Virtue ethics (SPT Special Interest Group on virtue ethics) -Part II
Chair(s): Marc Steen (TNO), Zoe Robaey (Wageningen University & Research)
Rationale and goal: To further develop the field of virtue ethics in the context of technology, design, engineering, innovation, and professionalism. We understand virtue ethics broadly: as diverse efforts to facilitate people to cultivate relevant virtues so that they can flourish and live different versions of ‘the good life’, with technology, and to help create structures and institutes that enable people to collectively find ways to live well together. We envision research in the following themes:
• Citizens and practices: E.g., study how technologies can help, or hinder, people to cultivate specific virtues (Vallor 2016), e.g., how a social media app can corrode one’s self-control—and how we can envision alternative designs, that can instead help people to cultivate self-control.
• Professionals and institutions: E.g., view the work of technologists, and other professionals, through a virtue ethics lens (Steen 2022). We are also interested in various institutions, e.g., for governance or oversight. This theme also relates to education and training (next item, below).
• Education and training: E.g. design and implement education and training programs. This offers opportunities to study, e.g., how students or professionals cultivate virtues. This will probably involve cultivating practical wisdom or reflexivity, as a pivotal virtue (Steen et al. 2021).
• Traditions and cultures: E.g., study and appreciate various ‘Non-Western’ virtue ethics traditions, like Confucianism, Buddhism (Ess 2006; Vallor 2016) or Indigenous cultures (Steen 2022b). We can turn to feminist ethics or study virtues in specific domains, like health care or the military.
Presentations of the Symposium
Technological bullshit
Mandi Astola
Delft University of Technology
The electronic fatbike has stirred controversy in Dutch cities because it masquerades as an electric bike, whilst clearly being a scooter for all intents and purposes. The fatbike masquerades as an e-bike to benefit from the positive, and sustainable, image of e-bikes, and to circumvent the mandate on wearing helmets whilst riding a scooter, making the e-fatbike attractive. The fatbike, therefore displays a desired performance which is functioning as a scooter without the need for a helmet, to be driven in cities. This primary performance is however masked by multiple secondary performances, such as the bike being an e-bike, and being suitable for rough terrain by having thick tires. It is clear from looking at the design of the fatbike that the features pointing at these latter performances are there largely for decorative reasons and to mask the primary performance. The case of the fatbike shows that it is possible to bullshit using technology.
In recent years, many scholars have extended the definition of “bullshit” (which traditionally refers to phony speech acts) to various non-verbal activities, such as bullshit jobs or feigning a fall in sports (Frankfurt, 1986; Graebner, 2019; Easwaran, 2023). We aim to make such an extension too, by arguing that one can also bullshit by designing, creating or co-constructing technology. Technological artifacts can, in our view, contain or be instances of technological bullshit. This concept can be employed in the philosophy of technology both descriptively (for understanding technological artifacts as social performances) and normatively (for evaluating technologies in relationship to social values).
We present different types of technological bullshit and highlight their different aspects. We discuss hype-driven technological bullshit, self-defeating technological bullshit and conspiratorial technological bullshit. We also discuss different constellations of technological bullshitter and bullshittee. Furthermore, we reflect on the nature of the wrongness of technological bullshit, based on what it says about the character of the technological bullshitter.
Bibliography
• Frankfurt, H. (1986) On Bullshit. Raritan.
• Graeber, D. (2019). Bullshit jobs: The rise of pointless work, and what we can do about it.
• Easwaran, K. (2023). Bullshit Activities. Analytic Philosophy. 00, 1-23.
Digital doppelgangers, moral deskilling, and the fragmented identity: a Confucian critique
Pak Hang Wong
Hong Kong Baptist University
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly capable of learning from and mimicking individuals, as demonstrated by a fairly successful effort to replicate the attitudes and behaviors of individuals by generative AI with a 2-hour interview (see, Park et al. 2024). This technical advancement has afforded the creation of increasingly indistinguishable (online, digital) doubles of individuals, variously known as digital doppelgangers, digital duplicates, and digital twins, which can talk to others, interact with them, and perform tasks on behalf of their creators and the originals. Major technology companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI have also imagined various ways in which digital doppelgangers can be adopted for various purposes including: attending meeting and performing mundane tasks on behalf of their creators, establishing and maintaining relationships, reanimating the deads, among others.
The introduction of digital doppelgangers in our current and existing social fabric will for sure generate new modes of interactions and relationships among individuals that are mediated by digital doppelgangers which are like us but not exactly us, and thus potentially disrupt our current norms and values and raise social and ethical issues related to their design and implementation. Indeed, some of these ethical concerns such as digital doppelgangers and the value of individuals (Danaher & Nyholm 2024) and their social and ethical implications in terms of life extension (Iglesias et al. 2024) have been explored along with the social and ethical challenges of digital doppelgangers in specific domains of application, e.g., griefing, romance, and education. More generally, John Danaher and Sven Nyholm have also offered a promising general moral principle to assess the design and implementation of digital doppelgangers in what they call the “minimally viable permissibility principle”. Much less, however, has been said about digital doppelgangers’ potential implications to individuals’ moral self-cultivation.
In this talk, I shall approach the questions of digital doppelgangers and moral self-cultivation from a Confucian perspective, drawing from Confucian ideas on moral self-cultivation. The discussion, however, should also apply to non-Confucian accounts of moral self-cultivation as well. More specifically, I shall connect the discussion of moral deskilling to the social and ethical analysis of digital doppelgangers (see, Vallor 2015; Wong 2019), and argue that the use of digital doppelgangers will in various ways result in individuals’ moral deskilling. In addition, I shall argue that the use of digital doppelgangers generates a novel challenge of fragmented identity, which requires the creators and/or the originals of the digital doppelgangers to reconcile potentially conflicting narratives and images, thereby de-stabilizing individuals in their cultivation of moral selves.
Bibliography
• Danaher, J., Nyholm, S. (2024a). Digital Duplicates and the Scarcity Problem: Might AI Make Us Less Scarce and Therefore Less Valuable?. Philos. Technol. 37, 106.
• Danaher, J., and S. Nyholm. (2024b). The ethics of personalised digital duplicates: A minimally viable permissibility principle. AI and Ethics. doi:10.1007/s43681-024-00513-7.
• Iglesias, S., Earp, B. D., Voinea, C., Mann, S. P., Zahiu, A., Jecker, N. S., & Savulescu, J. (2024). Digital Doppelgängers and Lifespan Extension: What Matters? The American Journal of Bioethics, 1–16.
• Vallor, S. Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age: Reflections on the Ambiguous Future of Character. Philos. Technol. 28, 107–124 (2015).
• Wong P-H. Rituals and Machines: A Confucian Response to Technology-Driven Moral Deskilling. Philosophies. 2019; 4(4):59.
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