Steffen Steinert

ABSTRACT It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking.

Research conducted on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) has grown considerably during the last decades. With the help of BCIs, users can (re)gain a wide range of functions. Our aim in this paper is to analyze the impact of BCIs on autonomy. To this end, we introduce three abilities that most accounts of autonomy take to be essential: (1) the ability to use information and knowledge to produce reasons; (2) the ability to ensure that intended actions are effectively realized (control); and (3) the ability to enact intentions within concrete relationships and contexts. We then consider the impact of BCI technology on each of these abilities. Although on first glance, BCIs solely enhance self-determination because they restore or improve abilities, we will show that there are other positive, but also negative impacts on user autonomy, which require further philosophical and ethical discussions.

This chapter sets up the upcoming chapters of the book and introduces four essential aspects of value. The topic of value has personal, social, and cultural dimensions, and value considerations are related to conceptual and metaphysical questions. These four dimensions of value correspond to four crucial academic disciplines that have focused their theoretical and empirical attention on value(s): psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. These four disciplines developed their own value theories and conceptualizations of value. To make progress in value theory, an interdisciplinary exchange is necessary. This chapter motivates the book’s aim to provide an accessible introduction and overview of value theories in the four disciplines. Paying attention to how different disciplines approach the topic of value is the first step toward a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and improved understanding of value.

Philosophers ask fundamental questions about values and valuing. Some of the philosophical debates about these fundamental questions have repercussions for the value theories of other disciplines. This chapter focuses on crucial conceptual distinctions and philosophical positions about value. For instance, the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic value. The chapter also reviews important metaphysical positions concerning the nature of value, like objectivism and subjectivism. It also touches upon the issue of pluralism and monism, whether there are many values or just one. Finally, the chapter addresses the issue of value change, emphasizing the pragmatist account of value (Dewey).

Anthropological theories of value highlight the cultural processes responsible for value creation, re-creation, and transmission. This chapter provides an overview of the most crucial value theories in anthropology. First, It introduces early anthropological accounts of value, like Kluckhohn’s and Strodtbeck’s theory of value orientations, which was an attempt to provide a tool for cross-cultural comparison. The chapter also outlines the structuralist approach to value, specifically Dumont’s influential account, where values are part of a hierarchical meaning system. The chapter then introduces so-called action-oriented approaches to value (Munn, Turner, Graeber). Action-oriented accounts focus on how humans actively create and reproduce values in a cultural system of meaning into which value actions are embedded. Finally, the chapter also briefly considers anthropological ideas about value change.

Most psychologists take value to be abstract motivational goals that transcend situations and that systematically relate to one another. First, this chapter introduces the ideas of historical precursors of the psychological investigation of value, like Windelband, Lotze, Scheler, and Brentano. Then, the chapter outlines influential psychological theories of value, specifically the theories of Vernon and Allport, Rokeach, and Shalom Schwartz. The chapter also considers the recent functional theory of value (Gouveia) and presents how psychologists distinguish values from other concepts, like attitudes and traits. The last part of the chapter focuses on psychological research concerning value change.

This chapter traces the development of value theory in sociology and opens with Weber’s influential ideas about value rationality and value spheres. The chapter then outlines Parsons’ idea that values are abstract goals that play a crucial role in explaining social action. Like psychologists, sociologists acknowledge values as essential aspects of the self and have conceptualized the relationship between individual and social value systems. Sociologists are interested in the relationship between the social and the individual, and some suggest that changes in the value systems of individuals are linked to cultural, social, and economic changes. In a section on value change, the chapter focuses on the influential modernization theory (Inglehart).

Previous chapters considered value theories of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. These disciplines can benefit and learn from one another, and closer interaction between disciplines will lead to better value theory. To facilitate an interdisciplinary understanding of value, this chapter will highlight the overlap between the different disciplines and what they can learn from one another. Each section of this chapter compares two disciplines and highlights overlaps, similarities, and differences. The hope is that this constructive comparison will build a bridge between disciplines, which helps to advance the theory development within the disciplines and brings theoretical blind spots into focus. Bringing disciplines together is the first step towards crossing disciplinary boundaries, resolving conceptual differences, and increasing interdisciplinary communication.

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking.

When crafting argumentative essays, increasingly, students use large language models (LLMs) to help with writing, and we notice this happening with students taking ethics classes as part of their professional education. This chapter argues that relying too much on LLMs can lead to moral deskilling because writing argumentative texts shapes moral skills, including moral sensitivity and imagination of future professionals. Developing and sharpening moral skills relies on effort, which LLMs undermine by design. Furthermore, the struggle to develop an argument and to find the right words, structure, and tone contributes to relevant skills like resilience and grit because it is the struggle itself that leads to a better understanding of how difficult it is to make ethical arguments, which can contribute to more complex perspective taking in ethical reflection. The upshot of the argument is that replacing written assignments in ethics education with other formats, like oral assessments or practical assignments, risks losing a valuable format for moral skill development. The chapter ends with practical advice for educators on dealing with the student’s tendency to delegate written assignments to LLMs without giving up on written formative assignments.

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways.

Philosophy of emotions has become an established sub-discipline of philosophy, and emotions are no longer exclusively seen as disturbances that threaten our rational faculties. Philosophers now take seriously the multi-facetted relation between emotion, knowledge, and reason. Laura Candiotto's edited volume on emotions and their role in epistemic practice brings together texts that look at this relation from different angles and from different traditions. The volume includes texts that zoom in on a wide variety of themes, like agency, emotion regulation, group emotions and social epistemology, cognitive science, and pragmatist accounts of emotions. The book will be interesting not only for those engaging with philosophy of emotions but...

Many researchers from robotics, machine ethics, and adjacent fields seem to assume that norms represent good behavior that social robots should learn to benefit their users and society. We would like to complicate this view and present seven key troubles with norm-compliant robots: (1) norm biases, (2) paternalism (3) tyrannies of the majority, (4) pluralistic ignorance, (5) paths of least resistance, (6) outdated norms, and (7) technologically-induced norm change. Because discussions of why norm-compliant robots can be problematic are noticeably absent from the robot and machine ethics literature, this paper fills an important research gap. We argue that it is critical for researchers to take these issues into account if they wish to make norm-compliant robots.

Technology should be aligned with our values. We make the case that attempts to align emerging technologies with our values should reflect critically on these values. Critical thinking seems like a natural starting point for the critical assessment of our values. However, extant conceptualizations of critical thinking carve out no space for the critical scrutiny of values. We will argue that we need critical thinking that focuses on values instead of taking them as unexamined starting points. In order to play a crucial role in helping to align values and technology, critical thinking needs to be modified and refocused on values. Here, we outline what value-centred critical thinking could look like.

This book offers an interdisciplinary introduction to value theory. It reviews how researchers in four academic disciplines – psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy – understand value and value change. It offers an introduction for researchers in these disciplines about how other disciplines define, theorize, and investigate value(s) to foster interdisciplinary communication. The book identifies and summarizes similarities and differences of value theory between the academic disciplines and highlights promising areas where each discipline can learn from the others.

Prometheus has grown four years older since its last and highly controversial special issue, published in 2017 on the Shaken Baby Debate. But, as always, Prometheus is committed to open discussion and dissemination of scientific research, regardless of the potential backlash or controversy that may ensue from such a venture, a venture that is at the core of authentic scholarship. Since the beginning of 2020, the world has changed irrevocably, making once-held norms seem obsolete in favour of new ways of being in the world and new technologies emerging to face these new ways of living. Although it has been a long-held insight in the philosophy of technology that technical systems are carriers of values, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made manifest how these values, and their incarnations in sociotechnical systems, can likewise change. Prometheus has, since its inception, danced in tandem with the critical interpretations, theories, and methods for understanding innovation, and how innovations fundamentally impact and are impacted by the world in which they emerge and are situated. For this reason, Steffen Steinert, Tristan de Wildt, and I chose to guest edit this special issue on designing for value change and chose Prometheus as its home.

Social media technologies are routinely identified as a strong and pervasive threat to digital well-being. Extended screen time sessions, chronic distractions via notifications, and fragmented workflows have all been blamed on how these technologies ruthlessly undermine our ability to exercise quintessential human faculties. One reason SMTs can do this is because they powerfully affect our emotions. Nevertheless, how social media technology affects our emotional life and how these emotions relate to our digital well-being remain unexplored. Remedying this is important because ethical insights into and open the possibility of designing for social media technologies in ways that actively reinforce our digital well-being. In this article, we examine the way social media technologies facilitate online emotions because of emotional affordances. This has important implications for evaluating the ethical implications of today’s social media platforms, as well as for how we design future ones.

Philosophy of emotions has become an established sub-discipline of philosophy, and emotions are no longer exclusively seen as disturbances that threaten our rational faculties. Philosophers now take seriously the multi-facetted relation between emotion, knowledge, and reason. Laura Candiotto's edited volume on emotions and their role in epistemic practice brings together texts that look at this relation from different angles and from different traditions. The volume includes texts that zoom in on a wide variety of themes, like agency, emotion regulation, group emotions and social epistemology, cognitive science, and pragmatist accounts of emotions. The book will be interesting not only for those engaging with philosophy of emotions but...

Research conducted on Brain-Computer Interfaces has grown considerably during the last decades. With the help of BCIs, users can gain a wide range of functions. Our aim in this paper is to analyze the impact of BCIs on autonomy. To this end, we introduce three abilities that most accounts of autonomy take to be essential: the ability to use information and knowledge to produce reasons; the ability to ensure that intended actions are effectively realized ; and the ability to enact intentions within concrete relationships and contexts. We then consider the impact of BCI technology on each of these abilities. Although on first glance, BCIs solely enhance self-determination because they restore or improve abilities, we will show that there are other positive, but also negative impacts on user autonomy, which require further philosophical and ethical discussions.

In this article, we discuss the importance of emotions for ethical reflection on technological developments, as well as the role that art can play in this. We review literature that argues that emotions can and should play an important role in the assessment and acceptance of technological risk and in designing morally responsible technologies. We then investigate how technologically engagedartcan contribute to critical, emotional-moral reflection on technological risks. The role of art that engages with technology is unexplored territory and gives rise to many fascinating philosophical questions that have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the literature.

People share their emotions on social media and evidence suggests that in times of crisis people are especially motivated to post emotional content. The current Coronavirus pandemic is such a crisis. The online sharing of emotional content during the Coronavirus crisis may contribute to societal value change. Emotion sharing via social media could lead to emotional contagion which in turn could facilitate an emotional climate in a society. In turn, the emotional climate of a society can influence society’s value structure. The emotions that spread in the current Coronavirus crisis are predominantly negative, which could result in a negative emotional climate. Based on the dynamic relations of values to each other and the way that emotions relate to values, a negative emotional climate can contribute to societal value change towards values related to security preservation and threat avoidance. As a consequence, a negative emotional climate and the shift in values could lead to a change in political attitudes that has implications for rights, freedom, privacy and moral progress. Considering the impact of social media in terms of emotional contagion and a longer-lasting value change is an important perspective in thinking about the ethical long-term impact of social media technology.

Ethical issues concerning brain–computer interfaces have already received a considerable amount of attention. However, one particular form of BCI has not received the attention that it deserves: Affective BCIs that allow for the detection and stimulation of affective states. This paper brings the ethical issues of affective BCIs in sharper focus. The paper briefly reviews recent applications of affective BCIs and considers ethical issues that arise from these applications. Ethical issues that affective BCIs share with other neurotechnologies are presented and ethical concerns that are specific to affective BCIs are identified and discussed.

Connecting human minds to various technological devices and applications through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) affords intriguingly novel ways for humans to engage and interact with the world. Not only do BCIs play an important role in restorative medicine, they are also increasingly used outside of medical or therapeutic contexts (e.g., gaming or mental state monitoring). A striking peculiarity of BCI technology is that the kind of actions it enables seems to differ from paradigmatic human actions, because, effects in the world are brought about by devices such as robotic arms, prosthesis, or other machines, and their execution runs through a computer directed by brain signals. In contrast to usual forms of action, the sequence does not need to involve bodily or muscle movements at all. A motionless body, the epitome of inaction, might be acting. How do theories of action relate to such BCI-mediated forms of changing the world? We wish to explore this question through the lenses of three perspectives on agency: subjective experience of agency, philosophical action theory, and legal concepts of action. Our analysis pursues three aims: First, we shall discuss whether and which BCI-mediated events qualify as actions, according to the main concepts of action in philosophy and law. Secondly, en passant, we wish to highlight the ten most interesting novelties or peculiarities of BCI-mediated movements. Thirdly, we seek to explore whether these novel forms of movement may have consequences for concepts of agency. More concretely, we think that convincing assessments of BCI-movements require more fine-grained accounts of agency and a distinction between various forms of control during movements. In addition, we show that the disembodied nature of BCI-mediated events causes troubles for the standard legal account of actions as bodily movements. In an exchange with views from philosophy, we wish to propose that the law ought to reform its concept of action to include some, but not all, BCI-mediated events and sketch some of the wider implications this may have, especially for the venerable legal idea of the right to freedom of thought. In this regard, BCIs are an example of the way in which technological access to yet largely sealed-off domains of the person may necessitate adjusting normative boundaries between the personal and the social sphere.

Can scientific evidence prompt us to revise philosophical theories or folk theoretical accounts of phenomena of the mind? We will argue that it can—but only under the condition that they make a so-called ‘ontological commitment’ to something that is actually subject to empirical inquiry. In other words, scientific evidence pertaining to neuroanatomical structure or causal processes only has a refuting effect if philosophical theories and folk notions subscribe to either account. We will illustrate the importance of ‘ontological commitment’ with the ‘neuroanatomical approach’ to amusement as proposed in a recent paper by Palencik :419–434, 2007). We will show that the scientific evidence presented in said neuroanatomical approach has no bearing on the conceptual issues, in that the philosophical theories and folk distinction that are criticized do not subscribe to any account of the underlying neuroanatomical structure or causal processes. Our suggestions in this paper are not limited to philosophical accounts of humor but apply to the relationship of philosophy, common sense and science in general.

Consider Bob, whom people attest a lack of sense of humor because he is not easily amused. He may ask himself, "Can I train to be amused more often?" or, in a more sophisticated manner, "Can I somehow improve the mechanism that is responsible for amusement in a way so that I enhance my ability to be amused?" Given that a sense of humor is something that we value in other people, the wish to improve this ability may not be as far-fetched as it might seem. Some authors have hinted that our sense of humor is subject to cultivation and training.1 Aaron Smuts, for example, claims that our sense of humor can be trained and blocked.2 In the light of these remarks, I want to investigate the idea that our ability of...

In this paper, I argue that machines can create works of art. My argument is based on an analysis of the so-called creative machines and focuses on technical functions and intentions. If my proposal is correct, then creative machines are technical artifacts with the proper function to bring about works of art. My account is based on sensible conceptual connections between makers, technical artifacts, intentions, and the creation of art. One upshot of the account presented here is that we do not need a new conceptual framework or dubious assumptions about artistic agency on part of machines in order to arrive at the conclusion that creative machines make art. I will conclude the paper with some remarks regarding the artistic value of items produced by creative machines.