Engineering, as a complex and multidimensional practice of technology development, has long been a source of ethical concerns. These concerns have been approached from various perspectives. There are ongoing debates in the literature of the philosophy of engineering/technology about how to organize an optimized view of the values entailed in technology development processes. However, these debates deliver little in the way of a concrete rationale or framework that could comprehensively describe different types of engineering values and their multi-aspect interrelations in (...) real engineering practices. Approaching engineering values from a meaning-based perspective, as in this paper, can be a reliable method of tackling such a controversial problem. This paper therefore proposes that technology development be considered a systemic normative practice and attempts to provide a comprehensive view of various built-in values, their different origins and features, and a way of prioritizing them in real engineering processes. Studying two cases of the Zayandeh Rood Dam and the Abbasi Dam will lead to practical insights into how to understand norms in technology development and incorporate them into engineering practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the present study, we refer to Carr's theory on the nature of educational practice for evaluating teaching as a praxis in relation to two major changes, i.e. ubiquitous learning and massive communication caused by MOOCs. With regard to the first change, we argue that the teacher is faced with the problem of encouraging the learners to get involved in the educational activities. The second change has resulted in a reduction of teacher’s agency and loss of teaching legitimacy and hence (...) its natural feature as a morally committed action. In addition, massive communication has affected the potential encounters between teacher and student considered as the ‘Other’ and has replaced conversation with texting. We highlight the significance of teacher-student conversation as an essential element for developing reflection and self-reflection capacities. Finally, we discuss that the responsibility of teaching is beyond designing and implementing education technically through MOOCs. (shrink)

Teaching about technology, at all levels of education, can only be done properly when those who teach have a clear idea about what it is that they teach. In other words: they should be able to give a decent answer to the question: what is technology? In the philosophy of technology that question is explored. Therefore the philosophy of technology is a discipline with a high relevance for those who teach about technology. Literature in this field, though, is not always (...) easy to access for non-philosophers. This book provides an introduction to the philosophy of technology for such people. It offers a survey of the current state-of-affairs in the philosophy of technology, and also discusses the relevance of that for teaching about technology. The book can be used in introductory courses on the philosophy of technology in teacher education programs, engineering education programs, and by individual educators that are interested in the intriguing phenomenon of technology that is so important in our contemporary society. (shrink)

In Philosophia Reformata, Vol. 69, No. 1, Johan Stellingwerff published a challenging article1 on the need to rethink the philosophy of technology in reformational philosophy. Stellingwerff is not only critical about the work done by Van Riessen and Schuurman, but he also criticizes the Dual Nature of Technical Artifacts program at the Delft University of Technology.2 In this reply I want to take up particularly some of the points of criticism against the latter and see if they can be upheld (...) when taking a closer look at what has been published in this program so far. Although the article by Stellingwerff is in Dutch, I have decided to write my reply in English to enable a wider audience to take part in the debate. (shrink)

In this article I will show how the conceptual framework for analyzing reality as developed in reformational philosophy can help us to get a fuller understanding of the ethics of technology than in popular reductionist views. Thereby I will use Caroline Whitbeck’s suggestion that ethical problems should be dealt with as if they were design problems. Reformational philosophy helps us to understand the nature of complexity in design and also how order in this complex chaos can be created by observing (...) the various functions of technical artifacts. In line with the current empirical turn in the philosophy of technology, I will illustrate this by describing a case study: nanotechnology. (shrink)

This book examines the role of new technologies and the way social practices are influenced by them, creating all sorts of new challenges for maintaining a coherent practice without clashed between norms.

In this article, the morality in the “wickedness” of design problems as wicked problems is explored. I will use for that purpose the characteristics of wicked problems as identified by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. These characteristics suggest interdisciplinary thinking for solving such problems. An awareness of the wicked nature of design problems can stimulate proper use of the concept of utopias for solving these problems. I will use the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd to provide a framework for understanding the (...) nature of design problems as wicked problems. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Types of Knowledge in Technology A Neglected Topic Empirical Studies Philosophical Explorations References and Further Reading.

Engineering, as a complex and multidimensional practice of technology development, has long been a source of ethical concerns. These concerns have been approached from various perspectives. There are ongoing debates in the literature of the philosophy of engineering/technology about how to organize an optimized view of the values entailed in technology development processes. However, these debates deliver little in the way of a concrete rationale or framework that could comprehensively describe different types of engineering values and their multi-aspect interrelations in (...) real engineering practices. Approaching engineering values from a meaning-based perspective, as in this paper, can be a reliable method of tackling such a controversial problem. This paper therefore proposes that technology development be considered a systemic normative practice and attempts to provide a comprehensive view of various built-in values, their different origins and features, and a way of prioritizing them in real engineering processes. Studying two cases of the Zayandeh Rood Dam and the Abbasi Dam will lead to practical insights into how to understand norms in technology development and incorporate them into engineering practice. (shrink)

_Reflections on Technology for Educational Practitioners_ describes the main ideas of fourteen philosophers of technology and how these ideas are used or can be used in technology education.

Reflections on Technology for Educational Practitioners describes the main ideas of fourteen philosophers of technology and how these ideas are used or can be used in technology education.

Since current water governance patterns mandate cooperation and partnership within and between the actors in the hydrosystems, supplementary models are necessary to distinguish the roles and the rules of indoor actions which is why we extend a theory in the frameworks of philosophy of technology. This analysis is empirically grounded on the problematic hydrosystems of a river in central Iran, Zayandehrud. Following a modernist-holistic-based analysis, it illustrates how values in the water apportionment mechanisms are being reshaped. The article by using (...) the theory of normative practice has scrutinised the tasks and the rules of the old and new water-management systems, Mirab. Subsequently according to such philosophical theory, it has argued that the conflicts over the cases are due to interference of structural and directional norms within them. (shrink)

English summary: Marc Andre Wiegand analyzes the neo-Kantian premises of Gustav Radbruch's legal philosophy.

If religion once seemed to have played out its role in the intellectual and political history of Western secular modernity, it has now returned with a vengeance. In this engaging study, Hent de Vries argues that a turn to religion discernible in recent philosophy anticipates and accompanies this development in the contemporary world. Though the book reaches back to Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and earlier, it takes its inspiration from the tradition of French phenomenology, notably Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, (...) and, especially, Jacques Derrida. Tracing how Derrida probes the discourse on religion, its metaphysical presuppositions, and its transformations, de Vries shows how this author consistently foregrounds the unexpected alliances between a radical interrogation of the history of Western philosophy and the religious inheritance from which that philosophy has increasingly sought to set itself apart. De Vries goes beyond formal analogies between the textual practices of deconstruction and so-called negative theology to address the necessity for a philosophical thinking that situates itself at once close to and at the farthest remove from traditional manifestations of the religious and the theological. This paradox is captured in the phrase adieu ( à dieu ), borrowed from Levinas, which signals at once a turn toward and a leave-taking from God -- and which also gestures toward and departs from the other of this divine other, the possibility of radical evil. Only by confronting such uncanny and difficult figures, de Vries claims, can one begin to think and act upon the ethical and political imperatives of our day. (shrink)

Standardly, epistemic peers regarding a given matter are said to be people of equal competence who share all relevant evidence. Alternatively, one can define epistemic peers regarding a given matter as people who are equally likely to be right about that matter. I argue that a definition in terms of likelihood captures the essence of epistemic peerhood better than the standard definition or any variant of it. What is more, a likelihood definition implies the truth of the central thesis in (...) the debate on peer disagreement, the so-called Equal Weight View, according to which we should give the opinions of our peers the same weight we give our own. Adopting a likelihood definition, however, does not end the debate on peer disagreement, because the alleged theoretical alternatives to the Equal Weight View, reinterpreted in the light of a likelihood definition, can in fact be shown to be compatible with this view—though the reinterpreted versions may appear less plausible than the original ones. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ethics, the use of empirical data has become more and more popular, leading to a distinct form of applied ethics, namely empirical ethics. This ‘empirical turn’ is especially visible in bioethics. There are various ways of combining empirical research and ethical reflection. In this paper we discuss the use of empirical data in a special form of Reflective Equilibrium (RE), namely the Network Model with Third Person Moral Experiences. In this model, the empirical data consist of the moral (...) experiences of people in a practice. Although inclusion of these moral experiences in this specific model of RE can be well defended, their use in the application of the model still raises important questions. What precisely are moral experiences? How to determine relevance of experiences, in other words: should there be a selection of the moral experiences that are eventually used in the RE? How much weight should the empirical data have in the RE? And the key question: can the use of RE by empirical ethicists really produce answers to practical moral questions? In this paper we start to answer the above questions by giving examples taken from our research project on understanding the norm of informed consent in the field of pediatric oncology. We especially emphasize that incorporation of empirical data in a network model can reduce the risk of self‐justification and bias and can increase the credibility of the RE reached. (shrink)

The evidence that we get from peer disagreement is especially problematic from a Bayesian point of view since the belief revision caused by a piece of such evidence cannot be modelled along the lines of Bayesian conditionalisation. This paper explains how exactly this problem arises, what features of peer disagreements are responsible for it, and what lessons should be drawn for both the analysis of peer disagreements and Bayesian conditionalisation as a model of evidence acquisition. In particular, it is pointed (...) out that the same characteristic of evidence from disagreement that explains the problems with Bayesian conditionalisation also suggests an interpretation of suspension of belief in terms of imprecise probabilities. (shrink)

A commonly neglected feature of the so-called Equal Weight View, according to which we should give our peers’ opinions the same weight we give our own, is its prima facie incompatibility with the common picture of philosophy as an armchair activity: an intellectual effort to seek a priori knowledge. This view seems to imply that our beliefs are more likely to be true if we leave our armchair in order to find out whether there actually are peers who, by disagreeing (...) with us, force us to revise our beliefs. This article argues that the Equal Weight View should be spelled out in such a way that not only actual peer disagreement requires us to revise our beliefs, but also merely possible peer disagreement. This result is not a reductio ad absurdum of the view. Quite the opposite: it shows that the view is, contrary to appearance, compatible with our common way of doing philosophy. (shrink)

Unknown peers create a problem for those epistemologists who argue that we should be conciliatory in cases of peer disagreement. The standard interpretation of ‘being conciliatory’ has it that we should revise our opinions concerning a specific subject matter whenever we encounter someone who is as competent and well informed as we are concerning this subject matter (and thus is our peer) and holds a different opinion. As a consequence, peers whom we have never encountered and who are hence unknown (...) to us are not taken into account. This, however, appears odd; not only because it is an accidental matter which peers we happen to encounter and which not, but also because it would allow people to deliberately isolate themselves from any kind of intellectual exchange on the topic under consideration. The paper argues that we should take the problem of unknown peers seriously, and that disregarding the problem is an instance of the more general mistake of assuming that evidential quality and justified believability can be dealt with separately. Moreover, a solution to the problem of unknown peers is suggested. (shrink)

Dieser Text geht der Frage nach, ob und, wenn ja, inwieweit sich Gedankenexperimente in der praktischen Philosophie in ihrer Struktur und ihrer epistemischen Signifikanz von Gedankenexperimenten in der theoretischen Philosophie oder in den Naturwissenschaften unterscheiden. Anhand einer allgemeinen Strukturanalyse von Gedankenexperimenten wird dabei aufgezeigt, dass bei Gedankenexperimenten in der praktischen Philosophie zwar häufig die angemessene Bewertung eines zugrunde gelegten Szenarios im Zentrum steht und nicht, wie zum Beispiel in theoretischen Philosophie oft, dessen angemessene Beschreibung, dass dieser Unterschied aber kaum Auswirkungen (...) hat auf die prinzipielle Anwendbarkeit – abgesehen von einer bisher übersehenen Konsequenz: Man darf in einem Gedankenexperiment nicht annehmen, dass moralische, ästhetische oder entscheidungstheoretische Prinzipien in unterschiedlichen möglichen Welten verschieden sind. Andernfalls käme dem Gedankenexperiment keinerlei epistemische Signifikanz zu. (shrink)

Marc Hauser puts forth the theory that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Combining his cutting-edge research with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, Hauser explores the startling implications of his provocative theory vis-à-vis contemporary bioethics, religion, the law, and our everyday lives.

The silencing of the epistemologies, theories, principles, values, concepts and experiences of the global South constitutes a particularly egregious epistemic injustice in bioethics. Our shared responsibility to rectify that injustice should be at the top of the ethics agenda. That it is not, or only is in part, is deeply problematic and endangers the credibility of the entire field. As a first step towards reorienting the field, this paper offers a comprehensive account of epistemic justice for global health ethics. We (...) first introduce several different conceptions of justice and decolonisation in relation to knowledge, purposefully drawing on work emanating from the global South as well as the global North. We then apply those conceptions to the global health ethics context to generate a tripartite account of the layers of epistemic justice in the field: who is producing ethics knowledge; what theories and concepts are being applied to produce ethics knowledge; and whose voices are sought, recorded and used to generate ethics knowledge. These layers reflect that the field spans conceptual and empirical research. We conclude by proposing that, going forward, three avenues are key to achieve greater epistemic justice at each layer and to help decolonise global health ethics: namely, understanding the problem, dialogue and structural change. (shrink)