve certain vested interests
Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:289–301 developed from New Materialism offers a means engaging with the ethical conundrums of virtual humans
We suggest that the concepts from a New Materialist understanding supplemented by ideas from Latour as in our modest ethics, achieve the same objectives but without having to make universal claims
Summary
One of the concerns articulated in the paper and supported by work such as that of Bernard Stiegler (2016) is that the current economic and political structures have determined the development and deployment of virtual humans to serve certain vested interests. Whereas many standard ethical approaches focus on the agent, Floridi’s claim centre on less orthodox frameworks such as medical ethics or bioethics, an equal or greater concern with the patient Even these alternative approaches are still biased against the inanimate, intangible, abstract, engineered and artificial entities such as information and communication technologies and any form of virtual human in the future. ‘artificial informational entities, insofar as they can be agents, can be accountable moral agents’ (2015: 110) Floridi sees this as an improvement upon the Kantian position, but this means that it still rests upon some concept of the moral autonomous individual even though that is not necessarily human, and it is exactly that understanding of the human (and nonhuman) which New Materialism and those of us who develop this further, bring into question. We would argue that the understandings of a modest ethics as above stand a better chance of avoiding the instrumentalist approach of more traditional ethical frameworks—in other words, the ethics is no more than an application of ideas to systems that are already in place—and instead engage with the material energies and movements embedded in the technologies as they are being developed
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