•  8
    Robots, Rebukes, and Relationships
    Res Philosophica 100 (1): 43-62. 2023.
    The status and functioning of shame is contested in moral psychology. In much of anglophone philosophy and psychology, it is presumed to be largely destructive, while in Confucian philosophy and many East Asian communities, it is positively associated with moral development. Recent work in human-robot interaction offers a unique opportunity to investigate how shame functions while controlling for confounding variables of interpersonal interaction. One research program suggests a Confucian strate…Read more
  • Evaluations of social media’s impact on friendship have often focused on risks and drawbacks. In this chapter, both empirical and philosophical resources are surveyed and a more nuanced conclusion is defended. While social media platforms and users are too diverse to support simplistic conclusions, investigating the details of shared activity and influence on character in the context of social media interactions, we can find evidence of genuine benefits as well as hazards, and the evolving and e…Read more
  •  94
    When it comes to social robotics (robots that engage human social responses via “eyes” and other facial features, voice-based natural-language interactions, and even evocative movements), ethicists, particularly in European and North American traditions, are divided over whether and why they might be morally considerable. Some argue that moral considerability is based on internal psychological states like consciousness and sentience, and debate about thresholds of such features sufficient for et…Read more
  •  184
    Caregiving robots are often lauded for their potential to assist with geriatric care. While seniors can be wise and mature, possessing valuable life experience, they can also present a variety of ethical challenges, from prevalence of racism and sexism, to troubled relationships, histories of abusive behavior, and aggression, mood swings and impulsive behavior associated with cognitive decline. I draw on Confucian ethics, especially the concept of filial piety, to address these issues. Confucian…Read more
  •  7
    Guest editorial
    with Marty J. Wolf and Gosia Plotka
    Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 17 (2): 114-118. 2019.
    “Congealing” is a word that evokes senses of unpleasantness where perhaps something inviting had once been. It also implies that things are becoming less fluid and more rigid. As we began organizing ETHICOMP 2018, we wanted a theme that reflected the impact of technologies on human cultures, practices and lives. Our initial draft of the theme was “Creating, Changing, and Congealing Ways of Life with Technologies.” And while we were eventually persuaded to use a more congenial way of putting the …Read more
  • Forgiveness and Friendship
    In Forgiveness and Philosophy - Volume 1: Explorations of Forgiveness: Personal, Relational, and Religious, Vernon Press. pp. 17-38. 2016.
  •  26
    Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In Digital Souls, Patrick Stokes brings together a thoughtful account of personal identity and death with a range of examples from literature and real life, to help us think about the dead online....
  •  986
    Excellent online friendships: an Aristotelian defense of social media
    Ethics and Information Technology 16 (4): 287-297. 2014.
    I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital…Read more
  •  26
    What Words Can’t Say
    Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 16 (1): 2-15. 2018.
    Purpose This paper aims to survey the moral psychology of emoji, time-restricted messaging and other non-verbal elements of nominally textual computer-mediated communication. These features are increasingly common in interpersonal communication. Effects on both individual well-being and quality of intimate relationships are assessed. Results of this assessment are used to support ethical conclusions about these elements of digital communication. Design/methodology/approach Assessment of these no…Read more
  •  219
    Siri, Stereotypes, and the Mechanics of Sexism
    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 8 (3). 2022.
    Feminized AIs designed for in-home verbal assistance are often subjected to gendered verbal abuse by their users. I survey a variety of features contributing to this phenomenon—from financial incentives for businesses to build products likely to provoke gendered abuse, to the impact of such behavior on household members—and identify a potential worry for attempts to criticize the phenomenon; while critics may be tempted to argue that engaging in gendered abuse of AI increases the chances that on…Read more
  •  211
    The status and functioning of shame is contested in moral psychology. In much of anglophone philosophy and psychology, it is presumed to be largely destructive, while in Confucian philosophy and many East Asian communities, it is positively associated with moral development. Recent work in human-robot interaction offers a unique opportunity to investigate how shame functions while controlling for confounding variables of interpersonal interaction. One research program suggests a Confucian strate…Read more
  •  26
    Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In the first part of the book Elder develops a ro…Read more
  •  410
    The interpersonal is political: unfriending to promote civic discourse on social media
    Ethics and Information Technology 22 (1): 15-24. 2020.
    Despite the initial promise of social media platforms as a means of facilitating discourse on matters of civic discourse, in practice it has turned out to impair fruitful conversation on civic issues by a number of means. From self-isolation into echo chambers, to algorithmically supported filter bubbles, to widespread failure to engage politically owing to psychological phenomena like the ‘spiral of silence’, a variety of factors have been blamed. I argue that extant accounts overlook the impor…Read more
  •  8
    The Philosophy of Forgiveness is multi-dimensional and complex. As recent scholarly philosophical works on forgiveness illustrate, incorporating personal, relational, political, ethical, psychological, and religious dimensions into one consistent conception of “forgiveness” is difficult. As part of Vernon Press’s series on the Philosophy of Forgiveness, Explorations of Forgiveness: Personal, Relational, and Religious begins the task of creating a consistent multidimensional account of forgivenes…Read more
  •  352
    Zhuangzi on Friendship and Death
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (4): 575-592. 2014.
    Zhuangzi suggests that death is a transformation that we commonly and mistakenly think means the end of someone but really just marks a new phase of existence. This metaphysical thesis is presented at several points in the text as an explanation of distinctively Daoist responses to death and loss. Some take a Daoist response to death, as presented by Zhuangzi, to indicate dual perspectives on friendship and death. But I argue that the metaphysical view sketched above is consistent with a unified…Read more
  •  1699
    Why Bad People Can't be Good Friends
    Ratio 27 (1): 84-99. 2013.
    Must the best friends necessarily be good people? On the one hand, as Aristotle puts it, ‘people think that the same people are good and also friends’. But on the other hand, friendship sometimes seems to require that one behave badly. For example, a normally honest person might lie to corroborate a friend's story. What I will call closeness, which I take to include sensitivity to friends' subjective values and concerns as well as an inclination to take their subjective interests as reasons for …Read more
  •  12
    Living with Robots (review)
    The Philosophers' Magazine 86 115-117. 2019.
  •  208
    Proprioception, Anosognosia, and the Richness of Conscious Experience
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (3-4): 3-4. 2013.
    Proprioception, a sense of bodily position and movement, is rarely the focus of conscious experience. If we are ordinarily conscious of proprioception, we seem only peripherally so. Thus, evidence that proprioception is present in the periphery of at least some conscious experiences seems to be good evidence that conscious experience is fairly rich. Anosognosia for paralysis is a denial of paralysis of one's limbs, usually in the wake of brain damage from stroke. Because anosognosic patients ove…Read more
  •  482
    Conversation from Beyond the Grave? A Neo‐Confucian Ethics of Chatbots of the Dead
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (1): 73-88. 2020.
    Digital records, from chat transcripts to social media posts, are being used to create chatbots that recreate the conversational style of deceased individuals. Some maintain that this is merely a new form of digital memorial, while others argue that they pose a variety of moral hazards. To resolve this, I turn to classical Chinese philosophy to make use of a debate over the ethics of funerals and mourning. This ancient argument includes much of interest for the contemporary issue at hand, includ…Read more