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Ethics - Glossary ethics

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December 1, 2021

Professional responsibility

The concept of professional responsibility is a component of ethics relevant in particular to how ethics relates to practical training. A sense of personal morality or the obligations one has to other roles can be distinguished from the responsibility someone has as a member of their profession. In this context we will focus on what the profession demands, independently from the degree to which all responsibilities may or may not be judged to align. This will allow a clearer view of exactly what it is that demanded by the workplace as opposed to other elements of one’s life.

Document

Miranda Nell

August 18, 2021

Value Ethics

Value ethics is a practical approach in applied ethics that is aimed at generating solutions for ethical and social problems . Many ethical problems involve multiple stakeholders, viewpoints, and ethical convictions. Technology development, for instance, is full of ethically contested issues where stakeholders’ interests and values clash. Think about the heated discussion of genetically modified food or green energy, like wind turbines, and the ‘not-in-my-backyard’ movements of residents. The value ethics approach accounts for this diversity and seeks to facilitate solutions that realize the most possible value for the various stakeholders affected by the problem. To achieve this, value ethics provides a method that takes seriously the different perspectives and interests of multiple stakeholders in a deliberative process.

Document

Steffen Steinert

August 18, 2021

Care ethics

Care ethics emerged in the 1980s as a challenge to individualism, arguing that people are interdependent beings and reaching a good life can only happen if there is a strong base of caring relationships. The theory also moves away from abstractions and universals, turning instead to the daily contextual experiences of care that keep people in a society alive and well: cooking, cleaning, teaching, transporting, resting, and much more. Since care work is disproportionately done by women and people of colour, care ethics seeks knowledge from voices that have a history of being marginalized in philosophy.

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Madelaine Ley

August 18, 2021

Technological Mediation and Ethics

According to the theory of technological mediation, technological artifacts are not ‘passive’; they play an active role in our lives, always mediating the way we engage with the world around us. And this is not only true for artefacts that seem to ‘act’, like robots, digital avatars or the like. No, even simple artifacts like hammers, glasses or the fountain pen mediate our lives. They do so by mediating two important aspects of my existence in the world: my perception of the world, and my actions in it. And in so doing, they also help change who and what we are. The rich tradition of ethical reflection on technology mostly deals with how humans should act, how we should (not) handle/design/implement/regulate artifacts. It relies on the idea that only humans have agency (and thus on the instrumentalist notion that artefacts do not). For mediation theory, this will not do: if no human engagement in the world is unmediated or non-technological, then the question of what artifacts do deserves to be taken more seriously in ethics. Meditation theory has uses in both descriptive and prescriptive ethics of technology.

Document

Jan Bergen

May 25, 2021

Risk Ethics

Risk ethics is a domain of ethics that investigates ethical aspects of risks and technological risks in particular. In order to avoid potentially harmful activities as much as possible, risk assessments need to be made. Technologies which, for instance, might lead to accidents or pollution, should be assessed so that these technologies can be improved. Risk ethics aims to provide insights into to the moral aspects of risk.

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Trijsje Franssen

November 26, 2020

Three ethical theories compared: deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics

This is a brief summary of the major differences between the most known ethical theories. It can be used by students in class as a quick reminder.

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Lavinia Marin

September 28, 2020

Norms

Norms are rules of behaviour. They indicate what should or should not be done, how to act, and how to treat one another in a given situation. There are different kinds of norms – moral, legal, conventional, personal, and more.

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Trijsje Franssen

August 17, 2020

Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics focuses on how to be a good person. Virtues are good or desirable human characteristics, such as courage and honesty. Virtue ethics then concentrates upon which characteristics one should have or develop to be a moral person. Whereas other ethical theories concentrate on the question how to act or how to make the right decision, virtue ethics is thus about having the right character.

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Trijsje Franssen

August 17, 2020

Virtues

A virtue is an excellent character trait or quality, such as courage, honesty and creativity. Virtues are expressed in action, and practice is essential: just as you need to practice drawing in order to become a designer, you need to practice in acting virtuously in order to cultivate virtues. To truly ‘possess’ a virtue means it is deeply ingrained in your personality – you cannot have half a virtue. A courageous person is not just occasionally courageous. A person who sometimes keeps his promise does not have the virtue of trustworthiness.

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Trijsje Franssen

June 23, 2020

Duty Ethics/ Deontology

According to duty ethics, the answer to the question whether an action is morally right or wrong depends upon our ‘duty’: a certain moral rule, law or norm such as “you should not lie”. The goodness of an action is thus independent of the consequences. It is determined by whether we act in accordance with such a moral rule.

Document

Trijsje Franssen