Ethical Problematization Research Articles

The emergence and self-definition of philosophy of engineering

Despite the role engineers initially played in the foundation of philosophy of technology, it took more than a century for engineering practice to become a legitimate special subject of philosophical inquiry. At the turn of the XX–XXI centuries philosophy of engineering has been emerging as a subfield in parallel in different regions (China, Europe, the USA), gradually demarcating itself from philosophy of science and technology, and positioning itself in relation to STS. The overview highlights the turning points of these developments: formation of the research programs and communities. It is argued that the emergence of philosophy of engineering is a result of a growing empirical orientation and ethical problematization in philosophy and the social studies of science and technology. In the engineered sociotechnical world, both descriptive and normative research of engineering practices is required for responsibilization of technological action. An empirically informed philosophical study of engineering includes the ontological, epistemological, and ethical aspects of engineering activity, overcoming the opposition of its context and content. Engineering is a specifically modern form of action in the world and at the same time can contribute to philosophical anthropology and the theory of human creativity. Institutionalization of philosophy of engineering becomes possible when (and where) a coalition of the interested actors has been formed, including the professional associations of engineering, academy, and policymakers. The overview concludes with deliberations on perspectives of the field in Russia, where a significant corpus of studies of engineering has been accumulated – yet, philosophy of engineering is not institutionalized, and remains an exotic label.

Gender as Emotive AI and the Case of ‘Nadia’: Regulatory and Ethical Implications

This article unpacks the regulatory and ethical problematics of the artificial intelligence (AI) powered virtual assistant, ‘Nadia’, developed for use in the Australian Government’s National Disabilities Insurance Agency (NDIA). We explore how Nadia is gendered female, utilises high-risk AI technologies, including emotive-inducing AI and machine learning to monitor highly sensitive health and biometric data, and was developed for use by a group deemed vulnerable to further human rights violations under international law. Drawing from the human rights frameworks of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly the rights to data protection law and privacy, we explore how a system like Nadia poses interferences with, and potential violations to, the fundamental human rights of vulnerable groups, and discuss what regulatory provisions and frameworks could have been put in place to safeguard Nadia.

Governing “The Homeless” in English Homelessness Legislation: Foucauldian Governmentality and the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the growing body of work exploring governmentality theory in housing and homelessness law by engaging, for the first time, a Foucauldian neoliberal, governmentality and risk framework to the recently enacted Homelessness Reduction Act 2017. This article locates the place of governmental activity to be scrutinized as the homeless population and contends that the Homelessness Reduction 2017 (‘HRA 17ʹ) can be interpreted as operating according to three intersecting modes of problematization of the homeless: (1) biopolitical problematization; (2) governmental problematization; and (3) ethical problematization. In so doing, this article reveals that the 2017 Act reflects a shift in neoliberal thinking on homelessness in constructing images of the homeless as a “risk population”, as subjectified, autonomized individuals exhorted to self-work and ethical self-fashioning as responsibilized citizens taking account of their own housing precarity.

Герой-трикстер в романе М. Фриша «Назову себя Гантенбайн»

The article offers an interpretation and analysis of the novel My Name Be Gantenbein, allowing to find an explanation to the genre uncertainty of the work of the Swiss writer M. Frisch. Due to the non-linear stylistics of the narrative, the image of Gantenbein eludes an unambiguous classification in terms of moral and ethical problematics lying on the surface. The hero of the novel turns into a methodological principle that clarifies the fundamental existences of life. In classical tradition, these included the concepts of freedom and law, truth and lies, truth and deception, game and life. The complicated plot makes Gantenbein a functional representative of both freedom and blind law. They create semantic space of self-organizing life. As a result, the character is endowed with properties of a trickster, because he accepts the complexity of such a life at the level of his existence. The investigation reveals that the game, roles and masks create the ideological basis of the story. This framework directs the reader to perceive life in its everyday manifestations, contributing to the development of an antidote to escapism.

Герой-трикстер в романе М. Фриша «Назову себя Гантенбайн»

The article offers an interpretation and analysis of the novel My Name Be Gantenbein, allowing to find an explanation to the genre uncertainty of the work of the Swiss writer M. Frisch. Due to the non-linear stylistics of the narrative, the image of Gantenbein eludes an unambiguous classification in terms of moral and ethical problematics lying on the surface. The hero of the novel turns into a methodological principle that clarifies the fundamental existences of life. In classical tradition, these included the concepts of freedom and law, truth and lies, truth and deception, game and life. The complicated plot makes Gantenbein a functional representative of both freedom and blind law. They create semantic space of self-organizing life. As a result, the character is endowed with properties of a trickster, because he accepts the complexity of such a life at the level of his existence. The investigation reveals that the game, roles and masks create the ideological basis of the story. This framework directs the reader to perceive life in its everyday manifestations, contributing to the development of an antidote to escapism.

Dementia, beauty, and play: A way of seeing and being with the wearisome patient

We describe a case of an elderly patient suffering from advanced dementia (Mrs. M) whose chronic confusion has become a source of frustration for her caregivers. Mrs. M experiences a touching interaction with a new nurse (Nathan) who takes a different approach with her. We describe this interaction and elaborate upon it by drawing from Catholic social teaching and the philosophy of play. Cases like these do not involve dramatic or esoteric ethical problematics, but rather the sort of dilemma born of the everyday tragedies of lingering illness, aging and caretakers’ fatigue. Nathan’s approach offers a different way of seeing and being with the wearisome patient.

От зова совести к голосу друга в философии М. Хайдеггера и Х. Арендт

The problem of conscience is not reduced to ethical problematics and constitutes a major research area of modern ontology, which considers the problems of subject’s existence, consciousness, selfhood and its structure. The authors compare M. Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological analysis of conscience and interpretation of conscience in H. Arendt’s philosophy. The comparison of these approaches shows that involvement initially postulated in the conception of conscience does not mean commitment to ethical values or to a society represented as a multitude of abstract others but rather empathy for the Other personified in the image of a close friend. The thesis that friendly dialogue is an essential aspect of conscience is postulated.

Accounting for Dignity in the Iliad, Ajax, Electra, and the Clinical Encounter: Debating the "End" of Life.

This essay explores as "dignity-denuding" case studies Greek tragic protagonists in order to discuss the ethical problematics involved in "accounting for" such figures: i.e. both diagnosing them and constructing (broken) narratives into which they are fitted. Starting with epic's positive constructions of "aidōs" (shame), it contrasts Ajax and Phaedra-each deprived of their dignity by what one psychiatrist called a "violent storm"-as seeking to construct a restorative story of self after trauma. Finally, it argues that Sophocles's Electra's presentation of her "shameful" state has been misread, by both psychiatrists and dramaturgs seeking, perhaps needing?, to impose an inappropriate closure on both her and the play. It is suggestive and significant that this so-called "hysteric" should attract accounts which so impose a diagnosis, impose an "end." The essay concludes that such imposition on anyone who has had their dignity taken away, whether protagonist or patient, is the final indignity.

Relational architectures and wearable space: Smart schools and the politics of ubiquitous sensation

This paper undertakes an analysis of the “smart school” as a building that both senses and manages bodies through sensory data. The authors argue that smart schools produce a situation of ubiquitous sensation in which learning environments are continuously sensed, regulated, and controlled through complex sensory ecosystems and data infrastructures. This includes the consideration of ethical and political issues associated with the collection of biometric and environmental data in schools and the implications for the design and operation of learning environments which are increasingly regulated through decentralized sensor networks. Working through a relational and adaptive theory of architecture, the authors explore ways of intervening in smart schools through the reconceptualization of sensor technologies as “atmospheric media” that operate within a distributed ecology of sensation that exceeds the limited bandwidth of the human senses. Drawing on recent projects in contemporary art, architecture, and interaction design, the authors discuss specific architectural interventions that foreground the atmospheric qualities and ethical problematics of sensor technologies in school buildings.

Peter pan: el líder y sus seguidores. una experiencia de filosofía con niños

La filosofía y la literatura están unidas por fuertes lazos que se evidencian en ambas disciplinas: son muchos los textos literarios y filosóficos en los que se pueden rastrear las influencias recíprocas. En esta experiencia de filosofía con niños se partió de una obra clásica, Peter Pan, para motivar a alumnos de primaria. Los objetivos fueron a) desarrollar el pensamiento crítico y ético a través de la problematización de la vida escolar, b) desarrollar habilidades de análisis, síntesis, inferencia, argumentación, cuestionamiento y pensamiento creativo, c) que los alumnos relacionaran sus experiencias cotidianas con las situaciones que se plantean en la historia. Peter Pan retrata a un tipo de persona muy popular en nuestra época: el líder. Peter es inteligente y simpático, posee la valentía y el carisma suficiente para seducir a los niños perdidos, a los pieles rojas y a Wendy y sus hermanos. Su imaginación y pasión por la aventura lo vuelven aún más atractivo. Peter también encarna defectos que reconocemos en numerosos líderes: vanidad, egoísmo y falta de responsabilidad. Para ejercer el poder cuenta con la sumisión de los niños perdidos. Si en el texto ambas conductas nos parecen naturales, al identificarlas en la vida cotidiana de nuestras escuelas sólo podemos nombrarlas con palabras como bullying, matonismo, agresión, víctimas… Esta experiencia mostró que las obras literarias pueden servir como detonador para la reflexión y el debate, tanto de la vida escolar como de dilemas de la vida cotidiana aportados por los alumnos; permitió el cuestionamiento sobre las relaciones entre pares y la argumentación de sus posturas; también fue posible apreciar las posibilidades que abre tener un espacio para potenciar la imaginación. En el caso de los docentes, pudieron conocer y comprobar la función problematizadora de las preguntas, aunque sólo algunos aprendieron a formularlas. Una escasa formación en pensamiento crítico disminuye su capacidad para implementar estrategias que contribuyan al desarrollo de las habilidades mencionadas.

The Politics of Gray Data: Digital Methods, Intimate Proximity, and Research Ethics for Work on the “Alt-Right”

This article addresses how gray data, or research data that have their provenance in the gray area between found texts and the products of participants, is complicated by issues inherent to studying the “alt-right,” especially in social justice–oriented and digital methods work. Although ethical guidelines and recommendations have not reached a consensus on issues such as requiring consent for doing work on gray data in general, fruitful contextual discussions that take in differing worldviews and political goals can help triangulate an approach to making decisions for specific projects. Furthermore, the overt hostility of “alt-right” groups to researchers is also considered as a complicating factor, one that extends the meaning of “ethical responsibility” to also include responsibilities to additional parties, such as those you are citing, research assistants, and family members. The article concludes with a consideration of the intimate proximities created by social justice–oriented and digital methods research on the “alt-right,” and a set of guiding questions for doing such work that, while not quite a set of best practices, are offered as signposts to help researchers navigate what are ultimately highly singular and emergent ethical problematics.

In Pursuit of Necessary Joys: Deleuze, Spinoza, and the Ethics of Becoming Active

This article explores the possibility of a thoroughly materialist conception of ethics through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Focusing on Deleuze’s rigorous philosophical engagement with Spinoza’s Ethics, I show how an ontology of bodies and their encounters demands a radical rearticulation of the field of ethical problematics, one that exceeds the experiences of individualized subjects and that, for this reason, cannot be founded solely on a sense of responsibility toward nonhuman others. The following discussion presents Deleuze’s Spinozian ethics as a process of “becoming active” through the pursuit of joys that, in their irreducibility to the subject’s world, are no longer human. To this end, I explore how a Deleuzian ethics tears the field of ethical problematics away from contemporary discourses concerning the survival of humanity as a species, and, moreover, opens up the question of ethical responsibility to the activation of inhuman joys.

REABILITATION OF ETHICS THROUGH THE PRISM OF INDIVIDUAL BIOGRAPHY (A. MACINTYRE, H. ARENDT)

The purpose of the article is to study ethical problematics in the philosophical works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Hannah Arendt. On the one hand we have the analysis of virtues ethics and of its place in modern society (through the prism of emotivism ethics inherent to this society), and on the other hand, we have the analysis of action and judgment as scopes of person’s self-representation, which are valuable by themselves. MacIntyre developed his hypothesis about an individual biography pointing out that modern emotivism ethics does not leave a room for conscious ethical worldview, reduces the scope of ethical choice to the very statement of individual preference. By that, a sequence of ethical decisions and preferences in a person’s life acquires irrational and wayward nature, due to which conscious transition from one narrative to another becomes impossible. In its turn, the possibility of individual biography as a holistic story that everyone can tell about themselves provides such an informative nature of ethical views, which have features of a narrative that can be rationally told and rationally perceived by others. Hannah Arendt analyzed the issue of modern ethical crisis from the other side – she studied the ethical dimension of judging ability and the role of action in social interaction. An action (as Arendt believed) becomes the strictly human scope of human activity, in which personality can “open up” (unlike the areas of work and creation). Judging ability appears in this context as a foundation, thanks to which a person becomes able to act: ethical worldview exists in terms of evaluation of something that exists in relation to something due. An action in this context is an active embodiment of a certain worldview position that “unfolds” itself precisely in the area of ethics while being involved in interpersonal interaction. Arendt claimed that an action, due to its nature, is unpredictable and that every human being, who dares to take it, risks getting, in the end, a result that is far from their intentions. Exactly because of it, an action exists in the actor’s biography and the fabrics of interpersonal connections simultaneously – it is the latter, which gives the space for interpretation of an actor’s actions significance. Thus, the individual biography becomes the thing that makes sense only through the prism of interpersonal interaction and mutual interpretations of individual stories.

Between heroism and sainthood: New martyr Evgenii Rodionov as a moral model in contemporary Russia

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the developing cult of a new martyr – the Russian soldier Evgenii Rodionov, killed in 1996 in Chechen captivity, allegedly for his refusal to convert to Islam. I examine how the notion of moral personhood – a capacity to have convictions and values and to stand by them – emerges as a central object of ethical problematization across the disparate narratives of the soldier’s death. I argue that the appeal of the radical model of morality personified by the soldier’s figure reflects a pervasive trend of longing for spirituality in contemporary Russia, which developed in response to the perceived moral collapse that followed the democratic transition. Through investigating how Evgenii’s image is being employed as a public symbol of patriotism and as a private moral exemplar for militaristically oriented young men, this article contributes to the understanding of the entangled relationship among religion, nationalism and conservative morality in contemporary Russia.

Praying until Jesus returns: commitment and prayerfulness among charismatic Christians in Ghana

ABSTRACTCharismatic Christians in Ghana display heterogeneous intensities of personal piety, often mapped out by believers to levels of ‘spiritual maturation’. In this article, I examine the devotional routines of ‘committed’ Christians, individuals recognized as ‘prayerful’ subjects. Through Marcel Mauss’ incidental definition of prayer as an ‘expenditure of physical and moral energy’, I investigate ethnographically the methods whereby prayerfulness comes about. I argue that charismatic prayer is not a discernible object of inquiry, but an ongoing field of ethical problematization driven forward by two modes of physical and moral expenditure: habit and anticipation. From this angle, spiritual maturity indicates not a durable ethical asset, but a continuous effort to produce homeostatic balance between these embodied temporal forces. I conclude by stressing how attention to the internal goods of prayer allow us to integrate vulnerability within religious projects, instead of reducing it to an external causal force, as in most deprivation theories of religion.

Legal remedies: therapeutic markets and the judicialization of the right to health

This study draw on the struggle of parents of children with mucopolysacchar idosis to access expensive drugs in the name of universal right to health. The work explores how, in Brazil, right-to-health litigation became an alternative pathway to access health care and shows that several public and private stakeholders dispute the judicialization of health. Biotechnology is, therefore, understood to remake human and social worlds as it opens up new spaces of ethical problematization, desire, and political belonging.

Affective Labor and Feminist Politics

This article discusses the political potential of Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s influential notion of affective labor for feminist theory and politics. The argument proceeds in two stages. I begin by briefly explicating Hardt’s and Negri’s concept of affective labor and outline what I see as its potential benefits for advancing critical feminist thought and political imagination. In the second part of the article I turn to a critical evaluation of the notion in connection with feminist politics. While I acknowledge the strengths of this concept in characterizing contemporary laboring practices, I nonetheless want to expose its shortcomings in advancing feminist politics. I contend that in order to imagine effective political responses to the problems currently facing us, feminist politics needs theoretical distinctions within the category of affective labor that allow us to advance a political and ethical problematization of our current forms of work.

The Care of Our Hybrid Selves: Ethics in Times of Technical Mediation

What can the art of living after Foucault contribute to ethics in relation to the mediation of human existence by technology? To develop the relation between technical mediation and ethics, firstly the theme of technical mediation is elaborated in line with Foucault’s notion of ethical problematization. Every view of what technology does to us at the same time expresses an ethical concern about technology. The contemporary conception of technical mediation tends towards the acknowledgement of ongoing hybridization, not ultimately good or bad but ambivalent, which means for us the challenge of taking care of ourselves as hybrid beings. Secondly, the work of Foucault provides elements for imagining this care for our hybrid selves, notably his notions of freedom as a practice and of the care of the self. A conclusions about technical mediation and ethics is that whereas the approaches of the delegation of morality to technology by Latour and mediated morality by Verbeek see technical mediation of behavior and moral outlook as an answer in ethics, this should rather be considered the problem that ethics is about.

Media ecology and techno-ethics in Paul Virilio

Abstract This article places Paul Virilio in the company of McLuhan, Foucault and Deleuze. After sketching out his intellectual personality, the article presents a few speed-induced media ecological and ethical problematics as Virilio sees them. It ends with two of Virilio’s signature notions – antiform and divergence – with the addition of a few tetrads. Finally, it points to further explorations that need to be made to fully capture the significance of Virilio’s work for the media ecology community, and for the good life.

Landscaping the page: British open-field poetics and environmental aesthetics

This essay examines recent British poetry informed by Concrete and ‘open-field’ poetics which engages with landscape through experimentation with the spatiality of the poetic page. Amounting to much more than just formal playfulness, this mode of ‘landscape writing’ raises pertinent questions about the politics and ethics of environmental aesthetics. In particular, it offers opportunities for investigating and complicating Timothy Morton's critical formulation of ‘nature writing’ as ‘ecomimesis’. My argument draws on examples from the work of three poets whose writing eschews straightforwardly mimetic relations to landscape but nevertheless claims connections between the space of the page and material geographies. These poetries ambivalently participate in an attenuated form of ‘ecomimesis’ and in doing so, provide occasions for critical reflection on the ethical imperatives and problematics of this aesthetic impulse.