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  • The categorical imperative of speed: acceleration as moral duty

    Thomas Sutherland (17168236) (2019-11-09)
    The Kantian model of ethics is premised upon the apodictic certainty of a law of pure practical reason which is in turn the foundation for an absolute transcendental freedom. This law, the categorical imperative, is the objective and universally valid determining ground of the will, and is irreducible to any empirically determined judgement of desire. Such a model, whereby we locate this moral law within ourselves (through a pure usage of the faculty of reason) even as it points us toward the infinite horizon of the unconditioned, imagines the rational human being to be ultimately autonomous in relation to any empirical determination. In this chapter, I wish to argue that such a conception of morality has become more and more implausible in an age of ubiquitous technical mediation; instead, we find ourselves in thrall to a moral law that is imposed upon us by an economic and socio-technical apparatus unconcerned with the finite temporalities of human thought and action: namely, a categorical imperative of speed, which incessantly pushes us toward an interminable acceleration of our labour and our everyday practices, treating the elimination of temporal lag as a moral duty. This imperative positions humans not as ends in themselves, but as the means for pursuing a teleology premised upon an abstract and unsustainable calculation of efficiency.
  • The Categorical Imperative of Speed: Acceleration as Moral Duty

    Thomas Sutherland (17168236) (2020-01-01)
    The Kantian model of ethics is premised upon the apodictic certainty of a law of pure practical reason which is in turn the foundation for an absolute transcendental freedom. This law, the categorical imperative, is the objective and universally valid determining ground of the will, and is irreducible to any empirically determined judgement of desire. Such a model, whereby we locate this moral law within ourselves (through a pure usage of the faculty of reason) even as it points us toward the infinite horizon of the unconditioned, imagines the rational human being to be ultimately autonomous in relation to any empirical determination. In this chapter, I wish to argue that such a conception of morality has become more and more implausible in an age of ubiquitous technical mediation; instead, we find ourselves in thrall to a moral law that is imposed upon us by an economic and socio-technical apparatus unconcerned with the finite temporalities of human thought and action: namely, a categorical imperative of speed, which incessantly pushes us toward an interminable acceleration of our labour and our everyday practices, treating the elimination of temporal lag as a moral duty. This imperative positions humans not as ends in themselves, but as the means for pursuing a teleology premised upon an abstract and unsustainable calculation of efficiency.
  • E-commerce from the Perspective of the Philosophy of Technology

    Amiri Tehrani, S. M. Reza (2011)
    In order to analyze e-commerce from the perspective of theories of the philosophy of technology, first the characteristics of e-commerce are examined and then analyzed from the viewpoint of the philosophy of technology. In the first section of the article, topics such as definitions and models of e-commerce, electronic contracts, electronic payments, and electronic customs are investigated. In the second section, topics including the technology of e-commerce, requirements of e-commerce, ethics and e-commerce, identity and e-commerce, virtual reality of e-commerce, and the power of aggregation in e-commerce are analyzed.
  • "Una nueva interpretación de la polémica filosófica en La Habana"

    Medina, Vicente (2014)
    La polémica fue un importante evento cultural durante el siglo XIX en Cuba. De 1838 a 1840 se debatieron en los principales periódicos de la isla temas en torno a la metafísica, la epistemología, la ética, la pedagogía y la influencia del eclecticismo de Víctor Cousin. Exploro en esta investigación brevemente algunos de los hechos históricos que antecedieron a esta polémica. Arguyo que es inexacta la interpretación predominante que esta polémica fue motivada por el deseo de independizar a Cuba de España. Tal interpretación promueve un mito de emancipación. Según mi análisis, cuando en su intervención en la polémica José de la Luz y Caballero apela al patriotismo, establece sin saberlo un precedente peligroso que usarán los autodenominados protectores del patriotismo para restringir los debates públicos. La polémica filosófica en la Habana se refiere a una serie de debates públicos que acaecieron en el siglo XIX en Cuba principalmente entre jóvenes intelectuales de la época. Con frecuencia estos debates resultaron en argumentos apasionados y algunas veces en ataques ad hominem entre los participantes de dicha polémica.
  • Corporalidad, tecnología y deseo de salvación: apuntes para una antropología de la vulnerabilidad

    Montoya, Martin (2024)
    Los autores son miembros del grupo Ciencia, Razón y Fe (CRYF) de la Universidad de Navarra, y llevan trabajando en este grupo de forma interdisciplinar durante casi una década en temas de antropología y ética. Como dice Javier Bernácer en el prólogo de este libro, los profesores Montoya Camacho y Giménez Amaya han realizado una obra profunda, académica, y al mismo tiempo de fácil lectura. Los autores apoyándose en el filósofo anglosajón Alasdair MacIntyre señalan que «la fragilidad del ser humano es un elemento vertebral de su actuar ético». Una vez que se descubre de modo natural el sentido de la vulnerabilidad, tanto propia como ajena, el ser humano desarrolla una serie de virtudes, que, por definición, llevan a la culminación de una vida realizada: la felicidad como eudemonía. No es el camino más fácil, pero sí el más directo a una existencia llena de sentido. [Portada e índice]
  • Wearable Technologies for Healthy Ageing: Prospects, Challenges, and Ethical Considerations

    Canali, Stefano; Ferretti, Agara; Schiaffonati, Viola; Blasimme, Alessandro (2024)
    Digital technologies hold promise to modernize healthcare. Such opportunity should be leveraged also to address the needs of rapidly ageing populations. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the use of wearable devices for promoting healthy ageing. Previous work has assessed the prospects of digital technologies for health promotion and disease prevention in older adults. However, to our knowledge, ours is one of the first attempts to specifically address the use of wearables for healthy ageing, and to offer ethical insights for assessing the prospects of leveraging wearable devices in this context. We provide an analysis of the considerable opportunities associated with the use of wearables for healthy ageing, with a focus on the five domains of intrinsic capacity: locomotion, sensory functions, psychological aspects, cognition, and vitality. We then highlight current limitations and ethical challenges of such approach to healthy ageing, including issues related to access, inclusion, privacy, surveillance, autonomy, and regulation. We conclude by discussing the implications of our analysis in light of current debates on the ethics of digital health, and suggest measures to address the identified challenges.
  • Commentary on “Pandemic Ethics: Five Lessons”

    Erler, Alexandre (2024)
    This commentary further explores some of the ethical issues raised by Prof. Peter Singer in his Lanson Lecture “Pandemic Ethics: Five Lessons”. In the first part, I distinguish a prioritarian approach to the allocation of scarce medical resources, from the utilitarian one advocated by Singer. I suggest that the prioritarian view better matches common intuitions about fair distribution, even though it likely needs to be balanced with other principles if it is to have plausibility in contexts like vaccine allocation. In the second part of the commentary, I take a global perspective (as Singer himself does regarding the ethics of lockdowns), and highlight the controversial implications of adopting a fully cosmopolitan ethical outlook when deciding how to distribute Covid-19 vaccines. I also raise justice-related concerns about Singer’s proposal to use well-being as a single metric for evaluating public health policies.
  • Virtues, Rights, or Consequences? Mapping the Way for Conceptual Ethics

    Queloz, Matthieu (forthcomin)
    Are there virtues that constitutively involve using certain concepts? Does it make sense to speak of rights or duties to use certain concepts? And do consequentialist approaches to concepts necessarily have to reproduce the difficulties that plague utilitarianism? These are fundamental orientating questions for the emerging field of conceptual ethics, which invites us to reflect critically about which concepts to use. In this article, I map out and explore the ways in which conceptual ethics might take its cue from virtue-ethical, deontological, and consequentialist traditions of ethical thought, flagging the main difficulties facing each approach. I end by sketching how the various dimensions of evaluation singled out by these three traditions might be combined in a single approach.
  • Ethics Dumping : Case Studies from Global North and South Research Collaborations

    Appiah, David; Teye-Adjei, Doreen; Auagah, Christian (2024)
    Ethics dumping is an ongoing practice in collaborative research. Despite the existence of ethical review boards, some notable discrepancy in governance and integration persists. This paper is a chronological book review of a 15-chapter book titled, "Ethics Dumping: Case Studies from North-South Research Collaborations," compiled from individual authors and edited by Schroeder, Cook, Hirch, Fenet, and Muthuswami in 2018. This book review aims to ensure ever-increasing attention to the numerous ways of ethics dumping and incite further research into the matter. The book is a must-read for researchers, ethicists, policymakers in research institutions, and students (especially graduate students).
  • Ethik in Computerspielen

    Samuel, Ulbricht (2023)
    Die Frage nach der Ethik in Computerspielen fragt im Kern danach, wie Computerspiele moralische Fragen aushandeln können. Ausgangspunkt ist die folgende Beobachtung: Situationen und Tätigkeiten, die in Wirklichkeit¹ moralisch brisant wären, sind seit jeher ein beliebter Gegenstand von Computerspielen. Seien es spielerische Umsetzungen von Kriegssituationen wie in den Reihen Call of Duty oder Metal Gear Solid, seien es heftige körperliche Auseinandersetzungen wie in Tekken oder auch in Super Smash Bros., seien es bleihaltige Abenteuer wie in Uncharted oder Tomb Raider – in zahlreichen Fällen wie diesen führen wir beim Spielen Handlungen aus, die wir, wenn wir sie in Wirklichkeit durchführten, für...
  • Epistemic Courage

    Ichikawa, Jonathan (forthcomin)
    Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from conspiracy theories to medical misinformation, Ichikawa shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. And, he argues, many mainstream ideas about what to believe - those emphasizing the importance of ensuring that one doesn't believe with insufficient evidence - are incomplete and distorting in important and harmful ways. A skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo. Throughout the book, Ichikawa argues that we need to shift our focus from avoiding false beliefs to actively seeking out true ones. Throughout the book, Ichikawa uses engaging and timely examples to illustrate his points. He tackles important questions, such as how moral considerations interact with evidential ones in deciding what to believe, and how to navigate the complex ethical issues around testimony, rape culture, and epistemic injustice. Accessible and rigorous, Epistemic Courage invites readers to consider the importance of belief, and how it shapes our lives and the world around us. With its insightful analysis and compelling case studies, this book is an essential read for philosophers and anyone else interested in belief, social justice, and the pursuit of truth.
  • Should the State Teach Ethics? A Schematism

    Frim, Landon (2022)
    Should the state teach ethics? There is widespread disagreement on whether (and how) secular states should be in the business of promoting a particular moral viewpoint. This article attempts to schematize, and evaluate, these stances. It does so by posing three, simple questions: (1) Should the state explicitly promote certain ethical values over others? (2) Should the state have ultimate justifications for the values it promotes? (3) Should the state compel its citizens to accept these ultimate justifications? Logically, each question in this series is a prerequisite for considering those questions further down the list. The result is that responses can be categorized into one of four possible permutations or ‘camps.’ These are: (1) The Libertarian (“No” to all three questions) (2) The Pluralist (“Yes” to question 1; “No” to questions 2 and 3) (3) The Rationalist Republican (“Yes” to questions 1 and 2; “No” to question 3) (4) The Rigorous Republican (“Yes” to all three questions) It will be shown that just one of these positions, the ‘rationalist republican,’ stands out from all the rest. For only the rationalist republican can account for a normative politics while also safeguarding the individual’s freedom of conscience.
  • Vulnerability, Recognition, and the Ethics of Pregnancy: A Theological Response

    Kamitsuka, Margaret (2024)
    Vulnerability is a notion discussed in feminist philosophy as a basis for a morality that widens our sense of those whose deaths are grievable. Vulnerability and grievability also factor in reproductive ethics. This essay employs recognition theory to analyze critically how these notions are mobilized in conservative Christian anti-abortion writings and in feminist philosophy. This analysis exposes weaknesses and misrecognition in both sets of discourses. In response, I offer theological arguments for recognizing fetal value without implying a right to life and for acknowledging how human finitude and the precarity of pregnancy render gestational hospitality a discretionary, not obligatory, moral act.
  • Deontología y axiología de la cognición moral: los fundamentos éticos de la norma jurídica

    Torres Vásquez, Henry; Diaz-Navarro, David Ernesto (2024)
    Con una metodología analítico-sintética, el propósito del presente artículo es ofrecer un fundamento teórico sobre la legitimidad de los actos y las decisiones morales. Por consiguiente, se resolverá la siguiente cuestión: ¿cuál es la función ética del derecho, en el marco del ejercicio de una conciencia y consciencia construidas por agentes morales? Se concluye que la coacción legítima debe fundarse en la protección universal de toda persona y en el sometimiento a objeciones por parte de los ciudadanos, con el propósito de revisar la legitimidad y legalidad de las normas jurídicas.
  • Der Intellektuelle als Yogi: Für eine neue Kunst der Aufmerksamkeit im digitalen Zeitalter

    Weis, Hans-Willi (transcript VerlagDEUBielefeld, 2024-02-27)
    Die digitale Revolution ist nicht nur ein Angriff auf die Grundlagen von Aufmerksamkeit und Intellektualität - ihre Auswirkungen sind zugleich eine Herausforderung für die Intellektuellen, die hierauf allzu oft nur mit Ratlosigkeit oder Gedankenakrobatik zu reagieren wissen. Hans-Willi Weis lädt zu einer Tour d'Horizon durch intellektuelle Zeitgeistdiskurse ein. Er schlägt den Bogen von der Kritik in sich leer laufender Diskurse zu einer das Denken und das Diskursive revitalisierenden neuen Aufmerksamkeitspraxis und zeigt, wie man der digitalen Aufmerksamkeitsdiffusion und den Zwängen entgrenzter Netzaktivität je individuell mit der yogischen Übung methodischer Unterbrechung zu begegnen vermag.
  • Die Kunst des Möglichen III: Grundlinien einer dialektischen Philosophie der Technik - Macht der Technik

    Hubig, Christoph (transcript VerlagDEUBielefeld, 2024-02-23)
    Inwieweit sind unsere Handlungsvollzüge und ihre Ordnungen durch Technik bedingt? Nachdem Christoph Hubig die Ermöglichungsfunktion der Technik freigelegt (Band I) und eine Moral für den Umgang mit technischen Möglichkeiten entwickelt hat (Band II), entwirft er nun in diesem (eigenständig lesbaren) Band III in kritischer Auseinandersetzung mit Foucault und der Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie ein technikadäquates Machtkonzept. Jenseits eines »Technikdeterminismus« oder der Behauptung einer eigendynamischen Technikevolution steht dabei der Unterschied zwischen einer Strukturdynamik und einer Netzdynamik im Vordergrund. Zudem werden die Erträge dieser Modellierung für die Frage eines Wandels von Autonomie und (ethischer) Kontrolle geltend gemacht.
  • Philosophie der Lebensführung: Ethisches Denken zwischen Existenzphilosophie und Konstruktivismus

    Weiland, René (transcript VerlagDEUBielefeld, 2024-02-19)
    Existenzphilosophie fragt nach dem Sinn menschlichen Lebens. Für den Konstruktivismus ist diese Frage schon beantwortet, ja, sinnlos: Für ihn ist die Wirklichkeit des Einzelnen ohnehin die ganze Wirklichkeit - es gibt keine "Objektivität". So fremd sich beide Denkweisen also gegenüberstehen, so nahe sind sie sich in ihrer radikalen Subjektivität. René Weiland nimmt diese fremde Nähe in den Blick, indem er sich von der Kategorie der Innen-Außen-Differenz als eines Schaltbegriffs leiten lässt, der beide Denkweisen untergründig miteinander verbindet: als Nahtstelle alles Systemischen wie als Nadelöhr unserer Individuationen. Ein Buch für Philosophen und Psychologen - und für Resilienz-Forscher.
  • Unsicheres Mitleid: Eine Begriffssuche im Ausgang von Wittgenstein

    Siller, Georg (transcript VerlagDEUBielefeld, 2024-02-15)
    Wie kaum ein anderes Gefühl ist Mitleid von Unsicherheiten geprägt: Der Begriff "Mitleid" wird widersprüchlich verwendet - aber auch das Gefühl selbst kann schwanken. Dies wirft Fragen der Angemessenheit auf. Georg Sillers genaue Lektüre Ludwig Wittgensteins zeigt, dass solche Unbestimmtheiten jedoch nicht als Defizite gesehen werden müssen: Erstens sind psychologische Begriffe in ihrer Bedeutungsvielfalt Teil unserer Lebensform und damit mehr als die Bezeichnung von Zuständen, zweitens stellt schwankendes Mitleid eine ganz eigene Haltung dar - und zwar häufig die des Respekts. Diese Perspektive ermöglicht neue Zugriffe auf Aristoteles, Nietzsche, Brecht, Arendt sowie die Neuropsychologie - und nicht zuletzt auf Wittgenstein selbst.

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