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Recent scholarship on the political thought of Niccolo Machiavelli has demonstrated the extent to which the latter's republicanism is of a populist type, and a potentially important resource for contemporary democratic theory. Although work has been produced on the constitutional form of the Machiavellian republic, less effort has been made to articulate the theoretical assumptions upon which the advocacy of such a republic is ethically grounded. Here, I attempt to locate the democratic ethical imperative in the affirmation of a fundamental human difference. Influenced by the Epicurean tradition, Machiavelli's natural philosophy considers material entities as absolute singularities lacking internal teleological direction, their movement the productive result of contingent encounters. One cannot assume a natural or pre-social identity of desire between persons. Democracy is the ethically preferred regime because it is the one that is capable of facilitating the expression of this human uniqueness. Keywords: democracy, difference, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, republicanism, The so-called 'democratic turn' in Machiavelli studies has fundamentally shifted the terms of the debate over Machiavelli's political commitments and the potential relevance of these commitments to thinking about contemporary [...]

This paper intends to contribute to the emerging literature on the ethical problems posed by quantum computing and quantum technologies in general. The key ethical questions are as follows: Does quantum computing pose new ethical problems, or are those raised by quantum computing just a different version of the same ethical problems raised by other technologies, such as nanotechnologies, nuclear plants, or cloud computing? In other words, what is new in quantum computing from an ethical point of view? The paper aims to answer these two questions by (a) developing an analysis of the existing literature on the ethical and social aspects of quantum computing and (b) identifying and analyzing the main ethical problems posed by quantum computing. The conclusion is that quantum computing poses completely new ethical issues that require new conceptual tools and methods., Author(s): Luca M. Possati [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.5292.c, 0000 0001 2097 4740, Delft University of Technology, , Delft, The Netherlands Introduction Context and Motivation This paper intends to contribute [...]

Although there is a history in urban thought wherein scholars view cities as technologies, the encompassing character of such views inherently limits them. In turn, their usefulness does not efficiently support the kind of thinking that is required to deliver worthwhile outcomes that can promote social justice and human flourishing. However, narrowing the focus through examining municipalities as technologies offers possibilities that can help us achieve such goals. To maximize the utility of this endeavor, employing the structural-ethics approach provides a way to assess urban technologies to achieve success. In this paper, the author explores the ideas above, revealing how they advance our thinking when it comes to remaking, planning, and building existing and future cities. The article concludes by linking these claims to other lessons in urban studies and geography., Author(s): Shane Epting [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.260128.f, 0000 0000 9364 6281, Department of Arts, Languages, and Philosophy, Missouri University of Science and Technology, , 220 Castlemann Hall, 65409, Rolla, [...]

Online exam supervision technologies have recently generated significant controversy and concern. Their use is now booming due to growing demand for online courses and for off-campus assessment options amid COVID-19 lockdowns. Online proctoring technologies purport to effectively oversee students sitting online exams by using artificial intelligence (AI) systems supplemented by human invigilators. Such technologies have alarmed some students who see them as a 'Big Brother-like' threat to liberty and privacy, and as potentially unfair and discriminatory. However, some universities and educators defend their judicious use. Critical ethical appraisal of online proctoring technologies is overdue. This essay provides one of the first sustained moral philosophical analyses of these technologies, focusing on ethical notions of academic integrity, fairness, non-maleficence, transparency, privacy, autonomy, liberty, and trust. Most of these concepts are prominent in the new field of AI ethics, and all are relevant to education. The essay discusses these ethical issues. It also offers suggestions for educational institutions and educators interested in the technologies about the kinds of inquiries they need to make and the governance and review processes they might need to adopt to justify and remain accountable for using online proctoring technologies. The rapid and contentious rise of proctoring software provides a fruitful ethical case study of how AI is infiltrating all areas of life. The social impacts and moral consequences of this digital technology warrant ongoing scrutiny and study., Author(s): Simon Coghlan [sup.1] [sup.2], Tim Miller [sup.1] [sup.2], Jeannie Paterson [sup.2] [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.1008.9, 0000 0001 2179 088X, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of [...]

Recent advances in the capability of digital information technologies-particularly due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI)-have invigorated the debate on the ethical issues surrounding their use. However, this debate has often been dominated by 'Western' ethical perspectives, values and interests, to the exclusion of broader ethical and socio-cultural perspectives. This imbalance carries the risk that digital technologies produce ethical harms and lack social acceptance, when the ethical norms and values designed into these technologies collide with those of the communities in which they are delivered and deployed. This special issue takes a step towards broadening the approach of digital ethics, by bringing together a range of cultural, social and structural perspectives on the ethical issues relating to digital information technology. Importantly, it refreshes and reignites the field of Intercultural Digital Ethics for the age of AI and ubiquitous computing., Author(s): Nikita Aggarwal [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.4991.5, 0000 0004 1936 8948, Faculty of Law and Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, , Oxford, UK Recent advances in the capability [...]

This paper motivates the idea that social robots should be credited as moral patients, building on an argumentative approach that combines virtue ethics and social recognition theory. Our proposal answers the call for a nuanced ethical evaluation of human-robot interaction that does justice to both the robustness of the social responses solicited in humans by robots and the fact that robots are designed to be used as instruments. On the one hand, we acknowledge that the instrumental nature of robots and their unsophisticated social capabilities prevent any attribution of rights to robots, which are devoid of intrinsic moral dignity and personal status. On the other hand, we argue that another form of moral consideration-not based on rights attribution-can and must be granted to robots. The reason is that relationships with robots offer to the human agents important opportunities to cultivate both vices and virtues, like social interaction with other human beings. Our argument appeals to social recognition to explain why social robots, unlike other technological artifacts, are capable of establishing with their human users quasi-social relationships as pseudo-persons. This recognition dynamic justifies seeing robots as worthy of moral consideration from a virtue ethical standpoint as it predicts the pre-reflective formation of persistent affective dispositions and behavioral habits that are capable of corrupting the human user's character. We conclude by drawing attention to a potential paradox drawn forth by our analysis and by examining the main conceptual conundrums that our approach has to face., Author(s): Massimiliano L. Cappuccio [sup.1] [sup.2], Anco Peeters [sup.3], William McDonald [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.1005.4, 0000 0004 4902 0432, School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South [...]

The principle of non-maleficence, primum non nocere, has deep roots in the history of moral philosophy, being endorsed by John Stuart Mill, W. D. Ross, H. L. A. Hart, Karl Popper and Bernard Gert. And yet, this principle is virtually absent from current debates on social justice. This article suggests that non-maleficence is more than a moral principle; it is also a principle of social justice. Part I looks at the origins of non-maleficence as a principle of ethics, and medical ethics in particular. Part II introduces the idea of non-maleficence as a principle of social justice. Parts III and IV define the principle of justice as non-maleficence in terms of its scope and coherence, while Part V argues that the motivation of not doing harm makes this principle an alternative to two well-established paradigms in the literature on social justice: justice as mutual advantage (David Gauthier) and justice as impartiality (Brian Barry). Keywords: Brian Barry, David Gauthier, impartiality, non-maleficence, social injustice, social justice, In his highly influential book Theories of Justice, Brian Barry (1989) argues that in John Rawls's account of justice as fairness there is not just one but two distinct and [...]

In recent times, scholars have utilized their expertise in developing modules for social engineering, producing goods and services befitting the needs of a hyper-technologically savvy generation, and creating the atmosphere for civic participation in shaping the course of their everyday lives. This essay explores the seeming irony that at a time of such advancement in science and technology, and in liberal democracy-when there seems to be a boundless horizon to the scope of human ingenuity-the prospect of censorship by left-liberalism appears to threaten the very foundation of liberal democracies. The essay identifies the recent upsurge in left-liberal thinking, especially in college managements, and the ethical scars the increasing suppression of views deemed controversial creates in the lives of millions of people. This ideological quest for homogenization of thoughts and actions can only succeed at a great cost to liberty, responsibility, and human flourishing., TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM OF INQUIRY Reason-the ability to analyze, deduce, create, and formulate ideas--separates mankind from brutes, and is responsible for the continual evolution of humanity. It is reason that [...]

Universities worldwide strive to nurture socially responsible graduates to create a better society. Since ethical behavior of role models can stimulate followers' professional standards and ethical values, it is crucial to focus on an appropriate path through which ethical values can be conveyed and learned by individuals. The current study seeks to examine if this objective can be facilitated through the positive role played by academic supervisors at higher education level. Owing to the very close leader-follower relationship, this study empirically investigated if ethical supervisors could stimulate prosocial behavior among students under their supervision. Data was collected from 240 postgraduate university students and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings of this study revealed that students demonstrated greater anonymous, emotional, and compliant prosocial behavior when they perceived stronger ethical supervision. Study implications and limitations have been discussed., Author(s): Mehran Nejati [sup.1] , Azadeh Shafaei [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University, 0000 0004 0389 4302, grid.1038.a, , 270 Joondalup Drive, 6027, Joondalup, [...]

Q: You started out working in developmental biology. How did you become interested in the field of ethics and governance of biomedicine? A: As a student, I always had a [...]

Abstract Gannett Company was one of the largest media operations in the United States but struggled in recent years with loss of revenue and circulation. Gannett Blog reported news related to the company from 2007 to 2014. The blog was independent and covered corporate news, job loss and issues of ethics. This used Gannett Blog to study how individuals reacted to their changing workplace. As information was gathered and presented from multiple users, a crowdsourcing dynamic gave context to Gannett’s landscape. Theories of communities of practice and social construction underpin this study. This study suggests that the rhetoric on Gannett Blog evolved into more than a distribution channel for information. It became a social space where original information evolved and helped negotiate social meaning for the users. Overall, this study found that communities of professionals could be influential in growing a journalistic product as per the tenets of the communities of influence model. This study also identified themes consistent with news workers using Gannett Blog for community building, expanding knowledge and maintaining professionalism during industry change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Press councils are among the traditional self-regulatory instruments present in most European countries and, as a part of a wider network of accountability systems, need to be analysed and evaluated. This article presents part of the results of a cross-national European project studying journalism, ethics and regulating systems, and focuses on the opinion of journalists from twelve European and two Arab Mediterranean countries regarding the perceived impact of press councils as instruments of self-regulation, compared with other traditional mechanisms. The study was conducted with a quantitative approach: an online questionnaire was administered to 1762 journalists, and data were analysed by using the SPSS software (significance set at <0.05). The sample was selected based on several criteria to achieve representative national sub-samples. The journalists’ answers about the perceived impact of different regulatory and self-regulatory instruments are analysed. Press councils are seen as having a mid-range perceived impact when compared with the other instruments. Journalists from the countries where press councils have been in place for a long time perceive the impact of these instruments to be higher, with the exception of the United Kingdom, a country that was a pioneer in the consolidation of press councils. Middle-aged, male and lower-income journalists attribute the lowest impact to press councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of immersive witness underpins much of the exploration of virtual reality (VR) by journalists and humanitarian organisations. Immersive witness links the experience of VR with a moral attitude of responsibility for distant others. In accounts of media witness, the ability of the media to sustain an experience of presence has played an important, albeit often implicit, role linking the spectator spatially and temporally to distant suffering. However, the concept of media witness has to date assumed that the media represent, that news stories and documentaries present to their audiences images and sounds that communicate something of an event. VR, in contrast, seeks to simulate, providing the audience with something of an experience that is linked in various ways to the experiences of others. It is this simulative function that is seen as fundamental to VR’s moral address. This paper explores the moral potential of VR suggesting that while there is much to recommend VR as a platform for humanitarian communication there is an inherent moral risk attached: the risk of improper distance. The United Nation’s VR work serves as a case study for exploring VR’s moral potential and the risk of improper distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates four different ways of relating the normative side of sociology to its empirical side. Two such ways are in existence at present. The first is “dualism,” the idea that sociology provides purely scientific results to political or moral projects that are conducted on some independent normative basis. This position is commonly invoked in the idea of “value-free sociology.” The second is “monism,” the ideas that value-freedom is impossible and that sociology is inevitably value-driven, indeed perhaps that it should be openly so driven. This position is commonly invoked in the idea of “the unity of theory and practice.” These existing approaches are complemented by two that do not yet exist in practice. Both are explicitly normative in part. The first of these is a “canonical” approach, like that of the subdiscipline of political theory, in which normative inquiry within sociology would be formally recognized within the discipline and would be organized around a classical canon of normative works. The second would be a “legalist” approach, which would grow out of new genres of writing that aimed at the systematic normative evaluation of bodies of work or literatures, thus working inductively, in contrast to the canonical approach’s deductivism. The article evaluates these four positions according to four criteria: feasibility, coherence, trajectory, and open-mindedness. It concludes that the current positions (dualism and monism) are both embarrassingly weak: typically unconscious and sometimes naïve, in many cases driven by the unacknowledged - and hence uncritical - assumption that one's particular politics are in fact universally desirable. The discipline should try to create an explicit but rigorously argued normative subdiscipline, probably combining both the canonical and legalist positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great need for systematic evaluation of ethics training programs exists. Those tasked with developing an ethics training program may be quick to dismiss the value of training evaluation in continuous process improvement. In the present effort, we use a case study approach to delineate how to leverage formative and summative evaluation measures to create a high-quality ethics education program. With regard to formative evaluation, information bearing on trainee reactions, qualitative data from the comments of trainees, in addition to empirical findings, can ensure that the training program operates smoothly. Regarding summative evaluation, measures examining trainee cognition, behavior, and organization-level results provide information about how much trainees have changed as a result of taking the ethics training. The implications of effective training program evaluation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kant's 'Formula of Humanity' is sometimes read as though it allows us to use humanity as a means to our ends, as long as we do not use it merely as means. The present contribution offers three arguments against this reading. First, this reading is not supported textually by the way that Kant uses the verb 'to use' (brauchen) in ethical contexts. Second, allowing for actions that use humanity, but at the same time respect its value as an end-in-itself is superfluous within Kant's corpus. Third, relying on the force of 'merely' to modify 'using as means' is detrimental in the discussions in the public sphere and in applied ethics, because (lacking rigid and substantive criteria for how to interpret 'merely') it becomes possible to justify morally impermissible actions and policies on the grounds that they at the same time respect humanity as an end-in-itself. As a case study, we consider today's debates on the moral permissibility of 'saviour siblings' and show that in it Kant's 'Formula of Humanity' is used in ways that are, at best, conceptually vague and, at worst, distinctly non-Kantian. The paper concludes with an overview of Kant's use of brauchen in the context of 'relations of community', in which (according to Kant) persons acquire rights of possession to one another 'akin their rights to external objects' or things; even in these types of relations we are not treating humanity as means (but also, at the same time, as an end). The article concludes that Kant's 'Formula of Humanity' sets up an exclusive disjunction between actions that treat humanity merely as means on the one hand, and actions that are not guilty of this transgression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tragedy's overwhelming presence, presaged by the conspicuous absence of Aristotle's treatise on comedy, has dominated the debate between philosophy and poetry ever since Plato, making tragedy the dominant paradigm for philosophical and performance practices. Over the last century, the gradual blurring of genre distinctions has led to George Steiner's declaration of the 'death of tragedy' and to J. L. Styan's recognition of the emergence of 'dark comedy', giving rise to a growing body of research on comedy. Nevertheless, despite the unprecedented attention, the prejudices against comedy run wide and deep, from philosophical neglect to high-brow conceptions of art all the way to underlying economies of power and social regulation. In consequence, comedy has been side-stepped as an inferior genre or mode, or rehabilitated as a truer or newer form of the tragic. The present study attempts to frame this prejudice as the result of theories of aesthetics and ethics which systematically exclude the comic vision, claiming that it is possible to trace a distinct corollary between the development of theories of genre and the development of philosophical aesthetic categories. The emphasis on the beautiful and the sublime, and its corresponding brand of ethics, can be linked to the flourishing of theories of tragedy, while the systematized rejection of the ugly, the ridiculous, and the ethically ambiguous can be shown to correspond to the floundering of theories of comedy, which remained largely neglected for over two thousand years. Much more than mere literary genres, the terms comedy and tragedy, when applied to the history of Western civilization, reveal the extent of our penchant for the speculative to the detriment of the actual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major obstacle for the design of rigorous, reproducible studies in moral psychology is the lack of suitable stimulus sets. Here, we present the Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID), the largest standardized moral stimulus set assembled to date, containing 2,941 freely available photographic images, representing a wide range of morally (and affectively) positive, negative and neutral content. The SMID was validated with over 820,525 individual judgments from 2,716 participants, with normative ratings currently available for all images on affective valence and arousal, moral wrongness, and relevance to each of the five moral values posited by Moral Foundations Theory. We present a thorough analysis of the SMID regarding (1) inter-rater consensus, (2) rating precision, and (3) breadth and variability of moral content. Additionally, we provide recommendations for use aimed at efficient study design and reproducibility, and outline planned extensions to the database. We anticipate that the SMID will serve as a useful resource for psychological, neuroscientific and computational (e.g., natural language processing or computer vision) investigations of social, moral and affective processes. The SMID images, along with associated normative data and additional resources are available at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the sensational 1891 murder trial of Enrique Rode, a middle-class English professor who killed his wife in Mexico City. Using the trial and its ample coverage in the press as a case study, it explores the changing attitudes towards, and interconnections between, adultery, honor, masculinity, and sexuality, as well as the legal and medical discourses that arose out of the investigation and adjudication of the murder. It shows how gender and sexuality shaped (and reshaped) the concept of honor, a concept that embedded itself in the emerging fields of psychology and criminology and in their cutting-edge legal and scientific claims. It focuses on how medical and legal experts, as well as the press, discussed the transgression of normative boundaries of sexuality and used it to excuse or condemn Rode's killing of his new wife, Amelia Zornosa. The Rode case reveals that late-nineteenth-century Mexico City was a society characterized by changing gender norms and views toward sexuality. While some sectors of society idealized female sexual purity, family harmony, and aggressive, if not violent, patriarchy to control women's sexuality, others did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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