Ethical Significance of Brain-Computer Interfaces as Enablers of Communication

Many authors have claimed a moral and educational significance for wonder.In this article Anders Schinkel assesses these claims in order to address the question whether we do indeed have reason to stimulate the sense of wonder and to provoke experiences of wonder in education with a view to its moral effects or importance.Are there moral effects of wonder -or does wonder have a moral significance -that give us a (further) reason to promote children's sense of wonder and to attempt to elicit the experience of wonder in children?And if so, will any experience of wonder do, from a moral perspective, or do only some experiences of wonder -in specific contexts, or with a specific objecthave the desired effect?Schinkel argues that, although there is certainly a case to be made for wonder's moral (educational) importance, it needs to be made cautiously.Wonder coheres more easily with some emotions and attitudes than with others, but in the end its moral significance depends to a large extent on how we interpret or make sense of our wonder and what we wonder at.In moral education, therefore, the value of wonder depends on how it is framed and morally charged.

ABSTRACTMany authors have claimed a moral and educational significance for wonder. In this article Anders Schinkel assesses these claims in order to address the question whether we do indeed have reason to stimulate the sense of wonder and to provoke experiences of wonder in education with a view to its moral effects or importance. Are there moral effects of wonder — or does wonder have a moral significance — that give us a (further) reason to promote children's sense of wonder and to attempt to elicit the experience of wonder in children? And if so, will any experience of wonder do, from a moral perspective, or do only some experiences of wonder — in specific contexts, or with a specific object — have the desired effect? Schinkel argues that, although there is certainly a case to be made for wonder's moral (educational) importance, it needs to be made cautiously. Wonder coheres more easily with some emotions and attitudes than with others, but in the end its moral significance depends to a large extent on how we interpret or make sense of our wonder and what we wonder at. In moral education, therefore, the value of wonder depends on how it is framed and morally charged.

Building on a previous study of Swedish middle-school students’ perspectives on historical significance (Sjölund Åhsberg, 2024b), where students expressed a strong moral engagement with the past, this article further explores and defines two tentative criteria: ethical and affective significance. Using thematic analysis of focus-group interviews and relating the findings to historical empathy (Karn, 2023), the study shows that ethical significance involves making moral judgments about history that students care about and wish to change, while affective significance reflects more intuitive emotional responses. The results indicate that students are highly interested in ethically significant history and its implications for the present and future, yet experience the history classroom as largely silent on these issues. Students also express feelings of guilt and responsibility in relation to ethically challenging histories and a desire to engage with these topics in greater depth. The findings point to didactical opportunities for a more inclusive and engaging history education and highlight guilt as an underexplored dimension of historical significance.

This chapter discusses the relations between moral status (or standing) and what the author calls moral significance. Something has moral significance just in case it morally counts for its own sake, or is something that must be taken into consideration in itself when moral judgments about what ought or ought not to be done are made. The chapter argues that the moral status of something is dependent on what is morally significant about it. Nothing can have moral status if there is not anything morally significant about it. On the other hand, something can be morally significant, even though it does not have moral status. The notion of moral significance is then the more fundamental notion and the notion of moral status could be dispensed with. In fact, it would simplify and clarify matters if it were dispensed with.

It goes without saying that technical artefacts are used in ways that are considered to be morally good or bad. That the use of technical artefacts has moral significance is not controversial. This moral significance may easily be interpreted as being tied to the moral significance of the ends that humans pursue through their use. But does it also make sense to claim that technical artefacts by themselves, irrespective of the ways they are actually put to use, are morally good or bad? Is it in any way meaningful to maintain that a life saving device, such as a life jacket, is by itself morally good and that some torture instrument, like a thumb screw, is by itself morally bad? Is it possible for technical artefacts to embody values - just as they may be said to embody designs - that make them by themselves susceptible to moral assessment? Or may technical artefacts be considered to have some form of moral agency that likewise would cmake them liable to moral assessment? These questions have been the topic of intense dispute in recent times. In order to come to grips with this controversial issue of the moral significance of technical artefacts it will be necessary to examine in detail the notion of a technical artefact, more in particular the notion of a technical artefact by itself. On the basis of the dual-nature conception of technical artefacts I argue that this notion, and a fortiori that of a technical artefact having moral significance by itself, does not make sense if it is taken to mean a technical artefact separated from human agency. I show that the notions of technical artefacts underlying positions that maintain that technical artefacts are morally neutral (section 6.3) and positions that attribute some form of intrinsic moral significance to technical artefacts without moral agency (section 6.4) are highly problematic. Thereafter I consider Latour’s idea that technical artefacts may be considered to be moral agents in more or less the same sense as human beings (section 6.5). I reject this rather radical proposal. In line with the dual-nature conception of technical artefacts I argue that any reference to technical artefacts by themselves implies reference to human intentionality. This conception of artefacts makes it is possible to avoid getting trapped into either the idea that technical artefacts are morally neutral things, or the idea that they have some form of moral significance independent of human agency. Given that human intentions (human agency) play a constitutive role with regard to technical artefacts, I argue that they have inherent moral significance which, however, finds its origin in human agency (section V.6). Finally, I discuss the moral significance of technical artefacts by looking at their meaning in general (section V.7) and in a specific case (section V.8). For a better understanding of present-day discussions about the moral status of technical artefacts, in particular about their moral agency, I start first with a brief discussion of the problems involved (section V.1) and with a sketch of various issues that lie at the root of the idea of technological agency (section V.2).

I discuss the moral significance of artificial life within synthetic biology via a discussion of Douglas, Powell and Savulescu's paper 'Is the creation of artificial life morally significant'. I argue that the definitions of 'artificial life' and of 'moral significance' are too narrow. Douglas, Powell and Savulescu's definition of artificial life does not capture all core projects of synthetic biology or the ethical concerns that have been voiced, and their definition of moral significance fails to take into account the possibility that creating artificial life is conditionally acceptable. Finally, I show how several important objections to synthetic biology are plausibly understood as arguing that creating artificial life in a wide sense is only conditionally acceptable.

Early Pregnancy Losses: Multiple Meanings and Moral Considerations

This book aims to clarify competing and confusing definitions of terrorism, and of terrorist acts, that proliferate in specialist publications as well as in popular discourse, and then to construct a concept of a terrorist act that both reflects a central core of the usages examined and provides for a more coherent and fruitful discussion of terrorism and its moral and political significance. The book’s project thus treats the idea of meaning as involving a concern not only for semantic clarity, but also for probing various dimensions of what our understanding of terrorism can mean morally for complex social and political circumstances. The first two chapters sketch the types of definition abroad and propose what is called a tactical definition, with a focus on terrorist acts as violent attacks upon non-combatants or innocents (in a special sense). They discuss the benefits of such an approach and defend it against numerous objections that can be and have been made to it. Chapter 3 discusses critically theorists who argue that, independent of its definition, terrorist acts have a special, and profoundly disturbing, moral significance. Chapter 4 explores the scope and meaning of non-combatant status and its relation to recent controversies in the philosophy of war. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss important attempted philosophical defenses of terrorism for certain contexts. Chapter 7 discusses the moral challenges facing attempts at counter-terrorism, and Chapter 8 examines the commonly held view that religion is particularly prone to cause terrorism or some of its most extreme manifestations.

In Beyond Prejudice , Evelyn B. Pluhar defends the view that any sentient conative being—one capable of caring about what happens to him or herself—is morally significant, a view that supports the moral status and rights of many nonhuman animals. Confronting traditional and contemporary philosophical arguments, she offers in clear and accessible fashion a thorough examination of theories of moral significance while decisively demonstrating the flaws in the arguments of those who would avoid attributing moral rights to nonhumans. Exposing the traditional view—which restricts the moral realm to autonomous, fully fledged persons—as having horrific implications for the treatment of many humans, Pluhar goes on to argue positively that sentient individuals of any species are no less morally significant than the most automomous human. Her position provides the ultimate justification that is missing from previous defenses of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In the process of advancing her position, Pluhar discusses the implications of determining moral significance for children and abnormal humans as well as its relevance to population policies, the raising of animals for food or product testing, decisions on hunting and euthanasia, and the treatment of companion animals. In addition, the author scrutinizes recent assertions by environmental ethicists that all living things or that natural objects and ecosystems be considered highly morally significant. This powerful book of moral theory challenges all defenders of the moral status quo—which decrees that animals decidedly do not count—to reevaluate their convictions.

In his critique of the therapeutic, Taylor argues that therapy fails to engage with the ethical and spiritual significance of human suffering. Therapy’s denial of ethics is representative of a wider modern difficulty with accommodating Taylor’s view of ethical discourse as the articulation of the qualitative distinctions of worth implicit in our strong evaluations. In the case of therapy, this rejection of ethics stems from the claim to offer a set of scientifically based techniques of psychological change, and from protections for patient autonomy that are derived from a negative conception of liberty. Taylor’s critique of negative liberty demonstrates the inevitability of strong evaluation and serves to highlight how therapy covertly offers ethical proposals while denying that it is doing so. A psychoanalytic case vignette illustrates how it would be possible to give an ethical frame to therapeutic aims. To locate standard conceptions of psychological health in the context of Taylor’s history of the modern identity would emphasize their ethical significance and open the possibility to move therapy beyond the therapeutic.

Reading Paradise Regained Ethically Robert B. Pierce Much modern criticism follows a long tradition by attending to the presumed effect of literature on our personal and political lives. Feminists, cultural materialists, new historicists, and postcolonialists frequently remind us that texts are "not innocent," and such analysts seek to make explicit the values and judgments that literary texts encourage in their readers. Whether in the vein of unmasking or of celebrating, we critics often attribute great ethical and political significance to the works we study, but we are inclined to be vague about the mechanisms by which these effects occur. Given that I share this presumption that the texts we love to study matter to our lives, I would like to look more closely at how the process occurs, taking Milton's Paradise Regained as a test case. Does our reading of literary texts affect us ethically, and should it?1 An ancient and powerful critical tradition has taken for granted that the answer to both questions is yes. At the very least, good literature read properly is seen as one among the shaping forces of our education. But, beginning in the late eighteenth century, the theoretical movement to separate esthetics from ethics rendered this assumption problematic. Perhaps the beautiful is a value quite separate from the good. Later the literary school of estheticism brashly proclaimed the triumph of beauty over goodness under the banner of art for art's sake, [End Page 208] and Auden more modestly noted in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" that "poetry makes nothing happen,"2 presumably including in the denial the moral betterment of its readers. The idea that literature is good for us has been almost embarrassing for the past century or so. On the other hand, many feminists and cultural critics have recently argued in effect that literature is often bad for us, that it is implicated in the ethical and political life of the time when it is produced and also in the time when it is received or consumed, so that it may tend to reinforce the ideology of one period or the other. In their assumption that literature is ethically significant they agree with most ordinary people and with the cultural right, especially in concern about its influence. What does this recent set of contentions entail? The term "implicated" that is characteristically used in such analysis claims at a minimum that the literary text in question has been shaped in production, consumption, or both by larger cultural forces, shaped in such a way as to incorporate certain values. Most such analyses go further to assert or suggest that the text under study helps to reinforce those values in the original audience or in later consumers (sometimes by attacking opposed values).3 The characteristic rhetorical stance in such readings is an implied warning to the reader against the insidious effect of the text lest it instill some fallacious, unethical, or politically harmful attitude or idea. Often the reader is rhetorically invited to share a position of intellectual superiority along with the critic, both of them above the corruption that afflicts an unspecified gullible audience. Thus many modern critics identify a romanticizing of war and the military hero in Shakespeare's Henry V, though they differ among themselves in that some locate both poison and cure in the text itself (suggesting, for example, that Shakespeare subverts the official ideology that he portrays), while some offer a "reading against the text," a cure administered by the critic against the wholly poisonous work. Such critics frequently manifest a reasonable caution about their own ethical and political stance. In an age of widespread pluralism and cultural relativism, we have learned to suspect self-confident proclamations of the ethical and political truth by critics as well as by literary authors, and in particular we are suspicious of official codes of conduct, including our own. Also we are (often at least) less confident than our forebears in purporting to state the meaning of a text. We have learned to heed the ambiguities and self-undermining elements in texts that complicate the capacity of any simple critical statement to reflect adequately what the text means. We no...

Tragedy and philosophy have long been locked in a life and death struggle. By banishing the tragic poets from his ideal, philosophically cultivated community, Plato established philosophy's authority atop the corpse of tragedy. But more than two millennia later, the recognition of the limits of metaphysical thinking led some to call for a rebirth of the question of tragedy. Certain German philosophers, all united in a concern for the ethical and political significance of the exhaustion of Western philosophical thought, have thus come to reverse Socrates' banishment and have begged the poets back into thought's domain. Dennis Schmidt has written a thought-provoking study of the development of this peculiar interweaving of tragedy, philosophy, death, and (re)birth, focusing on the rehabilitation of ancient Greek tragedy by Hegel, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. After two preliminary chapters on the assessment of tragedy's political and ethical significance in Plato and Aristotle, Schmidt proceeds to examine what each of the German philosophers contributes to the rehabilitation of the question of tragedy. On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life purports to test the hypothesis that an examination of how all six of these thinkers evaluate and appropriate tragic art "provides unique insights into the possibilities for the ethical and political assumptions working in those philosophers" (3). As Schmidt shows, despite the varying assessments of tragedy by the Greek and German philosophers examined, the topic of tragedy asserts itself always as an urgent, ethical question of our shared existence in time.

In 2010, the Venter lab announced that it had created the first bacterium with an entirely synthetic genome. This was reported to be the first instance of ‘artificial life,’ and in the ethical and policy discussions that followed it was widely assumed that the creation of artificial life is in itself morally significant. We cast doubt on this assumption. First we offer an account of the creation of artificial life that distinguishes this from the derivation of organisms from existing life and clarify what we mean in asking whether the creation of artificial life has moral significance. We then articulate and evaluate three attempts to establish that the creation of artificial life is morally significant. These appeal to (1) the claim that the creation of artificial life involves playing God, as expressed in three distinct formulations; (2) the claim that the creation of artificial life will encourage reductionist attitudes toward the living world that undermine the special moral value accorded to life; and (3) the worry that artificial organisms will have an uncertain functional status and consequently an uncertain moral status. We argue that all three attempts to ground the moral significance of the creation of artificial life fail, because none of them establishes that the creation of artificial life is morally problematic in a way that the derivation of organisms from existing life forms is not. We conclude that the decisive moral consideration is not how life is created but what non-genealogical properties it possesses.

The question of whether a mistake of law should negate or mitigate criminal liability is commonly considered to be pertinent to the culpability of the agent, often examined in light of the (epistemic) reasonableness of the mistake. I argue that this view disregards an important aspect of this question; namely, whether a mistake of law affects the rightness of the action, particularly in light of the moral significance of the mistake. I argue that several plausible premises regarding moral rightness under uncertainty, the nature of law, and the moral significance of law entail a positive answer to this question. Specifically, I consider this argument: (1) one (subjective) sense of moral rightness depends on the (epistemically justified) belief of the agent concerning a non-moral fact that is morally significant; (2) a law is (partly) a non-moral fact; (3) a legal fact might be morally significant; (4) therefore, an action that is compatible with an applicable moral standard, in light of the mistaken (justified) belief of the agent concerning a morally significant law, is (subjectively) right or less wrongful; (5) the (subjective) moral rightness of an action counts against criminal liability for this action; (6) therefore, an action that is compatible with the applicable moral standard, in light of the mistaken (epistemically justified) belief of the agent, counts against criminal liability for the action if the law is morally significant.

There are significant similarities between Bosanquet’s ethical function of the state and Miller’s defence of nations as communities that generate duties. Bosanquet’s references to the state are predominantly to the nation state (1917a: p. 295), and Miller argues that there are good reasons for states and nations to coincide. More to the point, there are essential similarities in the reasons why these two thinkers believe in the ethical significance of the nation state. Many of their arguments in defence of the state or the nation, respectively, are based on the particularist nature of communities in principle and the nation state in particular. The state, for Bosanquet, has ethical significance because it embodies the general will and the latter can exist only in specific communities with shared experiences and established traditions. The general will is anchored in specific communities, institutions and practices and the state is ‘the largest body which possesses the unity of experience necessary for constituting a general will’ (Bosanquet, 1917a: p. 272). Miller’s commitment to particularist ethics is explicit. Particularism, for him, works on the assumption ‘that memberships and attachments in general have ethical significance’ (Miller, 1995: p. 65). National membership, however, supersedes in ethical significance other memberships for two reasons: existence of public culture and national self-determination.