Julio Andrade

This article arises in the Ecuadorian context of Higher Education where the insertion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has a considerable impact on the knowledge and attitudes of students. The purpose of the research is to analyze the integration of ICT in attitudes and knowledge in students of the Bolivar State University in the careers of Accounting and Business Administration. The methodology used in a sample of 150 students presents a quantitative research design, exploratory type, correlational scope and cross-sectional; in addition, an exploratory factor analysis, KMO sample adequacy and Bartlett’s test were used, central trend and dispersion measures, Pearson’s correlation. The results show that, despite the direct relationship between the variables, there are no statistically significant differences between knowledge and attitude, that is, the perception and understanding of ICTs between the two cohorts of students are similar. It is concluded that students have an average level of knowledge about ICT and their attitude to the use of them is indifferent.

My starting point in this article is that investigating the ethics of autonomous vehicles through the lens of the trolley problem is not only limited but also unethical. I construct my case by aligning myself with Niklas Toivakainen, who argues against David Gunkel’s reading of Levinasian ethics as an answer to the “Machine Question”. I adumbrate Toivakainen’s critique that the attempt to give a Levinasian face to the machine is an example of a compensatory logic – a way to avoid a deeper exploration of the moral dynamics from which our technologies emerge. I offer an extended reading of Levinas’s formulation of the face of the other to argue that while the machine cannot signify as a face, the machine can announce or anticipate the signification of the face which the self is infinitely responsible to. I reach this conclusion through focusing on the uncertainty and ambiguity of the signification of the face. I then argue that current approaches to the ethics of autonomous vehicles, based on variations of the trolley problem, fail to locate ethical responsibility to the other, precisely in its attempts to evade uncertainty. I demonstrate how an embrace of uncertainty can make the ethics of autonomous vehicles more ethical through a consideration of the concept of shared space and naked streets in the work of the late Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman.

This book presents a conceptual mapping of supererogation in the analytic moral philosophical tradition. It first asks whether supererogation can be conceptualised in the absence of obligation or duty and then makes the case that it can be. It does so by enlisting the resources of the continental tradition, specifically using the work of Emmanuel Levinas and his notion of infinite responsibility. In so doing the book contributes to the ongoing efforts to create a common ethical terminology between the analytic and continental traditions within moral philosophy. Supererogatory actions are praiseworthy actions that go ‘beyond duty’, and yet are not blameworthy when not performed. In responding to this paradox, moral philosophy either brackets or attempts a reductionism of supererogation. Supererogation is epitomised in the paradigmatic figures of the saint and hero. Yet, most would agree that emulating these figures is too morally demanding. We rightly ask: where does moral obligation end? Is it even possible, or desirable to demarcate such a boundary? Besides the important theoretical issues these questions raise, they also speak to practical ethical dilemmas in the contemporary milieu, as they concern the global wealthy’s responsibility to the poor and the challenges of development aid work.

In this paper I seek to critically examine UCT’s and CCT’s and consider how a Levinasian ethics might offer normative guidelines to evaluate such aid programmes. Such an analysis will serve to both critique and supplement the traditional utilitarian analyses of such programmes. In so doing, this paper also hopes to contribute to the business ethics literature in which a Levinasian ethics may be brought to bear on real world problems. I proceed by enlisting Jordaan who argues that a Levinasian ethical politics can be instantiated in institutional designs by allowing a more complex representation of the other’s alterity. Two UCT programmes are interrogated in light of this finding – the first, a UCT programme in a community in Vietnam; the second, a joint CCT/UCT programme targeting adolescent girls in Malawi, designed to test the efficacy of conditionality to achieve certain.

This paper explores the ethical dilemma of conflicting loyalties found in whistleblowing. Central to this dilemma is the internal/external disclosure dichotomy; disclosure of organisational wrongdoing to an external recipient is seen as disloyal, whilst disclosure to an internal recipient is seen as loyal. Understanding how the organisation and society have dealt with these problems over the last 30 years is undertaken through an analysis of Vandekerckhove’s project, which seeks to place the normative legitimisations of whistleblowing legislation and organisational whistleblowing policies within a globalisation semantic able to contain this conflict between society and the organisation. This project fails, it is argued, because of Vandekerckhove’s particular understanding of the organisation as an autopoietic system, i.e. an operationally closed system. A case is made to understand organisations as complex systems, i.e. operationally open systems. Critical Complexity theory sees the identities of systems and components as coterminous. In the context of the organisation, this means that the identities of the corporation and its corporate members arise and die together. The whistleblower’s disclosure reconfigures the organisation by forcing the organisation to open up and make its boundaries flexible, making the designation ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to the organisation, and, therefore, who qualifies as a recipient of a disclosure of wrongdoing, flexible. The organisation is restrained from retailing against the whistleblower, because its identities are coterminous. Furthermore, as the disclosure cannot be categorically defined as either internal or external, the question of whether an external disclosure can qualify as an act of organisational loyalty becomes moot