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Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

In this panel, scholars discuss involving data, computational analysis, and information technology that hasthe potential to present ethical quandaries in the course of decision making related to digital government. More specifically, the presentations focus on algorithm-based decision making, personally identifiable information, and the manipulation of publicopinion in social media channels. Discussion following the presentations will focus on how ethical guidelines should be formulated or what their specific content should be., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology, Policy Analysis

For the period surrounding the 2018 Dutch municipal elections, a team of researchers from the Delft University of Technology investigated the effect of the digital environment on parliamentary democracy. An interdisciplinary group of researchers combined expertise on digital ethics, political theory, big data analytics, the economics of privacy and security, epistemology, media studies and computer science. This report presents the main findings, which are grouped around two main themes: political micro-targeting and ICT media. Societal themes that came to prominence over the research period, such as the debate over ‘fake news’ and the leaks of personal information that were used for political purposes by Facebook, as well as the implementation of new EU privacy regulation helped to put the research in a larger political context. The main findings provide a qualified picture. The influence of the digital revolution on democratic politics is already revolutionary, and the weaknesses of online platforms provide ample opportunities for derailing liberal democracy. Digital platforms are too closed-off, not mindful enough of individual digital rights, and biased in their (re)presentation of political pluralism. But the Netherlands has proven to be one of the few democracies that is relatively resilient, with an open multi-party system receptive to the political fragmentation that ICT developments encourage, and relatively high trust between citizens, in shared media organizations, and between political parties. In order not to be complacent in the face of fundamental challenges, the report provides several urgent recommendations. Next to several ‘reactive’ recommendations, which seek to remedy the weaknesses and dangers the digital environment poses to democracy, it also outlines an example of how the digital environment might be proactively redesigned in order to positively enhance the quality of the Dutch parliamentary system., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology, Values Technology and Innovation, Policy Analysis, Organisation and Governance

In this panel, scholars discuss involving data, computational analysis, and information technology that hasthe potential to present ethical quandaries in the course of decision making related to digital government. More specifically, the presentations focus on algorithm-based decision making, personally identifiable information, and the manipulation of publicopinion in social media channels. Discussion following the presentations will focus on how ethical guidelines should be formulated or what their specific content should be., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology, Policy Analysis

For the period surrounding the 2018 Dutch municipal elections, a team of researchers from the Delft University of Technology investigated the effect of the digital environment on parliamentary democracy. An interdisciplinary group of researchers combined expertise on digital ethics, political theory, big data analytics, the economics of privacy and security, epistemology, media studies and computer science. This report presents the main findings, which are grouped around two main themes: political micro-targeting and ICT media. Societal themes that came to prominence over the research period, such as the debate over ‘fake news’ and the leaks of personal information that were used for political purposes by Facebook, as well as the implementation of new EU privacy regulation helped to put the research in a larger political context. The main findings provide a qualified picture. The influence of the digital revolution on democratic politics is already revolutionary, and the weaknesses of online platforms provide ample opportunities for derailing liberal democracy. Digital platforms are too closed-off, not mindful enough of individual digital rights, and biased in their (re)presentation of political pluralism. But the Netherlands has proven to be one of the few democracies that is relatively resilient, with an open multi-party system receptive to the political fragmentation that ICT developments encourage, and relatively high trust between citizens, in shared media organizations, and between political parties. In order not to be complacent in the face of fundamental challenges, the report provides several urgent recommendations. Next to several ‘reactive’ recommendations, which seek to remedy the weaknesses and dangers the digital environment poses to democracy, it also outlines an example of how the digital environment might be proactively redesigned in order to positively enhance the quality of the Dutch parliamentary system., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology, Values Technology and Innovation, Policy Analysis, Organisation & Governance

Ethics is a field in which the gap between words and actions looms large. Game theory and the empirical methods it inspires look at behavior instead of the lip service people sometimes pay to norms. We believe that this special issue comprises several illustrations of the fruitful application of this approach to ethics., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model’s cross-cultural generalizability., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Gossip is often serious business, not idle chitchat. Gossip allows those oppressed to privately name their oppressors as a warning to others. Of course, gossip can be in error. The speaker may be lying or merely have lacked sufficient evidence. Bias can also make those who hear the gossip more or less likely to believe the gossip. By examining the social functions of gossip and considering the differences in power dynamics in which gossip can occur, we contend that gossip may be not only permissible but virtuous, both as the only reasonable recourse available and as a means of resistance against oppression., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Gossip is often serious business, not idle chitchat. Gossip allows those oppressed to privately name their oppressors as a warning to others. Of course, gossip can be in error. The speaker may be lying or merely have lacked sufficient evidence. Bias can also make those who hear the gossip more or less likely to believe the gossip. By examining the social functions of gossip and considering the differences in power dynamics in which gossip can occur, we contend that gossip may be not only permissible but virtuous, both as the only reasonable recourse available and as a means of resistance against oppression., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model’s cross-cultural generalizability., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Anthony K. Jensen has successfully undertaken an essential project for the fields of Nietzsche studies and philosophy of history. In his interpretation of Nietzsche's second "Untimely Meditation," On the Uses and Disadvantages for Life[1] (henceforth HL), he demonstrates an attention to detail and meticulousness sometimes bordering on obsessiveness. This textual work is based on Jensen's comprehensive familiarity with the philosophical, philological, and historiographic culture in which Nietzsche was trained and to which he was in part responding. Unlike many Anglophone philosophers interested in Nietzsche, Jensen is fully at home with German language and idiom. He combines this linguistic facility with philological expertise and encyclopedic archival research to bring sober clarity to a field often plagued by flights of interpretive speculation. Jensen is knowledgeable of not only the Anglophone but also the Germanophone secondary literatures, and he uses this expertise like a wide-angle lens to give his readers a synoptic perspective on the last thirteen decades of reactions to and interpretations of HL. I hasten to add, though, that his monograph is not simply a summary of the production, content, and reception of one of Nietzsche's early works; it is also a judicious philosophical evaluation of Nietzsche's views and arguments. It may not be the last word on HL, but the prospect of adding anything new and valuable is now daunting., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

This book has a noble aim: to free virtue ethics from the grip of the neo-Aristotelianism that limits its scope in contemporary Anglophone philosophy. Just as there are deontological views that are not Kant’s or even Kantian, just as there are consequentialist views that are not Bentham’s or even utilitarian, so, Swanton contends, there are viable virtue ethical views that are not Aristotle’s or even Aristotelian. Indeed, the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy suggests that the majority of normative ethics has focused primarily on understanding and explaining the nature and development of virtue and vice. There are other alternatives to Aristotle (Mengzi springs to mind), but it’s not unreasonable to start with Hume and Nietzsche, as has already been demonstrated for by Erin Frykholm (“A Humean Particularist Virtue Ethic,” Philosophical Studies, 172(8) [2015]: 2171-91) and myself (Mark Alfano, “The Most Agreeable of All Vices,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21(4) [2013]: 767-90)., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Anthony K. Jensen has successfully undertaken an essential project for the fields of Nietzsche studies and philosophy of history. In his interpretation of Nietzsche's second "Untimely Meditation," On the Uses and Disadvantages for Life[1] (henceforth HL), he demonstrates an attention to detail and meticulousness sometimes bordering on obsessiveness. This textual work is based on Jensen's comprehensive familiarity with the philosophical, philological, and historiographic culture in which Nietzsche was trained and to which he was in part responding. Unlike many Anglophone philosophers interested in Nietzsche, Jensen is fully at home with German language and idiom. He combines this linguistic facility with philological expertise and encyclopedic archival research to bring sober clarity to a field often plagued by flights of interpretive speculation. Jensen is knowledgeable of not only the Anglophone but also the Germanophone secondary literatures, and he uses this expertise like a wide-angle lens to give his readers a synoptic perspective on the last thirteen decades of reactions to and interpretations of HL. I hasten to add, though, that his monograph is not simply a summary of the production, content, and reception of one of Nietzsche's early works; it is also a judicious philosophical evaluation of Nietzsche's views and arguments. It may not be the last word on HL, but the prospect of adding anything new and valuable is now daunting., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

This book has a noble aim: to free virtue ethics from the grip of the neo-Aristotelianism that limits its scope in contemporary Anglophone philosophy. Just as there are deontological views that are not Kant’s or even Kantian, just as there are consequentialist views that are not Bentham’s or even utilitarian, so, Swanton contends, there are viable virtue ethical views that are not Aristotle’s or even Aristotelian. Indeed, the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy suggests that the majority of normative ethics has focused primarily on understanding and explaining the nature and development of virtue and vice. There are other alternatives to Aristotle (Mengzi springs to mind), but it’s not unreasonable to start with Hume and Nietzsche, as has already been demonstrated for by Erin Frykholm (“A Humean Particularist Virtue Ethic,” Philosophical Studies, 172(8) [2015]: 2171-91) and myself (Mark Alfano, “The Most Agreeable of All Vices,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21(4) [2013]: 767-90)., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Virtues are acquirable, so if intellectual humility is a virtue, it’s acquirable. But there is something deeply problematic—perhaps even paradoxical—about aiming to be intellectually humble. Drawing on Edward Slingerland’s analysis of the paradoxical virtue of wu-wei in Trying Not To Try, we argue for an anti-individualistic conception of the trait, concluding that one’s intellectual humility depends upon the intellectual humility of others. Slingerland defines wu-wei as the “dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective”. Someone who embodies wu-wei inspires implicit trust, so it is beneficial to appear wu-wei. This has led to an arms race between faking wu-wei on the one hand and detecting fakery on the other. Likewise, there are many benefits to being intellectually humble. But someone who makes conscious, strategic efforts to appear intellectually humble is ipso facto not intellectually humble. Following Slingerland’s lead, we argue that there are several strategies one might pursue to acquire genuine intellectual humility, and all of these involve commitment to shared social or epistemic values, combined with receptivity to feedback from others, who must in turn have and manifest relevant intellectual virtues. In other words, other people and shared values are partial bearers of a given individual’s intellectual humility. If this is on the right track, then acquiring intellectual humility demands epistemic anti-individualism., Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology

Ethics & Philosophy of Technology