Distributed Morality in an Information Society

Floridi, Luciano

doi:10.1007/s11948-012-9413-4

Cited by 122 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The significance of this facet of violence on the Double-Intent Account is thrown into sharper relief if we contrast it with the way good or evil outcomes might be generated through what Luciano Floridi calls 'distributed agency' (DA) (Floridi 2013). DA occurs when a morally significant outcome (whether positive or negative in value) occurs as a result of individual actions in their combined results but without any of the individual actors committing acts that are individually significant.…”

Section: The Moral Connotations Of 'Violence'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

Finlay

2018

Philos. Technol.

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Recent debate on the relationship between cyber threats, on the one hand, and both strategy and ethics on the other focus on the extent to which 'cyber war' is possible, both as a conceptual question and an empirical one. Whether it can is an important question for just war theorists. From this perspective, it is necessary to evaluate cyber measures both as a means of responding to threats and as a possible just cause for using armed kinetic force. In this paper, I shift the focus away from 'war' as such in order to ask whether some cyber threats might justifiably be characterized as a form of 'violence.' Some theorists argue that the term violence ought to be defined so as to encompass things like 'structural' harm or harm by neglect and thereby question implicitly the focus of just war theorists on armed force. This paper draws on a theory of violence I developed elsewhere as a defence of just war theory's narrow understanding of violence. According to the 'Double-Intent' theory, a distinctive form of 'Violent Agency' is the factor uniting the category of violence while partly accounting for the peculiar moral connotations of the term. Here, I argue that the resulting definition of violence reshapes the category in a way that includes some forms of cyber-attack. This may help us to see where cyber might fit in relation to just war theory and the ethics of kinetic attack.

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Section: The Moral Connotations Of 'Violence'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

Finlay

2018

Philos. Technol.

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“…The concept of distributed moral responsibility resolves the problem of individual responsibility by diluting it. The idea of distributed moral responsibility accounts for situations where various agents, both human and artificial (such as software platforms) may jointly produce a distributed moral action that can result from the sum of morally neutral actions (Luciano, 2013), and the same could be said about events surrounding the creation and use of weapons.…”

Section: Distributed Moral Responsibility Versus Individual Responsibmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engineering ethics and the future

Fell¹,

Lukianova²,

Lukianov³

2017

European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences

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Responding to the demands of the technology-driven global economy, engineers increase their technical competencies, improve cross-cultural communication skills, and become more innovative, entrepreneurial and flexible (Continental, 2006). As the demands on the engineer are increasing and the role of an engineer evolves and becomes more prominent, the importance of teaching engineering ethics to engineering students is increasing too. This article investigates current trends in the teaching of engineering ethics in the context of diverse approaches to evaluating the responsibility of an engineer. The article reveals the complexity of the issue, which confirms the need for future engineers to be competent in dealing with ethical dilemmas. The engineer must be aware of the fact that his or her invention will initiate a chain of events that will involve the use of this invention and will have various social, environmental and legal ramifications, which should be taken into account. The engineer must also be sufficiently prepared to make ethical decisions without sufficient guidance, as the full range of possible future scenarios cannot be foreseen.

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“…This, of course, reminds us of Floridi's (2010) attempt at an ontocentric applied ethics, but in Latour's version, it is not about letting everything be: it's about how each being negotiates its means or ends identity in relation to each other. For Latour (2013, p. 461), ethics as a mode of existence has no limits, since "everything in the world evaluates".…”

Section: An Ambi-optic Apparatus To Disclose Cyborg Ethical Ambiguitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an interdisciplinary ICT applied ethics: language matters

Buzato

2016

Rev. bras. linguist. apl.

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This study seeks to support an interdisciplinary, theory-practice integrated work on the applied ethics of information and communication technologies (ICT). Current work on applied ICT ethics is of a disciplinary nature and seeks to apply traditional philosophical norms to novel situations that are not easily identified by analogy to previous cases. I propose an alternative view in which ICTs are seen as a moral environment and ethical agents are seen as human-computer hybrids (cyborgs) whose experiences acquire ethical value ecologically. To implement such a view, I propose employing two different kinds of semiotics: a semiotics of meaning-making that is open to the environmental effects of cyborg acts across scales, and a material semiotics that allows for interdisciplinary practitioners to recognize the modes of existence involved in the ethical issues and work out better means-ends relationships among the modes pertinent to each discipline. Keywords: ICTs; applied ethics; applied linguistics; post-humanism, meaning-making.Resumo: Esta pesquisa busca apoiar um trabalho interdisciplinar que integre teoria e prática acerca de uma ética aplicada das tecnologias digitais da informação e comunicação. O trabalho atual em ética aplicada das TIC é de natureza disciplinar e busca aplicar normas filosóficas tradicionais às novas situações as quais não são facilmente identificadas por analogia a casos anteriores. Eu proponho uma visão alternativa pela qual as TIC são vistas como um ambiente ético e os agentes éticos são vistos como híbridos humanocomputador (ciborgues) cujas experiências adquirem valor ético ecologicamente. Para implementar esta visão, proponho que se empregue dois tipos distintos de semiótica: uma semiótica da significação que esteja aberta aos efeitos ambientais das atividades dos ciborgues em diferentes escalas, e uma semiótica material que permita aos praticantes de diferentes disciplinas reconhecerem os modos de existência envolvidos nas questões éticas e buscarem melhores relações do tipo meio-fim entre os modos implicados por cada disciplina. Palavras-chave: TIC; ética aplicada; linguística aplicada; pós-humanismo; significação. This paper presents the initial results of a research project aimed at achieving a metadiscursive/metatheoretical reasoning framework for an applied ethics of ICTs viewed as postsocial/post-human ethics of the here and now. These are philosophical and analytical-methodological perspectives that have a longstanding tradition, however short, in the digital humanities and social sciences, which most readers are probably already aware of to some degree. While pointing the readers to the works of Katherine Hayles (1999, 2011) and Karen Knorr-Cetina (1997, 2001, 2005 for a panoramic introduction to those traditions, I would like these terms, as used here, to refer to the definitions that follow."Postsocial" is a sociological perspective that emphasizes object relations as well as subject relations in explanations of social behavior. It recognizes that epistemic objec...

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Distributed Morality in an Information Society

Cited by 122 publications

References 42 publications

Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

Engineering ethics and the future

Towards an interdisciplinary ICT applied ethics: language matters

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