Mark Coeckelbergh

This special issue introduces the study of financial technologies and finance to the field of philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have not traditionally been in dialogue. The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger; Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange, by Laura Lotti; ‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial Technologies in a Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two Technical Images: Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh.

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life.

Contemporary ICTs such as speaking machines and computer games tend to create illusions. Is this ethically problematic? Is it deception? And what kind of “reality” do we presuppose when we talk about illusion in this context? Inspired by work on similarities between ICT design and the art of magic and illusion, responding to literature on deception in robot ethics and related fields, and briefly considering the issue in the context of the history of machines, this paper discusses these questions through the lens of stage magic and illusionism, with the aim of reframing the very question of deception. It investigates if we can take a more positive or at least morally neutral view of magic, illusion, and performance, while still being able to understand and criticize the relevant phenomena, and if we can describe and evaluate these phenomena without recourse to the term “deception” at all. This leads the paper into a discussion about metaphysics and into taking a relational and narrative turn. Replying to Tognazzini, the paper identifies and analyses two metaphysical positions: a narrative and performative non-dualist position is articulated in response to what is taken to be a dualist, in particular Platonic, approach to “deception” phenomena. The latter is critically discussed and replaced by a performative and relational approach which avoids a distant “view from nowhere” metaphysics and brings us back to the phenomena and experience in the performance relation. The paper also reflects on the ethical and political implications of the two positions: for the responsibility of ICT designers and users, which are seen as co-responsible magicians or co-performers, and for the responsibility of those who influence the social structures that shape who has power to deceive or to let others perform.

One of the barriers for doing ethics of technology in the domain of finance is that financial technologies usually remain invisible. These hidden and unseen devices, machines, and infrastructures have to be revealed. This paper shows how the “robots” of finance, which function as distance technologies, are not only themselves invisible, but also hide people and places, which is ethically and politically problematic. Furthermore, “the market” appears as a ghostly artificial agent, again rendering humans invisible and making it difficult to ascribe responsibility. Epistemic invisibilities thus become moral invisibilities. Finally, if we want to render finance more socially and ethically responsible, we also have to reveal the hidden efforts of many individuals and communities to re-invent finance by means of alternative financial practices and technologies. Research on responsible innovation should also consider less visible innovation that happens outside academia and industry.

As machines take over more tasks previously done by humans, artistic creation is also considered as a candidate to be automated. But, can machines create art? This paper offers a conceptual framework for a philosophical discussion of this question regarding the status of machine art and machine creativity. It breaks the main question down in three sub-questions, and then analyses each question in order to arrive at more precise problems with regard to machine art and machine creativity: What is art creation? What do we mean by art? And, what do we mean by machines create art? This then provides criteria we can use to discuss the main question in relation to particular cases. In the course of the analysis, the paper engages with theory in aesthetics, refers to literature on computational creativity, and contributes to the philosophy of technology and philosophical anthropology by reflecting on the role of technology in art creation. It is shown that the distinctions between process versus outcome criteria and subjective versus objective criteria of creativity are unstable. It is also argued that we should consider non-human forms of creativity, and not only cases where either humans or machines create art but also collaborations between humans and machines, which makes us reflect on human-technology relations. Finally, the paper questions the very approach that seeks criteria and suggests that the artistic status of machines may be shown and revealed in the human/non-human encounter before any theorizing or agreement takes place; an experience which then is presupposed when we theorize. This hints at a more general model of what happens in artistic perception and engagement as a hybrid human-technological and emergent or even poetic process, a model which leaves more room for letting ourselves be surprised by creativity—human and perhaps non-human.

In the philosophy of technology after the empirical turn, little attention has been paid to language and its relation to technology. In this programmatic and explorative paper, it is proposed to use the later Wittgenstein, not only to pay more attention to language use in philosophy of technology, but also to rethink technology itself—at least technology in its aspect of tool, technology-in-use. This is done by outlining a working account of Wittgenstein’s view of language and by then applying that account to technology—turning around Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the toolbox. Using Wittgenstein’s concepts of language games and form of life and coining the term ‘technology games’, the paper proposes and argues for a use-oriented, holistic, transcendental, social, and historical approach to technology which is empirically but also normatively sensitive, and which takes into account implicit knowledge and know-how. It gives examples of interaction with social robots to support the relevance of this project for understanding and evaluating today’s technologies, makes comparisons with authors in philosophy of technology such as Winner and Ihde, and sketches the contours of a phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology use that may help us to understand but also to gain a more critical relation to specific uses of concrete technologies in everyday contexts. Ultimately, given the holism argued for, it also promises a more critical relation to the games and forms of life technologies are embedded in—to the ways we do things.

This special issue introduces the study of financial technologies and finance to the field of philosophy of technology, bringing together two different fields that have not traditionally been in dialogue. The included articles are: Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain, by Martin Zeilinger; Fundamentals of Algorithmic Markets: Liquidity, Contingency, and the Incomputability of Exchange, by Laura Lotti; ‘Crises of Modernity’ Discourses and the Rise of Financial Technologies in a Contested Mechanized World, by Marinus Ossewaarde; Two Technical Images: Blockchain and High-Frequency Trading, by Diego Viana; and The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies, by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh.

ABSTRACT: This paper raises questions regarding the societal, cultural and ethical significance of finance, mathematics, and financial-mathematical technologies, discussing in particular the phenomenon of quantification as mediated by contemporary electronic information and communication technologies (ICTS). It first relates the history of mathematics to the history of financial technologies, and argues, inspired by Simmel and Marcuse, that from ancient times to now there seems to be an evolution towards increasing quantification not only in finance, accounting etc., but in modern society in general. It shows that scientific and technological changes have social and ethical consequences, as quantification creates more distance between people. The paper then analyzes and discusses current shifts of financial agency that exemplify what seems to be a moment of hyper-quantification through the use of ICTs: experiences of “the market” as an independent agent and money machines as artificial agents in high frequency trading—perhaps the only agents still able to cope with the data-loaded and hyper-quantified world we live in. Under these conditions it becomes more difficult to exercise responsibility. The paper concludes that while we must acknowledge the human character of finance and mathematics, there are real human and social consequences of quantification, in ancient times and today, for society and responsibility. It is therefore misleading to assume that financial technologies and mathematics are ethically neutral; more analysis of ethical and societal aspects is needed, also from an “outside” perspective.

Although the role of imagination in moral reasoning is often neglected, recent literature, mostly of pragmatist signature, points to imagination as one of its central elements. In this article we develop some of their arguments by looking at the moral role of imagination in practice, in particular the practice of neonatal intensive care. Drawing on empirical research, we analyze a decision-making process in various stages: delivery, staff meeting, and reflection afterwards. We show how imagination aids medical practitioners demarcating moral categories, tuning their actions, and exploring long-range consequences of decisions. We argue that imagination helps to bring about at least four kinds of integration in the moral decision-making process: personal integration by creating a moral self-image in moments of reflection; social integration by aiding the conciliation of the diverging perspectives of the people involved; temporal integration by facilitating the parties to transcend the present moment and connect past, present, and future; and epistemological integration by helping to combine the various forms of knowledge and experience needed to make moral decisions. Furthermore, we argue that the role of imagination in these moral decision-processes is limited in several significant ways. Rather than being a solution itself, it is merely an aid and cannot replace the decision itself. Finally, there are also limits to the practical relevance of this theoretical reflection. In the end, it is up to care professionals as reflective practitioners to re-imagine the practice of intensive care and make the right decisions with hope and imagination.

Whereas standard approaches to risk and vulnerability presuppose a strict separation between humans and their world, this book develops an existential-phenomenological approach according to which we are always already beings-at-risk. Moreover, it is argued that in our struggle against vulnerability, we create new vulnerabilities and thereby transform ourselves as much as we transform the world. Responding to the discussion about human enhancement and information technologies, the book then shows that this dynamic-relational approach has important implications for the evaluation of new technologies and their risks. It calls for a normative anthropology of vulnerability that does not ask which objective risks are acceptable, how we can become invulnerable, or which technologies threaten human nature, but which vulnerability transformations we want. To the extent that we can steer the growth of new technologies at all, this tragic and sometimes comic project should therefore be guided by what we want to become.​

Is there a politics of artifacts, and if so, what does it mean? Defining the issue as a problem about the relation between the human and the non-human, I argue that our common philosophical concepts bar us from an adequate understanding of this problem. Using the work of Hannah Arendt and Bruno Latour, I explore an escape route that involves a radical redefinition of the social. But the cost of this solution is high: we would lose the metaphysical foundation for our belief in the absolute value and dignity of humans. We should pay that prize only if we gain a better understanding of what we are doing and what we want to do together – with things.

Under what conditions can robots become companions and what are the ethical issues that might arise in human-robot companionship relations? I argue that the possibility and future of robots as companions depends on the robot’s capacity to be a recipient of human empathy, and that one necessary condition for this to happen is that the robot mirrors human vulnerabilities. For the purpose of these arguments, I make a distinction between empathy-as-cognition and empathy-as-feeling, connecting the latter to the moral sentiment tradition and its concept of “fellow feeling.” Furthermore, I sympathise with the intuition that vulnerability mirroring raises the ethical issue of deception. However, given the importance of appearance in social relations, problems with the concept of deception, and contemporary technologies that question the artificial-natural distinction, we cannot easily justify the underlying assumptions of the deception objection. If we want to hold on to them, we need convincing answers to these problems.

Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purposes

This paper explores how the phenomenology of using self-driving cars influences conditions for exercising and ascribing responsibility. First, a working account of responsibility is presented, which identifies two classic Aristotelian conditions for responsibility and adds a relational one, and which makes a distinction between responsibility for (what one does) and responsibility to (others). Then, this account is applied to a phenomenological analysis of what happens when we use a self-driving car and participate in traffic. It is argued that self-driving cars threaten the excercise and ascription of responsibility in several ways. These include the replacement of human agency by machine agency, but also the user’s changing epistemic relation to the environment and others, which can be described in terms of (dis)engagement. It is concluded that the discussion about the ethics of self-driving cars and related problems of responsibility should be restricted neither to general responsibilities related to the use of self-driving cars and its objective risks, nor to questions regarding the behavior, intelligence, autonomy, and ethical “thinking” of the car in response to the objective features of the traffic situations (e.g. various scenarios). Rather, it should also reflect on the shifting experience of the user: how the new technology reshapes the subjectivity of the user and on the morel consequences this has.

This article explores the relevance of Georg Simmel’s phenomenology of money and interpretation of modernity for understanding and evaluating contemporary financial information and communication technologies (ICTs). It reads Simmel as a philosopher of technology and phenomenologist whose view of money as a medium, a “pure” tool, and a social institution can help us to think about contemporary financial media and technologies. The analysis focuses on the social-spatial implications of financial ICTs. It also makes links to media theory, in particular remediation theory and Marshall McLuhan, and refers to work in anthropology and geography of money to nuance the story of the progressive dematerialization and delocalization of modern life. The conclusion highlights Simmel’s continuing relevance for thinking about the relation between technologies and social change, and explores alternative social-financial media and institutions.

In this paper, we engage in a philosophical investigation of how blockchain technologies such as cryptocurrencies can mediate our social world. Emerging blockchain-based decentralised applications have the potential to transform our financial system, our bureaucracies and models of governance. We construct an ontological framework of “narrative technologies” that allows us to show how these technologies, like texts, can configure our social reality. Drawing from the work of Ricoeur and responding to the works of Searle, in postphenomenology and STS, we show how blockchain technologies bring about a process of emplotment: an organisation of characters and events. First, we show how blockchain technologies actively configure plots such as financial transactions by rendering them increasingly rigid. Secondly, we show how they configure abstractions from the world of action, by replacing human interactions with automated code. Third, we investigate the role of people’s interpretative distances towards blockchain technologies: discussing the importance of greater public involvement with their application in different realms of social life.

This reply to Gunkel and Zwart further reflects on, and responds to, the following main points: the Heideggerian character of my view and the potential link to Kafka, the suggestion that we should become hackers, the interpretation of my approach in terms of the Hegelian Master–Slave dialectic, the lack of an empirical dimension, and the claim that I think that modern heroism entails overcoming vulnerability. I acknowledge Heideggerian influence, reflect on what it could mean to think about living with ICTs as a kind of hacking, comment on the Hegelian interpretation of my approach and its application to human–technology relations, bring novels and films into the discussion, and clarify that contemporary works of fiction are not necessarily entirely modern and that it has been a central claim here and in my book that although modern thinking and practice attempts to overcome vulnerability with the help of technologies, this is not successful, or it is illusory

Transhumanist visions appear to aim at invulnerability. We are invited to fight the dragon of death and disease, to shed our old, human bodies, and to live on as invulnerable minds or cyborgs. This paper argues that even if we managed to enhance humans in one of these ways, we would remain highly vulnerable entities given the fundamentally relational and dependent nature of posthuman existence. After discussing the need for minds to be embodied, the issue of disease and death in the infosphere, and problems of psychological, social and axiological vulnerability, I conclude that transhumanist human enhancement would not erase our current vulnerabilities, but instead transform them. Although the struggle against vulnerability is typically human and would probably continue to mark posthumans, we had better recognize that we can never win that fight and that the many dragons that threaten us are part of us. As vulnerable humans and posthumans, we are at once the hero and the dragon

In this essay we reflect critically on how animal ethics, and in particular thinking about moral standing, is currently configured. Starting from the work of two influential “analytic” thinkers in this field, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, we examine some basic assumptions shared by these positions and demonstrate their conceptual failings—ones that have, despite efforts to the contrary, the general effect of marginalizing and excluding others. Inspired by the so-called “continental” philosophical tradition , we then argue that what is needed is a change in the rules of the game, a change of the question. We alter the normative question from “What properties does the animal have?” to “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?” This leads us to consider the role of language, personal relations, and material-technological contexts. What is needed then in response to the moral standing problem, is not more of the same—yet another, more refined criterion and argumentation concerning moral standing, or a “final” rational argumentation that would be able to settle the animal question once and for all—but a turning or transformation in both our thinking about and our relations to animals, through language, through technology, and through the various place-ordering practices in which we participate

Can we trust robots? Responding to the literature on trust and e-trust, this paper asks if the question of trust is applicable to robots, discusses different approaches to trust, and analyses some preconditions for trust. In the course of the paper a phenomenological-social approach to trust is articulated, which provides a way of thinking about trust that puts less emphasis on individual choice and control than the contractarian-individualist approach. In addition, the argument is made that while robots are neither human nor mere tools, we have sufficient functional, agency-based, appearance-based, social-relational, and existential criteria left to evaluate trust in robots. It is also argued that such evaluations must be sensitive to cultural differences, which impact on how we interpret the criteria and how we think of trust in robots. Finally, it is suggested that when it comes to shaping conditions under which humans can trust robots, fine-tuning human expectations and robotic appearances is advisable

Like other teletechnological practices, drone fighting as remote fighting gives rise to a paradox with regard to the relation between ethics and distance: on the one hand, it bridges physical distance in the sense that it enables spying on people and killing people in other parts of the world. On the other hand, it seems to increase moral distance: if you are far away from your target, it becomes easier to kill. However, based on interviews with drone crew as published in the media, I show that the current surveillance tech­nologies used in drone fighting might mitigate this effect since they allow the viewer to build up a kind of in­timacy with targets. Then I argue that this moral proximity is only possible if we assume!hat in­terpretation and the construction of narrative play a key role in the·epistemology of surveillance. I compare military surveillance to surveillance in public spaces to elaborate this point and explore the relation be­tween automated surveillance, distance, and interpretation. I also argue that given the lack of shared soci­ality and communication, moral distance in surveillance and drone fighting can only partly be bridged by technology-mediated interpretation and narration. I conclude that we need more reflection on how technol­ogies could create the conditions under which moral metamorphosis and interpretative freedom is not only possible but also probable.

Usually technological innovation and artistic work are seen as very distinctive practices, and innovation of technologies is understood in terms of design and human intention. Moreover, thinking about technological innovation is usually categorized as “technical” and disconnected from thinking about culture and the social. Drawing on work by Dewey, Heidegger, Latour, and Wittgenstein and responding to academic discourses about craft and design, ethics and responsible innovation, transdisciplinarity, and participation, this essay questions these assumptions and examines what kind of knowledge and practices are involved in art and technological innovation. It argues that technological innovation is indeed “technical”, but, if conceptualized as techne, can be understood as art and performance. It is argued that in practice, innovative techne is not only connected to episteme as theoretical knowledge but also has the mode of poiesis: it is not just the outcome of human design and intention but rather involves a performative process in which there is a “dialogue” between form and matter and between creator and environment in which humans and non-humans participate. Moreover, this art is embedded in broader cultural patterns and grammars—ultimately a ‘form of life’—that shape and make possible the innovation. In that sense, there is no gap between science and society—a gap that is often assumed in STS and in, for instance, discourse on responsible innovation. It is concluded that technology and art were only relatively recently and unfortunately divorced, conceptually, but that in practices and performances they were always linked. If we understand technological innovation as a poetic, participative, and performative process, then bringing together technological innovation and artistic practices should not be seen as a marginal or luxury project but instead as one that is central, necessary, and vital for cultural-technological change. This conceptualization supports not only a different approach to innovation but has also social-transformative potential and has implications for ethics of technology and responsible innovation.

What does it mean to introduce the notion of imagination in the discussion about global justice? What is gained by studying the role of imagination in thinking about global justice? Does a focus on imagination imply that we must replace existing influential principle-centred approaches such as that of John Rawls and his critics? We can distinguish between two approaches to global justice. One approach is Rawlsian and Kantian in inspiration. Discussions within this tradition typically focus on the question whether Rawls's theory of justice (1971), designed for the national level, can or should be applied to the global level. Can and should Rawls's Difference Principle be globalized, as Thomas Pogge argues? Is this proposal superior to Rawls's Law of Peoples (1999)? Another approach to global justice has been developed by Martha Nussbaum in Cultivating Humanity (1997), Poetic Justice (1995), and other work. I will construct her view and critically examine it by looking at her arguments about the relation between empathy, literature, and global justice. At first sight, these two approaches seem to be opposed. The former puts an emphasis on principles, universal reason, and the moral aspects of institutions and their policies, whereas the latter is rather concerned with the relation between imagination and justice, with the particular, and with the individual moral development. But is this necessarily so? I will show that both approaches could benefit from each other's insights to strengthen their own position. Moreover, I will argue for middle way between, or an integration of the two approaches that combines principles and imagination. In this way, we can move towards a more comprehensive account of global justice.

Contemporary philosophy of technology after the empirical turn has surprisingly little to say on the relation between language and technology. This essay describes this gap, offers a preliminary discussion of how language and technology may be related to show that there is a rich conceptual space to be gained, and begins to explore some ways in which the gap could be bridged by starting from within specific philosophical subfields and traditions. One route starts from philosophy of language (both ‘‘analytic’’ and ‘‘continental’’: Searle and Heidegger) and discusses some potential implications for thinking about technology; another starts from artefact-oriented approaches in philosophy of technology and STS and shows that these approaches might helpfully be extended by theorizing relationships between language and techno- logical artefacts. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda, which invites more work on the relation between language and technology.