Christoph Luetge

This book examines the theoretical foundations of order ethics and discusses business ethics problems from an order ethics perspective. Order ethics focuses on the social order and the institutional environment in which individuals interact. It is a well-established paradigm in European business ethics. The book contains articles written by leading experts in the field and provides both a concise introduction to order ethics and short summary articles homing in on specific aspects of the order-ethical paradigm. It presents contributions describing fundamental concepts, historical roots, and the economic, social, and philosophical background of the theory. The second part of the handbook focuses on the theory's application in business, society, and politics, casting new light on an array of topics that loom large in contemporary ethical discourse.​

Organizational integrity is a key concept with and through which a company can assume its responsibility for ethical and societal issues. It is a basic premise for sustainable corporate success, as ethical risks ultimately become economic risks for a company. Recent research shows the potential of integrity‐based governance models to reduce corporate risks and to improve business performance. However, companies are not yet able to assess nor evaluate their level of organizational integrity in a sound and systematic way. We aim to develop a theoretical model as a basis for the measurement of organizational integrity by conceptualizing the construct and sizing the theoretical model's scope. We suggest that the theoretical model follows a holistic approach and involves three types of dimensions: prerequisite dimensions, independent dimensions, and dependent dimensions. The organizational integrity triad—consisting of active commitments to self‐imposed norms and principles, their transparent institutionalization into corporate processes and structures, and their implementation into action—plays a key role in this context.

Those who invoke the notion of moral responsibility in ethical discourse seem to be faced with a dilemma. Apparently, they either have to violate the “control principle” which says that nobody can be held responsible for what is beyond one's control. Or they have to concede that in many cases there is a “responsibility void” which means that nobody is responsible. The first option seems unjustifiable. The second renders the concept of moral responsibility useless. This dilemma may be taken to suggest that thinking about moral issues in terms of responsibility is an unproductive way of doing ethics. In our paper we offer a solution which, we hope, can rehabilitate responsibility as a moral concept. It combines order ethics (which is a kind of ethics that primarily focuses on the institutional structure of society) with a recently developed account of group agency

Karl Popper hat eine Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie, eine Philosophie der Naturwissenschaften, eine Sozialphilosophie, eine Philosophie des Geistes und sogar Beiträge zur Ästhetik geliefert. Lediglich eine Ethik fehlt, was bei Popper, der sich immer als Philosoph der Aufklärung bezeichnete, doch etwas erstaunt. Ich werde versuchen, Elemente einer solchen Ethik zu rekonstruieren. Karl Poppers Beiträge zur Ethik sind relativ wenig bekannt. Dies dürfte vor allem daran liegen, dass sich keine seiner Arbeiten ausschließlich mit Ethik beschäftigt. Stattdessen findet man Bemerkungen zu diesem Thema verstreut in ganz verschiedenen Werken, vor allem in der Offenen Gesellschaft. Da Popper keine systematische Darstellung seiner Ansichten zur Ethik geliefert hat, soll dieser Artikel dazu beitragen, diese Lücke zu schließen.

This open access book tackles the pressing problem of integrating concerns related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics into higher education curriculums aimed at future AI developers in Africa and beyond. For doing so, it analyzes the present and future states of AI ethics education in local computer science and engineering programs. The authors share relevant best practices and use cases for teaching, develop answers to ongoing organizational challenges, and reflect on the practical implications of different theoretical approaches to AI ethics. The book is of great interest to faculty members, researchers, and students in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, mathematics, computer engineering, and related areas, as well as higher education administration.

This article discusses the question whether modern societies require some kind of a social glue in order to remain stable. This social glue (termed the ‘moral surplus’) is regarded as a moral capacity or capability which goes beyond the individual quest for advantages and benefits. Four positions in contemporary social philosophy which postulate a moral surplus are discussed and criticized: J. Habermas, J. Rawls, D. Gauthier and K. Binmore. The conception of order ethics is outlined as an alternative view which abandons the idea of a moral surplus.

This paper extends previous attempts at understanding the nature of organizational integrity and its increasingly important role for companies which, after all, bear a moral and societal responsibility. Interpretations of organizational integrity in business ethics literature incorporate aspects ranging from the behavior of managers and employees to corporate structures and incentive systems. We argue that virtue ethics builds an indispensable framework for understanding the origin of the concept of integrity and transfer these findings to an organizational level. Hence, we first define organizational integrity, and second operationalize it in a closed three-step process, consisting of morally sound corporate commitments, their transparent institutionalization within the company, and their implementation into actions. We consider the main goal of organizational integrity to be of a preventative investment nature. Organizational integrity is a company investment that translates into avoiding fines for potential violations of the law or ethical missteps, as well as an investment in the company’s reputation. In turn, organizational integrity can protect a company from disruptions that can threaten its existence. Defining and operationalizing the concept of organizational integrity provides the foundation for future scientific research and the basis for developing practical guidance for organizations and managers.

The German Act on Autonomous Driving constitutes the first national framework on level four autonomous vehicles and has received attention from policy makers, AI ethics scholars and legal experts in autonomous driving. Owing to Germany’s role as a global hub for car manufacturing, the following paper sheds light on the act’s position within the ethical discourse and how it reconfigures the balance between legislation and ethical frameworks. Specifically, in this paper, we highlight areas that need to be more worked out in the future either through ethical conventions, corporate measures or legal measures and examine how the law can be incorporated into the existing discourse on the regulation of technologies. Based on this examination, we derive implications for future discourse and elaborate on companies’ responsibilities in developing autonomous driving technologies in an ethical sense.

Companies increasingly deploy artificial intelligence technologies in their personnel recruiting and selection process to streamline it, making it faster and more efficient. AI applications can be found in various stages of recruiting, such as writing job ads, screening of applicant resumes, and analyzing video interviews via face recognition software. As these new technologies significantly impact people’s lives and careers but often trigger ethical concerns, the ethicality of these AI applications needs to be comprehensively understood. However, given the novelty of AI applications in recruiting practice, the subject is still an emerging topic in academic literature. To inform and strengthen the foundation for future research, this paper systematically reviews the extant literature on the ethicality of AI-enabled recruiting to date. We identify 51 articles dealing with the topic, which we synthesize by mapping the ethical opportunities, risks, and ambiguities, as well as the proposed ways to mitigate ethical risks in practice. Based on this review, we identify gaps in the extant literature and point out moral questions that call for deeper exploration in future research.

This article reports the findings of AI4People, an Atomium—EISMD initiative designed to lay the foundations for a “Good AI Society”. We introduce the core opportunities and risks of AI for society; present a synthesis of five ethical principles that should undergird its development and adoption; and offer 20 concrete recommendations—to assess, to develop, to incentivise, and to support good AI—which in some cases may be undertaken directly by national or supranational policy makers, while in others may be led by other stakeholders. If adopted, these recommendations would serve as a firm foundation for the establishment of a Good AI Society.

The European Medical Information Framework project, funded through the IMI programme, has designed and implemented a federated platform to connect health data from a variety of sources across Europe, to facilitate large scale clinical and life sciences research. It enables approved users to analyse securely multiple, diverse, data via a single portal, thereby mediating research opportunities across a large quantity of research data. EMIF developed a code of practice to ensure the privacy protection of data subjects, protect the interests of data sharing parties, comply with legislation and various organisational policies on data protection, uphold best practices in the protection of personal privacy and information governance, and eventually promote these best practices more widely. EMIF convened an Ethics Advisory Board, to provide feedback on its approach, platform, and the EcoP. The most important challenges the ECoP team faced were: how to define, control and monitor the purposes for which federated health data are used; the kinds of organisation that should be permitted to conduct permitted research; and how to monitor this. This manuscript explores those issues, offering the combined insights of the EAB and EMIF core ECoP team. For some issues, a consensus on how to approach them is proposed. For other issues, a singular approach may be premature but the challenges are summarised to help the community to debate the topic further. Arguably, the issues and their analyses have application beyond EMIF, to many research infrastructures connected to health data sources.

In 2017, the German ethics commission for automated and connected driving released 20 ethical guidelines for autonomous vehicles. It is now up to the research and industrial sectors to enhance the development of autonomous vehicles based on such guidelines. In the current state of the art, we find studies on how ethical theories can be integrated. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no framework for motion planning has yet been published which allows for the true implementation of any practical ethical policies. This paper makes four contributions: Firstly, we briefly present the state of the art based on recent works concerning unavoidable accidents of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and identify further need for research. While most of the research focuses on decision strategies in moral dilemmas or crash optimization, we aim to develop an ethical trajectory planning for all situations on public roads. Secondly, we discuss several ethical theories and argue for the adoption of the theory “ethics of risk.” Thirdly, we propose a new framework for trajectory planning, with uncertainties and an assessment of risks. In this framework, we transform ethical specifications into mathematical equations and thus create the basis for the programming of an ethical trajectory. We present a risk cost function for trajectory planning that considers minimization of the overall risk, priority for the worst-off and equal treatment of people. Finally, we build a connection between the widely discussed trolley problem and our proposed framework.

Dilemma situations involving the choice of which human life to save in the case of unavoidable accidents are expected to arise only rarely in the context of autonomous vehicles. Nonetheless, the scientific community has devoted significant attention to finding appropriate and acceptable automated decisions in the event that AVs or drivers of AVs were indeed to face such situations. Awad and colleagues, in their now famous paper “The Moral Machine Experiment”, used a “multilingual online ‘serious game’ for collecting large-scale data on how citizens would want AVs to solve moral dilemmas in the context of unavoidable accidents.” Awad and colleagues undoubtedly collected an impressive and philosophically useful data set of armchair intuitions. However, we argue that applying their findings to the development of “global, socially acceptable principles for machine learning” would violate basic tenets of human rights law and fundamental principles of human dignity. To make its arguments, our paper cites principles of tort law, relevant case law, provisions from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and rules from the German Ethics Code for Autonomous and Connected Driving.

The Honorable Merchant as an ideal of business ethics has a long-standing tradition. However, this ideal focusses a lot on the individual person and less on situational conditions, constraints and incentives under which people act. The Order Ethics approach helps conceptualize and justify why business ethics for the globalized market economy might shift this focus and put situational conditions on top of the agenda. This holds within companies as well: Instead of insisting on the ideal of the honorable merchant, companies should change structural incentives and conditions, by way of mechanisms such as Corporate Social Responsibility and others.

This paper draws a connection between recent developments in naturalized philosophy of science and in economics. Social epistemology is one part of the naturalistic enterprise that has become especially important. Some approaches in this field use methods borrowed from economics, a fact that has often been overlooked. But there are also genuinely economic approaches to the problems of science and knowledge. Some of these approaches can be seen as contributions to an "economic epistemology." While these contributions are certainly fruitful, they have also raised criticism from economists. I overview of these points of criticism and outline possibilities to deal with these problems. In particular, the Buchanan research program offers some help.

Teaching experiments are valuable when it comes to sensitizing students for business ethics that addresses the behavior of agents in modern societies. Many students are coined by the often predominantly individualistic ethical reasoning that they are accustomed to from their living environments. In our classes, we confront them with the volatility of their own ethical behavior by the use of experiments that ideally work with real incentives. We believe experiments to be a powerful tool not only to illustrate theoretical concepts, but also to make students experience the compulsion of economic incentives first-hand. This may lead to the insight that one is more prone to the contingencies of the situation than expected. Experiments may make students question their own behavior and re-evaluate the implementability of their moral ideals - as consumers, citizens and managers.

The theme arises from the legal-academic movement "Law and Literature". This newly developed field should aim at two major goals, first, to investigate the meaning of law in a social context by questioning how the characters appearing in literary works understand and behave themselves to the law, and second, to find out a theoretical solution of the methodological question whether and to what extent the legal text can be interpreted objectively in comparison with the question how literary works should be interpreted. The subject of justice and injustice has been covered not only in treatises of law and philosophy, but also in many works of literature: On the one hand, poets and writers have been outraged at the social conditions of their time. On the other hand, some of them have also contributed fundamental reflections on the idea of justice itself.

This edited collection brings together experts from various disciplines to engage critically with diversity theory, diversity politics, and their practical application. Accordingly, the volume provides a provocative discursive space, where the key theoretical as well as practical problems of diversity in business, institutions and culture can speak to each other and can be assessed. The aim is to bridge the gap between two relatively distinct discourses: the discourse on practical applications of diversity concepts and the discourse on theoretical approaches to diversity. This selection of articles delivers the first step towards achieving this goal. Approaching diversity from a business perspective, the chapters discuss its ramifications on democratic institutions and theory, as well as point to its relevance in didactic and educational settings.

Throughout its age-old tradition, philosophy has continuously been presented with new challenges. The latest one in this series comes from the experimental disciplines and their methodology: experimental philosophy has, during the last 10 to 15 years, increasingly gained reputation, and it has certainly been a controversial issue. Within this movement, the field of ethics deserves more attention. This article aims to give not a complete overview of, but at least an introduction to, the newly rising field of ‘Experimental Ethics’, the chances it offers, the problems for discussion, and the criticism to be expected.

This volume explores the concept of the honest merchant, taking a broad perspective and covering a wide range of aspects. It looks at the different types of “honest merchant” conceptions originating from different cultures and literary traditions. The book covers Japanese, Islamic, Scandinavian, Russian, German, Spanish, as well as other aspects, and studies different disciplinary backgrounds of the honest merchant, such as philosophical, economic, neuroethical, sociological and literary ones. The concept of the honest merchant has a long tradition in business ethics. In the Hanseatic League and in medieval Italy, the ideal of the honest businessman was taught since the late Middle Ages. It originated during a time when travelling merchants were often regarded with a sceptical eye. The honest merchants of their time however held clear principles in their business and took responsibility for their community. In later times, the religious notions of the concept lost their pivotal place to reason and morality. This book goes beyond the tradition of discussing business ethics in association with concepts from the Hanseatic League and medieval Italy, and puts the central concept of business ethics in a much greater perspective.

Deliberation and Decision explores ways of bridging the gap between two rival approaches to theorizing about democratic institutions: constitutional economics on the one hand and deliberative democracy on the other. The two approaches offer very different accounts of the functioning and legitimacy of democratic institutions. Although both highlight the importance of democratic consent, their accounts of such consent could hardly be more different. Constitutional economics models individuals as self-interested rational utility maximizers and uses economic efficiency criteria such as incentive compatibility for evaluating institutions. Deliberative democracy models individuals as communicating subjects capable of engaging in democratic discourse. The two approaches are disjointed not only in terms of their assumptions and methodology but also in terms of the communication - or lack thereof - between their respective communities of researchers. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the recent debate between the two approaches and makes new and original contributions to that debate.

The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years :28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially automated driving already becoming standard in new cars from a number of manufacturers, the question of ethical and legal standards becomes virulent. For exam-ple, while automated and autonomous cars, being equipped with appropriate detection sensors, processors, and intelligent mapping material, have a chance of being much safer than human-driven cars in many regards, situations will arise in which accidents cannot be completely avoided. Such situations will have to be dealt with when programming the software of these vehicles. In several instances, internationally, regulations have been passed, based on legal considerations of road safety, mostly. However, to date, there have been few, if any, cases of a broader ethics code for autonomous or automated driving preceding actual regulation and being based on a broadly composed ethics committee of independent experts. In July 2016, the German Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt, appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, which began its work in September 2016. In June 2017, this committee presented a code of ethics which was published in German and in English. It consists of 20 ethical guidelines. Having been a member of this committee, I will present the main ethical topics of these guidelines and the discussions that lay behind them.

Zunächst einmal möchten wir klären, was der Begriff ökonomischer Bildung umfasst, um in einem zweiten Schritt klären zu können, welche Teilaspekte von ökonomischer Bildung möglicherweise verbindlich gelehrt werden sollten – und welche Teilaspekte etwa auch nur Teil von Spezialausbildungen sein könnten. Wir werden dabei zu dem Schluss kommen, dass vor allem die Politische Ökonomie – also ein Fach, das einen Schwerpunkt auf ordnungsökonomische und ordnungsethische Problemstellungen legt – ein Kandidat für die allgemein verbindliche Ausbildung an deutschen Schulen ist. Im zweiten Schritt möchten wir diskutieren, inwiefern sich die Einführung eines Faches Politische Ökonomie rechtfertigen ließe. Eine Rechtfertigung im philosophischen Sinne muss dabei zeigen können, dass die Einführung eines Fachs Politische Ökonomie nicht nur bestimmten Interessen – z.B. wirtschaftlichen Lobby-Gruppen dient –, sondern von einem gesellschaftlichen Konsens getragen werden könnte.