Ethical Desirability Research Articles

Counter-Conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Popup Civic Actions in Mexico

ABSTRACT This paper draws on Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct to move beyond the binary understandings of civil society and social movement. Using illustrative examples of popup civic actions in the aftermath of a flooding disaster that hit the Mexican state of Guerrero in 2013, we argue that for many grassroots and indigenous people with a longstanding struggle for recovery of communal lands (ejidos) and autonomy, mutuality (perceived as the domain of civil society) and resistance (perceived as the domain of social movement) are co-constitutive and continually invoked in their counter-conducts. That, their ethical desire for “being otherwise” and “doing things differently” is constitutive of their political will “not to be governed like that”. Using a Foucauldian analytics of counter-conduct, we discuss how self-organised popup actions in Guerrero both unsettled power relations by creating new fields of visibility, techniques, and knowledge, and imbued critical self-reflections, engendering new political identity.

Out of sight, out of mind: how pescetarians manage dissonance by creating distance

ABSTRACT For many, there exists a cognitive inconsistency between the practice of eating non-human animals and the belief that animals are morally relevant. This juxtaposition has fittingly been described as the ‘meat paradox’. However, what can be said about the decision to eat only the flesh of fish? The present research seeks to understand what attitudes lead pescetarians to remove terrestrial animals from their plate but still include aquatic animals such as fish. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with self-identifying pescetarians and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes are presented which can be understood by reference to the construal-level theory of psychological distance. Fish were perceived as distant on multiple dimensions which resulted in speciesist (the idea that some species are more important and morally relevant than others) attitudes toward marine animals’ capabilities and the justification of pescetarianism as a compromise between debates of feasibility and ethical desirability.

Designing Technical Systems in The Anthropocene: Manifesto for a New Paradigm

The RASSCAS Laboratory (Applied Research in Social Sciences to Design a Sustainable Anthropocene) is a human sciences laboratory based in a digital engineering school. The idea of this laboratory is to guide engineering students towards models of design and innovation that respond both to the ethical desires of this young generation and to the need for responsible innovation imposed by the context of access to development that is fair for mankind and sustainable for life and the planet. This article is first and foremost a profession of faith, that of researchers who have decided to commit themselves to the path of development that respects life. It is also a call to become aware of the need to modify traditional design models. It’s a call for a paradigm shift from anthropocentric models to one that gives equal place to human and non-human living beings.

What should we do with bad feelings? Negative affects, impotential responses

Bad feelings are everywhere. When faced with this situation in our empirical encounters or conceptual analyses, most socio-spatial research is committed to making things right again, with an eye to unleashing new potentials for action by repairing bad feeling. Yet this ‘ethics of rehabilitation’ assumes both the inherent possibility and ethical desirability of working away those affects that are deemed to be ‘negative’. We argue that this activating process risks delegitimising, in possibly troubling or violent ways, the ethical validity of both incapacities (when one is unable to act) and negative capacities (when one decides to not act). Instead of a rehabilitative ethics, we propose an ‘ethics of impotentiality’ that suspends the urge to activate negative affects, offering a radically situated ethical relation that is neither didactic nor moralising, refuses any easy distinction between empowering and disempowering affects, and allows for subjects to stay with inaction.

Lung Organotypic Slices Enable Rapid Quantification of Acute Radiotherapy Induced Toxicity.

To rapidly assess healthy tissue toxicities induced by new anti-cancer therapies (i.e., radiation alone or in combination with drugs), there is a critical need for relevant and easy-to-use models. Consistent with the ethical desire to reduce the use of animals in medical research, we propose to monitor lung toxicity using an ex vivo model. Briefly, freshly prepared organotypic lung slices from mice were irradiated, with or without being previously exposed to chemotherapy, and treatment toxicity was evaluated by analysis of cell division and viability of the slices. When exposed to different doses of radiation, this ex vivo model showed a dose-dependent decrease in cell division and viability. Interestingly, monitoring cell division was sensitive enough to detect a sparing effect induced by FLASH radiotherapy as well as the effect of combined treatment. Altogether, the organotypic lung slices can be used as a screening platform to rapidly determine in a quantitative manner the level of lung toxicity induced by different treatments alone or in combination with chemotherapy while drastically reducing the number of animals. Translated to human lung samples, this ex vivo assay could serve as an innovative method to investigate patients' sensitivity to radiation and drugs.

Automated guided vehicles with a mounted serial manipulator: A systematic literature review

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) have become a vital part of the automation sector and a key component of a new industrial revolution that promises to: i. automate the entire manufacturing process, ii. increase productivity rates, iii. develop safer workplaces, while iv. maximising profits and reducing running costs for businesses. However, several concerns arise in the face of this very promising revolution. A major issue is how to ensure that AGVs function effectively and safely during interactions with humans. Another one concerns the ethical desirability of pervasive, continuous, and multidimensional couplings (or interactions) between humans and robots. Generally speaking, automated systems, in virtue of their vast sensing capabilities, may pose privacy challenges to their users. This is because such systems can seamlessly gather information about people' behaviors, without people's consent or awareness. To tackle the important issues abovementioned, we performed a systematic literature review [SLR] on AGVs with mounted serial manipulators. We used as an input 282 papers published in the relevant scientific literature. We analysed these papers and selected 50 papers based on certain criteria to find out trends, algorithms, performance metrics used, as well as potential ethical concerns raised by the deployment of AGVs in the industry. Our findings suggest that corporations can effectively rely on AGVs with mounted manipulators as an efficient and safe solution to production challenges.

Technology in Espionage and Counterintelligence: Some Cautionary Lessons from Armed Conflict

AbstractThis essay contends that the ethics around the use of spy technology to gather intelligence (TECHINT) during espionage and counterintelligence operations is ambiguous. To build this argument, the essay critically scrutinizes Cécile Fabre's recent and excellent book Spying through a Glass Darkly, which argues that there are no ethical differences between the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) obtained from or by human assets and TECHINT in these operations. As the essay explains, Fabre arrives at this position by treating TECHINT as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. The essay argues instead that TECHINT is unlikely to act as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. As such, TECHINT might transform existing practices of espionage and counterintelligence, giving rise to new ethical challenges not captured in Fabre's analysis. To illustrate the point, the essay builds an analogy between TECHINT and recent armed conflicts in which precision weapons have been deployed. Although precision weapons seem ethically desirable, their availability has created new practices of waging war that are ethically problematic. By analogy, TECHINT, though not intrinsically undesirable, has the capacity to generate new practices of intelligence gathering that are ethically problematic—potentially more than HUMINT. Ultimately, recent negative experiences with the use of precision weaponry should caution against an overly positive assessment of TECHINT's ethical desirability.

The predictive reframing of machine learning applications: good predictions and bad measurements

Supervised machine learning has found its way into ever more areas of scientific inquiry, where the outcomes of supervised machine learning applications are almost universally classified as predictions. I argue that what researchers often present as a mere terminological particularity of the field involves the consequential transformation of tasks as diverse as classification, measurement, or image segmentation into prediction problems. Focusing on the case of machine-learning enabled poverty prediction, I explore how reframing a measurement problem as a prediction task alters the primary epistemic aim of the application. Instead of measuring a property, machine learning developers conceive of their models as predicting a given measurement of this property. I argue that this predictive reframing common to supervised machine learning applications is epistemically and ethically problematic, as it allows developers to externalize concerns critical to the epistemic validity and ethical implications of their model’s inferences. I further hold that the predictive reframing is not a necessary feature of supervised machine learning by offering an alternative conception of machine learning models as measurement models. An interpretation of supervised machine learning applications to measurement tasks as automatically-calibrated model-based measurements internalizes questions of construct validity and ethical desirability critical to the measurement problem these applications are intended to and presented as solving. Thereby, this paper introduces an initial framework for exploring technical, historical, and philosophical research at the intersection of measurement and machine learning.

Bonomythy and the Goodward Life: Sacred‐Ethical Invitations to Pause, Prayer, and Politics in Plotinus and Levinas

AbstractDrawing on a constellation of insights in Plotinus (third century) and Emmanuel Levinas (1905‐1995), I explore an ethically inflected spiritual‐political alternative to theology which I call “bonomythy.” Unlike “theology” which offers us a reasoned God‐Account, “bonomythy” offers us a lived experience at the intersection of goodness (bonum) and transformational narrative (muthos). An alternative to the calculated confines of theology, its ethical framing also avoids the cacophony and coldness of atheisms and the sorts of atheologies which variously draw strength from nothingness, chaos, matter, and the “death of god.” Moreover, prioritizing phenomenological frames over epistemological ones, it is far warmer than the kinds of cool, spiritually‐reductive ethics one can find in Kantian frames or in the at times nihilistic logics of deconstruction at play in some postmodern approaches. In its cultivation of ethical desire as a passionate quest for the sacred bound up with doing good in the world, bonomythy emerges as a more ethically‐driven alternative not only to theology but to a variety of deconstructive, mystical, and theopoetic atheologies.

Should Doctors Offer Biomarker Testing to Those Afraid to Develop Alzheimer's Dementia? : Applying the Method of Reflective Equilibrium for a Clinical Dilemma.

An increasing number of people seek medical attention for mild cognitive symptoms at older age, worried that they might develop Alzheimer's disease. Some clinical practice guidelines suggest offering biomarker testing in such cases, using a brain scan or a lumbar puncture, to improve diagnostic certainty about Alzheimer's disease and enable an earlier diagnosis. Critics, on the other hand, point out that there is no effective Alzheimer treatment available and argue that biomarker tests lack clinical validity. The debate on the ethical desirability of biomarker testing is currently polarized; advocates and opponents tend to focus on their own line of arguments. In this paper, we show how the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) can be used to systematically weigh the relevant arguments on both sides of the debate to decide whether to offer Alzheimer biomarker testing. In the tradition of RE, we reflect upon these arguments in light of their coherence with other argumentative elements, including relevant facts (e.g. on the clinical validity of the test), ethical principles, and theories on societal ideals or relevant concepts, such as autonomy. Our stance in the debate therefore rests upon previously set out in-depth arguments and reflects a wide societal perspective.

Achieving a \u2018Good AI Society\u2019: Comparing the Aims and Progress of the EU and the US

Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) strategies, released by governments around the world, that seek to maximise the benefits of AI and minimise potential harms. This article provides a comparative analysis of the European Union (EU) and the United States’ (US) AI strategies and considers (i) the visions of a ‘Good AI Society’ that are forwarded in key policy documents and their opportunity costs, (ii) the extent to which the implementation of each vision is living up to stated aims and (iii) the consequences that these differing visions of a ‘Good AI Society’ have for transatlantic cooperation. The article concludes by comparing the ethical desirability of each vision and identifies areas where the EU, and especially the US, need to improve in order to achieve ethical outcomes and deepen cooperation.

An Impossible Prayer: Ethics between Performative and Constative

This article takes up the blurred distinction between performative and constative utterances in an effort to develop a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer as perjurious testimony. Focusing on a passage in the recently published Le parjure et le pardon seminars, I argue that a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer is one whose function interminably oscillates between constative and performative, rendering the distinction between these two uses of language indiscernible. This oscillation plays not to prayer's detriment, but instead serves as the animating force behind prayer and the impossible ethical desire prayer expresses. The impossibility of a prayer whose desire is rendered perjurious by the state of affairs from which it emerges opens onto a number of political, ethical, and theological concerns that the second half of the paper addresses. By reading Simone Weil's reflections on the ‘Our Father’ in light of Derrida's considerations above, I argue that prayer's impossibility is a condition of possibility for its ability to produce real effects in the world it betrays.

Wearing the Good: A Kierkegaardian Exploration of “Messaged” Apparel

What might it mean to “wear the good?” This question arises from a dominating trend in contemporary spaces where objects such as clothing are employed to communicate desires and demonstrate ethical commitments to social causes, political institutions, beliefs, and ideologies. This paper explores the use of garments to convey messages, ethical stances, and even public virtues. It specifically attends to how “messaged” garments, or clothing items that bear images, symbols, and phrases, achieve these ends. Fashion theorist Malcom Barnard rightly intuits that “we have to use things to stand for our thoughts.” Yet the use of these garments warrants concern. This paper explores how such garments are enmeshed in the fashion industry and marketplace, identifying specific troubles that arise therein. Engaging the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, this paper attends to the ethical and spiritual complexities of “messaged” apparel, revealing their failure to supersede ambiguities, and ultimately collapsing ethical desires into aesthetic paralysis. The paper argues that a Kierkegaardian conception of hope can effectively guide those who wear such garments, countering the inadequacy of these wares to sustain personal and communal commitments. Hope directs the “worn” person beyond politicized and ethically “messaged” apparel towards new ways of dressing: adorned in finitude, humility, and an absurd perseverance towards the good.

Artificial Intelligence and Business Ethics: Goal Setting and Value Alignment as Management Concerns

Rapid advances in the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) is having a profound effect both on organizations and society at large. While already used extensively in organizations to promote rational decision making, its emergence is also giving rise to profound ethical concerns. As such, we argue that organizational research has a crucial role to play in promoting beneficial development and use of this technology. Given the rapidly increasing autonomy and impact of AI systems, we draw attention to the fundamental importance goal setting and value alignment in determining the ethical desirability of outcomes from this development. Importantly, we claim that goal setting necessitates ethical considerations that are not amenable to technology. Further, while the pursuit of goals can be partially delegated to AI, challenges relating to the representation of goals and (ethical) constraints imply that human involvement is crucial in preventing unforeseen consequences. Finally, we discuss issues relating to the malicious misuse and heedless overuse of AI, arguing that the importance of human agency and inclusion in decision making in fact increases with adoption of the technology due to an escalating scale and impact of decisions made. Given the profound impact of these decisions on numerous stakeholders, we suggest that organizational research stands to contribute to the relevance, comprehensiveness, and integrity of AI ethics in the face of this revolutionary technology.

A Fuzzy Logic-Based Method for Incorporating Ethics in the Internet of Things

IoT is expected to have far-reaching consequences on society due to a wide spectrum of applications like smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart agriculture, smart home, etc. However, ethical considerations of AI-enabled smart devices have not been duly considered from a design perspective. In this paper, the authors propose a novel fuzzy logic-based method to incorporate ethics within smart things of IoT. Ethical considerations relevant to a machine context are represented in terms of fuzzy ethics variables (FEVs) and ethics rules. For each ethics rule, a value called scaled ethics value (SEV) is used to indicate its ethical desirability. In order to model flexibility in ethical response, the authors employ the concept of ethics modes that selectively allow scenarios depending on the value of SEV. The method offers a viable mechanism for smart devices to imbue ethical sensitivity that can pave the way for a technology society amenable to human ethics. However, the method does not account for varying ethics, as such incorporating learning mechanisms represent a promising research direction.

Achieving a ‘Good AI Society’: comparing the aims and progress of the EU and the US

Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) strategies, released by governments around the world, that seek to maximise the benefits of AI and minimise potential harms. This article provides a comparative analysis of the European Union (EU) and the United States’ (US) AI strategies and considers (i) the visions of a ‘Good AI Society’ that are forwarded in key policy documents and their opportunity costs, (ii) the extent to which the implementation of each vision is living up to stated aims and (iii) the consequences that these differing visions of a ‘Good AI Society’ have for transatlantic cooperation. The article concludes by comparing the ethical desirability of each vision and identifies areas where the EU, and especially the US, need to improve in order to achieve ethical outcomes and deepen cooperation.

The Ethics of Geoengineering: A Literature Review.

Geoengineering as a technological intervention to avert the dangerous climate change has been on the table at least since 2006. The global outreach of the technology exercised in a non-encapsulated system, the concerns with unprecedented levels and scales of impact and the overarching interdisciplinarity of the project make the geoengineering debate ethically quite relevant and complex. This paper explores the ethical desirability of geoengineering from an overall review of the existing literature on the ethics of geoengineering. It identifies the relevant literature on the ethics of geoengineering by employing a standard methodology. Based on various framing of the major ethical arguments and their subsets, the results section presents the opportunities and challenges at stake in geoengineering from an ethical point of view. The discussion section takes a keen interest in identifying the evolving dynamics of the debate, the grey areas of the debate, with underdeveloped arguments being brought to the foreground and in highlighting the arguments that are likely to emerge in the future as key contenders. It observes the semantic diversity and ethical ambiguity, the academic lop-sidedness of the debate, missing contextual setting, need for interdisciplinary approaches, public engagement, and region-specific assessment of ethical issues. Recommendations are made to provide a useful platform for the second generation of geoengineering ethicists to help advance the debate to more decisive domains with the required clarity and caution.

Distributive justice, equality and the enhancement of human cognition: A commentary on fairness and ‘cognitive doping’

What implications might the use of techniques to enhance human cognition have for the kind of polities or civil societies we inhabit? What might political philosophy, if anything, have to tell us about the desirability of using drugs to increase our intellectual powers? Much of the focus in contemporary debates about human enhancement has been upon the ethical desirability of endeavouring to enhance our capacities: should we be meddling with ‘human nature’, as it were? Therapeutic uses of drugs are regarded as acceptable but enhancement is frowned upon in much of this literature. This rejection of enhancement is especially prevalent in the area of sport where there is a great deal of opposition to doping. Herein I take a somewhat different approach and explore enhancement as a problem in political philosophy and, more specifically, as a problem of distributive justice. Should the enhancement of human intellectual functioning be rejected on distributive grounds of equality? Alternatively, might it be plausibly be argued that distributive justice requires such enhancement? In this paper I shall outline two contemporary theories of justice—namely, the Egalitarianism and the Rawlsian Prioritarianism—and then consider what these principles might tell us about the political legitimacy (or otherwise) of ‘doping for intellect’.

Medical Students’ Exposure to Ethics Conflicts in Clinical Training: Implications for Timing UME Bioethics Education

While there is significant consensus that undergraduate medical education (UME) should include bioethics training, there is widespread debate about how to teach bioethics to medical students. Educators disagree about course methods and approaches, the topics that should be covered, and the effectiveness and metrics for UME ethics training. One issue that has received scant attention is the timing of bioethics education during medical training. The existing literature suggests that most medical ethics education occurs in the pre-clinical years. Follow-up studies indicate that medical students in their clinical rotations have little recall or ability to apply ethics concepts that were learned in their pre-clinical training. Trainees also report a desire for medical ethics to be taught in the context of practical application, which would suggest that the timing of pre-clinical ethics education is flawed. However, moving bioethics training to the clinical years should not be assumed to be the solution to the problems of recall and theory application. We argue that the effectiveness of timing bioethics education will depend on when medical students witness or experience particular categories of ethical dilemmas during their training. Our overarching hypothesis is that ethics education will be most effective when the bioethics training on a particular topic correlates to experiential exposure to that ethical issue. The purpose of our current study was to describe medical students exposure to particular categories of ethical conflicts, dilemmas, or issues. Our results may help bioethics educators better strategize about the most effective timing of medical ethics training in UME.

Le désir du Neutre et le Singulier. Notes sur les apories d’un appétit éthique chez Barthes

A travers le désir du Neutre, manifesté à l’occasion de son cours sur le Neutre (1977-1978) au Collège de France, Barthes prend une posture passionnément “désintéressée“ à l’égard du savoir institutionnel. En particulier, l’iter intellectuel de Barthes, de l’homme “engagé” des revues des années 50 à l’homme “amateur” à la recherche d’une herméneutique de soi, culmine avec ses cours au Collège de France : le passage de critique à praeceptor amoris serait révélé par un désir éthique en direction du Singulier. Au sein du “souci de soi” de Barthes, pour lequel l’émancipation individuelle précèderait l’émancipation collective, il est pourtant reconnaissable une sorte d’humanisme, non condensé dans une doctrine immédiatement politique. Cette pratique de soi rencontre ainsi une pratique d’écriture selon laquelle la littérature est appréciée pour ses effets, pour ses valeurs d’usage, davantage que pour son sens. L’appréciation d’un texte comme propédeutique de soi véhiculerait en réalité un usage politique de la littérature : la recherche d’un sens pour soi ne comporterait pas la recherche d’un usage individuel et “consolatoire”, mais au contraire inviterait à la pratique active d’une jouissance. Cet article s’interroge essentiellement sur les rapports entre le désir barthien d’idiosyncrasie et l’éthique du Singulier.