Fundamental Ethical Questions Research Articles

Digital facelift

The rapid development and proliferation of synthetic media and AI-generated avatars present both challenges and opportunities for higher education. Increasingly, educational institutions must navigate complex ethical and pedagogical considerations, as well as adapt to the latest AI technologies (Siemens et al., 2022). Ethical and pedagogical principles to guide AI use are urgently needed in education (Bozkurt et al., 2021). In this presentation, we share a practical perspective, framed by a specific case-study: the development and implementation of a large-scale, interactive business module featuring AI-generated ‘Guest Lecturers’ The AI-generated video content, along with other online activities, were designed to stimulate critical reflection and discussion about the ethical implications of AI in business. Now in its second iteration, the project represents a significant trial and evaluation of synthetic media to present educational concepts in a cohort of over 700 students. Fundamental ethical and pedagogical questions surfaced during the development and implementation of this learning media. How transparent should educators be about the processes and tools they adopt in producing content, for example (Pataranutaporn et al., 2021)? When does human presence add value in recorded video, be it in a pedagogical or parasocial sense (Beege et al., 2019)? And what forms of learning might benefit (or not) from automating video content (Li et al., 2016)? Based on evaluation data from focus groups and video analytics, we explore these questions and the potential affordances and limitations of synthetic media. We also reflect on the tools and techniques that were used to create the project, and implications for educational institutions as they seek to build capacity for AI content creation within traditional production ecosystems. An emergent typology for AI in educational media is explored, to help educators design for teaching and learning based on learning purposes and modes of delivery. Finally, we discuss how student feedback might inform the design, production and delivery of learning media, and future directions for student co-creation and agency.

Ethical Dimensions of the GDPR, AI Regulation, and Beyond

Our digital society is changing rapidly, with emerging new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, robotics, and the internet of things. These changes trigger new fundamental ethical questions relating to privacy, data protection and other values, including human rights and the way they are affected by the extensive and intensive use of data for analytical and practical innovations. This article explores these ethical dimensions and the extent to which the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2018 takes ethics into account in relation to these socio-technical developments. More briefly, it looks similarly but more selectively at the EU’s proposed AI Act of 2021, which aims to regulate AI in relation to levels of risk.It concludes with some observations on desirable institutional arrangements for making and applying ethical judgements in the regulation of advanced technologies that use personal data.

Addiction is a Disability, and it Matters

Previous discussions of addiction have often focused on the question of whether addiction is a disease. This discussion distinguishes that question – the disease question – from the question of whether addiction is a disability. I argue that, however one answers the disease question, and indeed on almost any credible account of addiction, addiction is a disability. I then consider the implications of this view, or why it matters that addiction is a disability. The disease model of addiction has led many to see addiction as primarily a medical problem, and to make medical treatment of the addicted person the first priority in addressing addiction. Once addiction is viewed as a disability (whether or not it is also a disease), different concerns are foregrounded. The problem of addiction resides not only in the addicted person, but also in the social environment in which the addicted person finds herself. The fundamental ethical question about addiction is not how addicted persons can be treated or otherwise changed, but how a just society can make reasonable accommodations for addicted persons.

Is it ethical to use hacked data in scientific research?

Hacked data — data obtained in an unauthorized manner through illicit access to a computer or computer network— are increasingly being used in scientific research. Examples include conflict modelling studies based on WikiLeaks datasets, and studies on sexual behaviour based on data leaked from Ashley Madison, a dating website hacked in 2015. Studies of this kind are prima facie lawful because the researchers who processed the data had no involvement in the hack itself, and the hacked datasets were made publicly available. However, research integrity is not simply reducible to lawfulness. We contend that the ethical acceptability of using datasets of illicit origin cannot simply be presumed, but requires ethical justification. Therefore, the scientific community is urged to address a fundamental ethical question: whether, and under which conditions, conducting research using hacked data can be considered a morally justifiable behaviour. This contribution will discuss and critically evaluate the ethical boundaries of research involving hacked data. This emerging ethical dilemma will be examined by analogy with previous debates on the ethics of research using data of unethical origin, such as research with data from Nazi medical experiments. Furthermore, we discuss the compatibility of research involving hacked data with current research ethics guidelines such as the Belmont Report. We posit that research using hacked data should be deemed ethically problematic. However, exceptions may be acknowledged, depending on how the data are processed and the overall value of the study to society. To this end, we propose six ethical and procedural requirements for conducting research with hacked data in an ethically responsible manner.

Rozumowanie moralne – norma czy wyjątek?

Czymś fundamentalnym dla etyki jest pytanie o to, w jaki sposób człowiek zdobywa swoją wiedzę o świecie moralnym, w tym przede wszystkim wiedzę na temat tego, co należy w danej sytuacji uczynić. Od czasów starożytnych ten obszar działalności człowieka nazywa się rozumowaniem praktycznym lub moralnym. Pod koniec ubiegłego wieku w świecie anglosaskim toczył się ciekawy spór o to, czy owo rozumowanie moralne ma charakter konieczny (stanowi warunek sine qua non każdego czynu), czy też stanowi coś wyjątkowego, dokonywanego przez podmiot tylko w wyjątkowo zawiłych sytuacjach moralnych. W swoim artykule staram się rozstrzygnąć ten spór, odwołując się do powszechnie przyjmowanego odróżnienia rozumowania prowadzącego do zdobycia racji do działania (rozumowanie implikatywne, pierwszoosobowy punkt widzenia) od rozumowania prowadzącego do wyrażenia tychże racji (rozumowanie eksplikatywne, trzecioosobowy punkt widzenia).

Religious Engagement and the Migration Issue: Towards Reconciling Political and Moral Duty

The increasingly acknowledged post-secular perspective has resulted in the emergence of some new approaches theorizing this phenomenon. One such approach has been the concept of religious engagement, which calls for the redefinition of the perception of religious non-state actors towards including them as important partners in the process of identifying and realizing political goals. According to this view, due to the multidimensional role played by religious communities and non-state religious actors, they need to be recognized as pivotal in creating a new form of knowledge generated through encounter and dialogue of the political decision-makers with these subjects. Among numerous others, the challenge of migration calls for enhanced debate referring to both political and ethical issues. When such a perspective is applied, the question is raised of the duties and limits of nation-states using more or less harsh political measures towards refugees and migrants based on the concept of security, but also short-term political goals. In the face of a state’s lack of will or capacity to deal with the problem of migration, the question of religion serving not only as the service-provider but also as the “trend-setter” with regard to fundamental ethical questions needs to be considered.

Privacy Policies Caught Between the Legal and the Ethical: European Media and Third Party Trackers Before and After GDPR.

This contribution analyses the use of third-party trackers by European countries media before and after the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (hereafter: GDPR) as an inroad to discuss the legal versus ethical obligations of media with regards to audiences’ privacy and the impact on the key value of trust in media. In force since 25 May 2018, GDPR provides extended rights to users to protect personal information. The legislation deals with third-party servers (represented by URLs) that play a role in compiling a webpage presented to the user. We focus on third-party servers that track, collect and analyse user behaviour. Theoretically, the paper starts from the idea that legal discussions of and instruments to regulate third-party servers’ impact on privacy do not cover more fundamental ethical questions. Data collection may be lawful but can affect users' lives in unwanted ways and, thus, affect their trust in the service provider, i.e. media. This has two complementary theoretical perspectives: computer ethics (e.g. Moore, 1997; Brey 2005) and (public service) media values (authors, 2017) in the ‘calculated public sphere’ (Harper, 2016). Data result from an extensive and repeated collecting of third party traffic on media-related websites. From a dataset of +32 million recordings of HTTP responses from servers for files like pictures, code or text to +12700 web pages from 1250 websites visited 25 times before and after GDPR, we selected 355 media websites from 38 European countries (#114 from EBU members, #241 from private media). Data were analysed and third-party servers were identified and categorized. The result section, first, discusses various characteristics of third-party trackers before focusing on differences between public service and private media, comparing for EU/EEA versus the rest of Europe. Next, we analyse evolutions over time finding that public service websites are unchanged with regards to third party URLs, while private media show a decrease. Furthermore, GDPR has led to smaller third-parties disappearing to the advantage of the big ones, enhancing concentration of power for access to and collecting of user data. Results are discussed in light of the ethical implications of what may legally be a licensed use of audiences’ data by third-party trackers. We assumed that the more third-party servers involved in a webpage visit, 1) the higher the potential exposure of personal, identifiable information and, thus, 2) the more the ethical aspects of privacy and, ultimately 3) the soft value of trust – crucial to the working of media, especially PSM - are compromised. Finally, it discusses how media policies in the area of privacy and wider individual rights need to go beyond the legal boundaries as set out in legal frameworks such as GDPR.

Admiring Dan's Creation.

Dan Callahan never tired of probing the fundamental ethical question that Socrates asked, "How should we live?" The investigation animated him. He asked, Can we, for a moment, set aside our preoccupation with better health and a longer life and think together about what we want those things for ? Can we explore what a good life consists in? It turned out there was no better alibi for asking that fundamental question than taking up the seemingly more manageable ones that were arising in the context of emerging medicine, science, and technology. When one asked about who should be born, or how we should die, or how we should prioritize investments in the myriad institutions that help to promote human well-being, the question concerning what we mean by a good life was always and palpably present.

Values in transformational sustainability science: four perspectives for change

Despite the normative nature of sustainability, values and their role in sustainability transformations are often discussed in vague terms, and when concrete conceptualizations exist, they widely differ across fields of application. To provide guidance for navigating the complexity arising from the various conceptualizations and operationalization of values, here, we differentiate four general perspectives of how and where values are important for transformation related sustainability science. The first perspective, surfacing implicit values, revolves around critical reflection on normative assumptions in scientific practices. Sustainability transformations concern fundamental ethical questions and are unavoidably influenced by assumptions sustainability scientists hold in their interactions with society. The second perspective, negotiating values, is related to the values held by different actors in group decision processes. Developing and implementing solution options to sustainability problems requires multiple values to be accounted for in order to increase civic participation and social legitimacy. The third perspective, eliciting values, focuses on the ascription of values to particular objects or choices related to specific sustainability challenges, for example, valuations of nature. The fourth perspective, transforming through values, highlights the dynamic nature and transformational potential of values. Value change is complex but possible, and may generate systemic shifts in patterns of human behaviours. Explicit recognition of these four interconnected values perspectives can help sustainability scientists to: (1) move beyond general discussions implying that values matter; (2) gain an awareness of the positionality of one’s own values perspective when undertaking values related sustainability research; and (3) reflect on the operationalizations of values in different contexts.

The Ethics of Interspecies Performance: Empathy beyond Analogy in Fevered Sleep's Sheep Pig Goat

The Ethics of Interspecies Performance:Empathy beyond Analogy in Fevered Sleep's Sheep Pig Goat Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sheep Pig Goat. (Photo: Ben Gilbert, courtesy of Wellcome Collection and Fevered Sleep.) [End Page E-1] Introduction How can humans change the way they perceive nonhuman animals? What would it take to see animals differently and what role might empathy have in this process? If humans could perceive the world from the animals' point of view, would this change how humans perceive animals and, in turn, how they behave towards them? What role might performance play in allowing humans to occupy the animal's world as produced by its specific embodiment—its powers to affect and be affected that both differ from and overlap with human worlds (that are themselves differential)? And what happens if performance itself is seen from the animal's perspective? I begin with these questions in an attempt to mark out the fundamentally ethico-political stakes of engaging animals in performance: the urgent question of how performance might contribute to addressing anthropocentrism, speciesism, and the violence toward animal bodies such perspectives enable. In my ongoing work, I am interested in the capacity of performance to produce reciprocally transformative encounters, in which the affective worlds of both human and nonhuman bodies can be un-made and re-made, and wherein "animals are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, and new ways to inhabit the human world and to force human beings to address them differently."1 These interests have led me to the project I will focus on here: Sheep Pig Goat (2017) by the UK-based performance company Fevered Sleep, a project in which I played the role of "research advisor" when it was first staged in March 2017. I am also collaborating with the company to develop a new iteration of this work which will be hosted at the Vet School at the University of Surrey in February 2020. In this essay, I consider Sheep Pig Goat alongside the work of foundational animal studies scholar and philosopher of science Vinciane Despret, whose important book What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) was one text among many others that the company themselves read as part of the preparation for the project. In particular, I draw from Despret to explore multiple possible understandings of the notion of "interspecies empathy," noting that, for Fevered Sleep, a core aim of the project was to investigate how performance might "increase understanding of, and empathy towards nonhuman animals" (both their own as a company and those of the audiences who encounter their work).2 Here, however, the mode of empathy I am reaching toward is not one that operates through analogy or identification, but an "embodied empathy" that operates as a mode of affective thinking alongside rather than "about" the animal, and as a performative encounter between human and nonhuman animals that produces both parties anew. Both embodied empathy and attention have key roles to play in securing greater ethical consideration of nonhuman animals in relation to the production of knowledge. As Donna Haraway suggests, the etymology of seeing––from the Latin verb respecere, to look again––invites consideration of the relationship between attention and respect: to taking care in an ethical sense and the careful, iterative act of observation that does not judge on first impressions, but considers others as worthy of re-spect, or a second [End Page E-2] look.3 But this ethics of attention is not just about vision or sight, and this is why performance might play a leading role in its investigation. Rather, as Amanda Boetzkes has argued, if "the fundamental ethical question" concerns "how we might develop a complex sensibility of and for non-human animals"4 or if ethics is a matter of embodied behaviors improvised between actors within the uncertainty of specific contexts, then performance practices surely have much to contribute to the development of our understanding of what constitutes an interspecies ethics. Interspecies performance practice might be understood as a primary domain for the creation and investigation of what Traci Warkentin also describes as "an...

“Can the living ever speak for the dead”: The White Hotel and Fictionalizing the Holocaust

This article explores the possibility of representing collective violence such as the Holocaust within the context of D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel (1981). It argues that The White Hotel lays bare the complicated relationship both between history and fiction and the burden of traumatic representation. By giving us a fictionalized story of a Holocaust victim, Thomas, offers the immediacy of the personal experiences one sees in eyewitness accounts; but, at the same time, by resisting a realist mode of narrative, the novel offers the possibility of remaining faithful to the resistance of collective trauma to representation. Ultimately, The White Hotel urges the reader to ask some fundamental ethical, narratological, and political questions about the representation of collective trauma. By representing the Holocaust in fiction, D.M. Thomas challenges the wildly-held belief both in Holocaust survivors and the intellectuals studying the Holocaust that Holocaust is considered beyond representability.

EYES WIDE OPEN

In this contribution, I plumb the depths of Georges Didi-Huberman’s abiding notion of the “eye of history” and, in particular, I explore to which responsible acts this notion might hold us. Does a reader of texts or viewer of an image have a right to claim a certain status as witness if the experience of being present at the crime is “merely” by the proxy of a text or an image? This is a fundamental ethical question and, consequently, a profoundly political one that Didi-Huberman’s abiding exploration of the “eye of history” asks. I attempt to answer it by reading a variety of texts by the prolific author. In particular, however, I test what Didi-Huberman speculates in Images in Spite of All about what went through the mind of Alex, the Sonderkommando who took four furtive shots from an Auschwitz gas chamber, against what I’ve learned recently after having discovered the Hiroshima photographs made on 6 August 1945 by hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) Yoshito Matsushige.

Realizing responsibility. Institutional routines, critical intervention, and the “big” questions in the controversy over non-invasive prenatal testing in Germany

NIPT has become a matter of controversy in Germany over the past years, there is now a widespread concern that it raises fundamental social and ethical questions. Starting from the assumption that responsible governance requires governance actors to address these questions, the article examines how the main governance actors realized their responsibility in the sense of conceiving and performing it. Building on the pragmatic sociology of critique, we study how actors are doing responsibility within a given institutional and political context. We show that critical interventions disrupted institutional routines and caused governance actors to struggle with conflicting commitments of complying with institutional rules and exercising responsibility by taking social and ethical considerations into account. Whereas these conflicting commitments posed a predicament for political decision-makers, who solved it through shifting responsibility for social and ethical issues elsewhere, there was no such predicament for the producers; for them, routine and responsibility converged.

Bringing the battlefield into the classroom: using video games to teach and assess international humanitarian law

ABSTRACTThe graphic and widespread atrocities committed during conflicts around the world and broadcast across 24/7 news and social media have made war never feel so close and the powerlessness of law seem so real. This raises difficulties in engaging students in real-life decision-making quandaries where military necessity meets legalism, as well as fundamental ethical questions about the use of realistic, yet explicit, imagery in the classroom. The School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast has developed a series of innovative computer scenarios based on the Arma 3 open world tactical war simulator. A variety of formative scenarios (addressing issues such as cluster munitions and landmines) were developed to familiarise the students with the factual scenario and the computer technology. Subsequently, students engaged in a summative assessment to test their legal understanding in the face of increasingly challenging conflict situations, in particular grey zones where legal argument can justify seemingly morally wrongful acts during war. This paper examines both the learning objectives of this project, and the project development cycle – from the initial proposal to its implementation in class, as well as positing the benefits and drawbacks in integrating technology and games into the legal teaching environment, reflecting on the emerging and traditional pedagogy in this area.

Vaccine delivery to disease control: a paradigm shift in health policy

India's Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP) has resulted in the creation of infrastructure, human resources and systems for the procurement and delivery of vaccines. Recently, new vaccines have been added and there are plans for the introduction of more. However, the outcomes in terms of reduction of the diseases for which the vaccines are being administered remain ambiguous. This is evident from the persistent health issues that children continue to experience, despite immunisation. This situation raises a fundamental ethical question for public health: vaccinations are one of the tools of disease control, but are they properly aligned to the control of disease so as to produce the expected public health utility or benefit?

Perspective has a strong effect on the calculation of historical contributions to global warming

The politically contentious issue of calculating countries’ contributions to climate change is strongly dependent on methodological choices. Different principles can be applied for distributing efforts for reducing human-induced global warming. According to the ‘Brazilian Proposal’, industrialized countries would reduce emissions proportional to their historical contributions to warming. This proposal was based on the assumption that the political process would lead to a global top-down agreement. The Paris Agreement changed the role of historical responsibilities. Whereas the agreement refers to equity principles, differentiation of mitigation efforts is delegated to each country, as countries will submit new national contributions every five years without any international negotiation. It is likely that considerations of historical contributions and distributive fairness will continue to play a key role, but increasingly so in a national setting. Contributions to warming can be used as a background for negotiations to inform and justify positions, and may also be useful for countries’ own assessment of what constitutes reasonable and fair contributions to limiting warming. Despite the fact that the decision from COP21 explicitly rules out compensation in the context of loss and damage, it is likely that considerations of historical responsibility will also play a role in future discussions. However, methodological choices have substantial impacts on calculated contributions to warming, including rank-ordering of contributions, and thus support the view that there is no single correct answer to the question of how much each country has contributed. There are fundamental value-related and ethical questions that cannot be answered through a single set of calculated contributions. Thus, analyses of historical contributions should not present just one set of results, but rather present a spectrum of results showing how the calculated contributions vary with a broad set of choices. Our results clearly expose some of the core issues related to climate responsibility.

Trends and Challenges in Neuroengineering: Toward "Intelligent" Neuroprostheses through Brain-"Brain Inspired Systems" Communication.

Future technologies aiming at restoring and enhancing organs function will intimately rely on near-physiological and energy-efficient communication between living and artificial biomimetic systems. Interfacing brain-inspired devices with the real brain is at the forefront of such emerging field, with the term “neurobiohybrids” indicating all those systems where such interaction is established. We argue that achieving a “high-level” communication and functional synergy between natural and artificial neuronal networks in vivo, will allow the development of a heterogeneous world of neurobiohybrids, which will include “living robots” but will also embrace “intelligent” neuroprostheses for augmentation of brain function. The societal and economical impact of intelligent neuroprostheses is likely to be potentially strong, as they will offer novel therapeutic perspectives for a number of diseases, and going beyond classical pharmaceutical schemes. However, they will unavoidably raise fundamental ethical questions on the intermingling between man and machine and more specifically, on how deeply it should be allowed that brain processing is affected by implanted “intelligent” artificial systems. Following this perspective, we provide the reader with insights on ongoing developments and trends in the field of neurobiohybrids. We address the topic also from a “community building” perspective, showing through a quantitative bibliographic analysis, how scientists working on the engineering of brain-inspired devices and brain-machine interfaces are increasing their interactions. We foresee that such trend preludes to a formidable technological and scientific revolution in brain-machine communication and to the opening of new avenues for restoring or even augmenting brain function for therapeutic purposes.

The ethics of resettlement: Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region

One of the key problems at the heart of refugee protection today is that there are large numbers of refugees attempting to seek asylum and insufficient political will in many asylum-host states to receive refugees in their territories. A proportion of these attempt to come to Australia to seek refuge – either by requesting a resettlement place through the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or by arriving directly in Australian territory (by boat or plane). Asylum-seekers who arrive by boat are disadvantaged and penalised under Australian law in that they are excluded from Australian territory and processed offshore in third countries. Successive Australian governments justify these measures by emphasising that resettlement is the ‘proper’ mode for claiming asylum which ensures protection is given to those refugees who are most in need. This raises fundamental ethical questions: are those chosen by resettlement countries such as Australia necessarily the refugees who are most in need? Is resettlement as a concept ethical? And should resettlement be utilised to prevent and penalise spontaneous arrivals attempting to seek asylum in a country?

Hoping Someday Never Comes: Deferring Ethical Thinking About Noninvasive Prenatal Testing

Background: Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is a new prenatal screening technology that became commercially available in the United States in 2011. NIPT's increased accuracy and low false positive rate compared to previous screening methods enable many women to avoid invasive diagnostic testing and receive much desired reassurance. NIPT has received much attention for both its benefits and drawbacks. Methods: Observation of genetic counseling sessions and qualitative interviews with women offered NIPT at a large academic medical center were conducted. Two ethnographic cases studies derived from the overall data set are used to illustrate the study findings. Results: Many fundamental ethical questions about prenatal screening, such as abortion or the value of disabled children, often do not emerge during clinical sessions, enabling most women to defer thinking about these issues until the future, when and if the need should arise. It may only be in the rare case when a woman receives a positive test result that she may be forced to confront ethical issues that she had up until then been able to avoid. Conclusions: Women want, and are grateful to have, access to NIPT, which offers much desired reassurance. This desire for reassurance may come at the expense of having contemplated the potential negative outcomes and limitations of testing. In the rare circumstance where women do not receive reassuring results, they may be unprepared and shocked by what NIPT can and cannot reveal. The routinization of NIPT as the latest and best available prenatal screening test does not necessarily create new ethical issues, but this study highlights ethical continuities following its arrival. However, the continued expansion of NIPT to include more conditions and women will increase the number of women who receive positive results, including false positives, and who may be shocked and unprepared as a result.

The phenomenon happiness: Prolegomena to a phenomenological description.

This article argues that phenomenology should investigate the phenomenon human happiness because this distinctive style of philosophizing has the potential to make a special contribution to the determination of the highest human good. This distinctive contribution is a function of the phenomenological method, which generally involves the performance of the phenomenological epoche and the execution of the transcendental reduction with respect to the acts of consciousness and their correlatively constituted objects. By means of an axiological application of the phenomenological method specifically to this fundamental ethical and practical question, it becomes possible to distinguish in a rigorous manner between what people think or feel happiness is and what it genuinely is. For example, the phenomenological approach to happiness enables people to neutralize their natural attitude toward the perceived highest good, in which it is given naively and straightforwardly, and to adopt the transcendental attitude ...