Elisa Orrù

The chapter focuses on current transformations in the field of EU security. It argues that within what has emerged as a 'Security Union', the most prominent present dynamic is the 'hybridisation' of security, i.e. the increasing integration of internal and external, civil and military security. The main driver of this transformation is the emphasis on phenomena framed as 'hybrid threats', notably migration and disinformation. The hybridisation of EU security has significant implications that require a critical examination of EU security policy. On the one hand, the framing of migration as a hybrid threat has brought to the fore the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, commonly known as Frontex, as a crucial actor that can be seen as a laboratory of cooperation for a future common European police force and army. The lack of parliamentary oversight and the poor effectiveness of judicial control over Frontex's actions emerge as the most important and urgent issues to be addressed. On the other hand, in the field of disinformation, no common actor has emerged and EU actions are still largely uncoordinated. Nevertheless, a fundamental tension emerges between the framing of disinformation as a security issue and fundamental democratic values such as freedom of information and expression. The hybridisation of EU security therefore requires contributions from all disciplines involved in the cross-disciplinary field of EU security research, namely securitization theories, legal theory and philosophical research, in order to further explore and assess the implications of the current dynamics.

At the turn of the millennium, the increased availability of large data sets and computing power led to the rise of machine learning in Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there has been much excitement about AI’s achievements since then, concerns about its drawbacks, including its environmental impact, are growing. This paper explores the possibility of a more sustainable form of AI. It argues that, although such a transition is feasible, it would require AI to abandon its dominant ‘Big Data’ approach and adopt a ‘Small Data’ paradigm. The paper intends to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of AI ethics in three ways. Firstly, it proposes framing the current dominant model of AI as ‘Big Data AI’, understood as a system that is intrinsically voracious in terms of its insatiable demand for (behavioural) data, energy, and natural resources. Secondly, it suggests a comprehensive, multi-factor taxonomy of the environmental impact of AI throughout its entire lifecycle. This taxonomy considers the environmental implications of AI in terms of rare earth mining, water consumption, energy usage, carbon footprint and pollution during the manufacturing, development, deployment and disposal phases of the AI lifecycle. Finally, it explores the notion of Small Data as a potentially more environmentally sustainable alternative to Big Data AI and provides an overview of Machine Learning (ML) techniques able to deal with data or computing power scarcity that have been suggested in AI literature. It concludes that Small Data techniques have the potential to reduce the environmental impact of AI, particularly its CO₂ footprint, water consumption and energy usage, but only if embedded within a broader sociotechnical process involving political action and economic transformation.

Privacy and autonomy are deeply intertwined. In privacy theory and law, there is broad agreement that privacy is a necessary precondition for autonomy. In order to make decisions according to our own preferences and live our lives according to our own goals, we need protected, ie, private, physical and metaphorical spaces. This is all the more true in the digital age, as the collection and analysis of personal information exposes the vulnerabilities of individuals, which can be exploited to influence and manipulate them, thus posing a serious threat to individual autonomy. The German constitutional way of protecting informational privacy, namely the right to informational self-determination, makes this conceptual link explicit in its very name.

This open access book offers a clear understanding of the core concepts of data protection and privacy, exploring their social value through European and North American legal perspectives, political struggles, and the impact of the AI revolution. Featuring prominent experts and emerging scholars, the book presents diverse understandings to showcase the multifaceted interests and values embedded in the concepts of data protection and privacy. It links philosophical and legal perspectives on privacy to historical and contemporary rights struggles, including those of African Americans, feminists, and queer people. The book also addresses privacy challenges posed by the digital revolution, particularly advances in AI, and recent efforts to safeguard privacy. Aimed at scholars, researchers, and students in law and philosophy, the book offers an overview of key theoretical and legal positions on privacy and data protection. Legal practitioners will find insights into landmark EU and US constitutional decisions, such as the German Constitutional Court's Census Decision and Carpenter v United States. Additionally, it is valuable for anyone seeking to understand the legal and philosophical foundations of globally influential regulations like the GDPR and the AI Act. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY NC ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This article examines the emergence of the concept of “hybrid threats” in EU security policy, and its implications for fundamental principles of the rule of law and democracy. It discusses these dynamics by focusing on two exemplary phenomena that have been framed as “hybrid threats”: migration and disinformation. The article’s main argument is that characterising these phenomena as “hybrid threats” leads to an increased intertwining of civil and military, internal and external dimensions of security, resulting in a “hybridisation” of security policies. Ultimately, this shifts the emphasis of securitisation towards the extreme pole of “existential threats”. This places significant pressure on the fundamental principles of the rule of law, such as respect for fundamental rights and judicial control over executive powers, and also undermines democratic participation and the integrity of public discourse.

In 1791, two years after the proclamation of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, the playwright, essayist, philosopher and revolutionary Olympe de Gouges wrote a short work entitled The Rights of Woman, the core of which is the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. As is already clear from the title, with her writing de Gouges intends to highlight the gendered character of the 1789 Declaration. To this end, the author first of all points out the contradictory nature of this Declaration: the rights it proclaims as universal apply, in law and in fact, only to human beings of the male gender. De Gouges also reformulates the claims of the Declaration so that they apply equally to men and women. This essay focuses on two themes of particular importance within de Gouges' reformulation: the claim of freedom of expression and the extension of the social contract to relationships. In dealing with these themes, de Gouges elaborates far-reaching theoretical insights that are significant not only for gender studies, but also for political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In fact, de Gouges' reflections, while placing themselves within the natural law tradition, reject and overturn some of its fundamental assumptions. Prominent among these are the subtraction of the family sphere from the equal regulation of relations between individuals, which instead characterises relations between citizens in the public sphere, and the abstraction from differences on which the particularism of rights, though proclaimed as universal, is based.

On the possibilities and limits of the ethics of artificial intelligence. An overview of current developments and debates with a focus on language processing systems. Driven by the success of artificial intelligence (AI), the ethics of AI is currently enjoying a boom. Advice from ethics experts is increasingly being sought by policymakers and industry to proactively identify the risks associated with new AI technologies and to propose solutions. But how realistic are the expectations placed on AI ethics to make technological development more equitable and acceptable? Doesn't AI ethics itself run the risk of becoming a fig leaf in the service of pre-determined economic and political goals? Based on these questions, this article presents and discusses some of the most current debates and proposals for dealing with the opportunities and risks of AI technologies, with a particular focus on language technologies. Although the danger of instrumentalization is present, the article concludes, the ethics of AI currently represents an important opportunity to identify problematic developments at an early stage and to initiate societal debates, political processes, and legal regulations that can make future AI developments more equitable and environmentally sound.

Olympe de Gouges (Montauban 1748 - Paris 1793) is best known as the author of the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne of 1791. De Gouges' intellectual contribution and political commitment, however, encompassed a broader field than just gender relations and the assertion of women's civil and political rights. De Gouges in fact publicly intervened on many of the central issues of the political and social context of the French Revolution, including public health, social policies, voting by head or by order, the execution of the king, divorce and, as we shall see in detail in the following pages, slavery and the slave trade. In the paper, I first reconstruct the context of de Gouges' production, with a focus on the institution of slavery in revolutionary France (§ 1). I then dwell on the political function of theatre at the time of the Revolution and trace the controversial events that marked the staging of L'esclavage des noirs (§ 2). I intend to show, more specifically, how de Gouges' reflection on the theme of slavery makes her an extraordinary interpreter of the spirit of the Enlightenment. Indeed, in it, she demystifies the supposed naturalness of existing inequalities and shows how, on the contrary, they are the result of historical injustices aimed at protecting specific interests and maintaining privileges. I then highlight de Gouges' originality within the philosophical paradigm of natural law. Compared to thinkers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, de Gouges is distinguished by the consistency of purpose with which she makes use of natural law. Indeed, de Gouges' reference to natural law always has emancipatory intentions and is never aimed at justifying existing inequalities (§ 4). Finally, I propose an interpretation according to which de Gouges is an advocate of a particular type of universalism, an anti-essentialist universalism that takes its starting point from concrete situations of injustice and inequality rather than from general and abstract principles, and which I will suggest we call ‘universalism of differences’ (§ 5).

Artificial intelligence (AI) and molecular biotechnologies (MB) are among the most promising, but also ethically hotly debated emerging technologies. In both fields, several ethics reports, which invoke lists of ethics principles, have been put forward. These reports and the principles lists are technology specific. This article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on ethics of emerging technologies by comparatively analysing four European ethics reports from the two technology fields. Adopting a qualitative and in-depth approach, the article highlights how ethics principles from MB can inform AI ethics and vice versa. By synthesizing the respective ethical cores of the principles included in the analysed reports, the article derives, moreover, a unified list of principles for assessing emerging technologies. The suggested list consists of nine principles: autonomy; individual and social well-being and prevention of harm; reliability, safety and security; informational privacy; transparency; accountability; communication, participation and democracy; justice, fairness, and non-discrimination; sustainability.

European police and judicial cooperation was initiated as a counterpart to the progressive abolition of internal border controls under Schengen. Since then, the security policy of the European Union (EU) has developed into one of the most dynamic and fastest growing policy areas of the Union. The aim of this contribution is to outline the main trends and characteristics of this policy field. I suggest to conceptualised them as instances of ‘pre-emptive security’. This is an approach to security that focuses on hypothetical future events and aims to prevent the most serious events (e.g. serious criminal offences) by means of risk assessments and probability forecasts, without addressing the phenomenon as a whole (e.g. crime) and its causes. Pre-emptive understandings of security differ from both reactive and pre-emptive approaches. In the paper, I outline the main characteristics of this model both in historical terms and with regard to the latest developments in the field of EU security policy. Finally, I discuss the problematic normative implications of the pre-emptive understanding of security, both for the rule of law and democracy and for human autonomy.

The re-use of publicly available (personal) data for originally unanticipated purposes has become common practice. Without such secondary uses, the development of many AI systems like large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT would not even have been possible. This chapter addresses the ethical implications of such secondary processing, with a particular focus on data protection and privacy issues. Legal and ethical evaluations of secondary processing of publicly available personal data diverge considerably both among scholars and the general public. While some of these uses are met with opposition and criticism, others are quite unanimously viewed as unproblematic. Often, proponents and opponents of such practices invoke the same ethical and legal standards for their opposite conclusions. This state of affairs shows that other considerations besides the public availability of data must play a role. It calls for a theoretical clarification of the additional criteria that should guide decisions about the (legally informed) ethical acceptability of re-processing practices. In order to make a contribution towards this goal, the present chapter maps the ongoing debate and systematises the existing contributions around three lines of argument: a consent-centred position, an approach that focuses on the distinction between data and information, and finally a line of argument that focuses on the contextual norms that govern the flows of information. The chapter further relates these arguments to three underlying conceptions of privacy and data protection: rights-based, structural and contextual, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each position in the light of concrete examples. It concludes by arguing for a mixed approach that combines core elements of the structural and contextual approaches. The chapter aims to contribute to existing research in the fields of data, AI and research ethics, and to reconnect the debate with ethical and legal scholarship on privacy and data protection. In doing so, it aims to make a theoretical contribution towards refining existing conceptions of privacy and data protection in order to make them more fit to ‘drive our digital world’ as far as the use of publicly available data is concerned.

The Passenger Name Record (PNR) Directive has introduced a pre-emptive, risk-based approach in the landscape of European databases and information exchange for security purposes. The article contributes to ongoing debates on algorithmic security and data-driven decision-making by fleshing out the specific way in which the EU PNR-based approach to security substantiates core characteristics of algorithmic regulation. The EU PNR framework appropriates data produced in the commercial sector for generating security-related behavioural predictions and does so in a way that gives rise to a paradoxical normativity directly dependent on empirical states. Its ‘securitisation move’ is moreover characterised by an inherent tendence to expand. As a result, the PNR Directive poses challenges for existing check and balance mechanisms and for human autonomy. These challenges could be partially addressed by strengthening ex-post control procedures and independent auditing. Yet in the decision to adopt a risk-based security model, something more fundamental seems to be at stake, namely, the preservation of the idea of human beings as moral agents able to direct and modify their behaviour in accordance with an intelligible, reliable and predictable normative order.

Digitalisation has lent the right to privacy increasing philosophical and legal relevance. However, privacy’s epistemic status and associated normative values are constantly subject to radical criticisms. This article investigates the validity, in theory and practice, of three radical critiques of privacy. A review of the philosophical and interdisciplinary discourse on privacy during the last half century is followed by analyses of recent legal developments within the EU. Privacy emerges as a highly differentiated and powerful tool to protect individuals and social relations and to limit and redistribute power. However, the right to privacy remains far from realising its practical potential.