•  1
    An empirical investigation of the Gamer's Dilemma: a mixed methods study of whether the dilemma exists
    with Thomas Montefiore, Mitchell McEwan, and Omid Ghasemi
    Behaviour and Information Technology. 2023.
    The Gamer’s Dilemma challenges us to justify the moral difference between enacting virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. The Dilemma relies for its argumentative force on the claim that there is an intuitive moral difference between these acts, with the former intuited as morally acceptable and the latter as morally unacceptable. However, there has been no empirical investigation of these claims. To explore these issues, we developed an experimental survey study in which p…Read more
  •  174
    The Authority to Moderate: Social Media Moderation and its Limits
    with Bhanuraj Kashyap
    Philosophy and Technology 36 (4): 1-22. 2023.
    The negative impacts of social media have given rise to philosophical questions around whether social media companies have the authority to regulate user-generated content on their platforms. The most popular justification for that authority is to appeal to private ownership rights. Social media companies own their platforms, and their ownership comes with various rights that ground their authority to moderate user-generated content on their platforms. However, we argue that ownership rights can…Read more
  •  176
    The Gamer’s Dilemma refers to the philosophical challenge of justifying the intuitive difference people seem to see between the moral permissibility of enacting virtual murder and the moral impermissibility of enacting virtual child molestation in video games (Luck Ethics and Information Technology, 1:31, 2009). Recently, Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 has argued that the Gamer’s Dilemma is actually an instance of a more general “paradox”, which he calls the “paradox of treating wrongdo…Read more
  •  457
    The Ethical Implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) For Meaningful Work
    with Sarah Bankins
    Journal of Business Ethics (4): 1-16. 2023.
    The increasing workplace use of artificially intelligent (AI) technologies has implications for the experience of meaningful human work. Meaningful work refers to the perception that one’s work has worth, significance, or a higher purpose. The development and organisational deployment of AI is accelerating, but the ways in which this will support or diminish opportunities for meaningful work and the ethical implications of these changes remain under-explored. This conceptual paper is positioned …Read more
  •  285
    Autonomous Vehicles and Ethical Settings: Who Should Decide?
    In Ryan Jenkins, David Cerny & Tomas Hribek (eds.), Autonomous Vehicle Ethics: The Trolley Problem and Beyond, Oxford University Press. 2022.
    While autonomous vehicles (AVs) are not designed to harm people, harming people is an inevitable by-product of their operation. How are AVs to deal ethically with situations where harming people is inevitable? Rather than focus on the much-discussed question of what choices AVs should make, we can also ask the much less discussed question of who gets to decide what AVs should do in such cases. Here there are two key options: AVs with a personal ethics setting (PES) or an “ethical knob” that end …Read more
  •  311
    Morality meters and their impacts on moral choices in videogames: a qualitative study
    with Malcolm Ryan, Stephanie Howarth, Jane Messer, and Mitchell McEwan
    Games and Culture 1 (17): 89-121. 2022.
    Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved pa…Read more
  •  149
    Morality meters and their impacts on moral choices in videogames: a qualitative study
    with Malcolm Ryan, Stephanie Howarth, Jane Messer, and Mitchell McEwan
    Games and Culture 17 (1): 89-121. 2022.
    Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved pa…Read more
  •  946
    A principlist-based study of the ethical design and acceptability of artificial social agents
    International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 172. 2023.
    Artificial Social Agents (ASAs), which are AI software driven entities programmed with rules and preferences to act autonomously and socially with humans, are increasingly playing roles in society. As their sophistication grows, humans will share greater amounts of personal information, thoughts, and feelings with ASAs, which has significant ethical implications. We conducted a study to investigate what ethical principles are of relative importance when people engage with ASAs and whether there …Read more
  •  709
    Ethical AI at work: the social contract for Artificial Intelligence and its implications for the workplace psychological contract
    with Sarah Bankins
    In Redefining the psychological contract in the digital era: issues for research and practice. pp. 55-72. 2021.
    Artificially intelligent (AI) technologies are increasingly being used in many workplaces. It is recognised that there are ethical dimensions to the ways in which organisations implement AI alongside, or substituting for, their human workforces. How will these technologically driven disruptions impact the employee–employer exchange? We provide one way to explore this question by drawing on scholarship linking Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) to the psychological contract (PC). Using IS…Read more
  •  2291
    A principlist framework for cybersecurity ethics
    with Michael Wilson and Deborah Richards
    Computers and Security 109. 2021.
    The ethical issues raised by cybersecurity practices and technologies are of critical importance. However, there is disagreement about what is the best ethical framework for understanding those issues. In this paper we seek to address this shortcoming through the introduction of a principlist ethical framework for cybersecurity that builds on existing work in adjacent fields of applied ethics, bioethics, and AI ethics. By redeploying the AI4People framework, we develop a domain-relevant specific…Read more
  •  226
    In his paper, ‘What moral work can Nussbaum’s account of human dignity do in the context of dementia care?’, Soofi seeks to modify Nussbaum’s conception of dignity to deal with four key objections that arise when appeals to dignity are made in the context of dementia care. We will not discuss the first of these, the redundancy of dignity talk, since this issue has already been much discussed in the literature. Instead, we will focus on the remaining three issues raised, that of the exclusion of …Read more
  •  353
    Resisting the Gamer’s Dilemma
    Ethics and Information Technology 24 (3): 1-13. 2022.
    Intuitively, many people seem to hold that engaging in acts of virtual murder in videogames is morally permissible, whereas engaging in acts of virtual child molestation is morally impermissible. The Gamer’s Dilemma (Luck in Ethics Inf Technol 11:31–36, 2009) challenges these intuitions by arguing that it is unclear whether there is a morally relevant difference between these two types of virtual actions. There are two main responses in the literature to this dilemma. First, attempts to resolve …Read more
  •  473
    Social Media and its Negative Impacts on Autonomy
    with Siavosh Sahebi
    Philosophy and Technology 35 (3): 1-24. 2022.
    How social media impacts the autonomy of its users is a topic of increasing focus. However, much of the literature that explores these impacts fails to engage in depth with the philosophical literature on autonomy. This has resulted in a failure to consider the full range of impacts that social media might have on autonomy. A deeper consideration of these impacts is thus needed, given the importance of both autonomy as a moral concept and social media as a feature of contemporary life. By drawin…Read more
  •  243
    Forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already being deployed into clinical settings and research into its future healthcare uses is accelerating. Despite this trajectory, more research is needed regarding the impacts on patients of increasing AI decision making. In particular, the impersonal nature of AI means that its deployment in highly sensitive contexts-of-use, such as in healthcare, raises issues associated with patients’ perceptions of (un) dignified treatment. We explore this issue t…Read more
  •  315
    AI Decision Making with Dignity? Contrasting Workers’ Justice Perceptions of Human and AI Decision Making in a Human Resource Management Context
    with Sarah Bankins, Yannick Griep, and Deborah Richards
    Information Systems Frontiers. forthcoming.
    Using artificial intelligence (AI) to make decisions in human resource management (HRM) raises questions of how fair employees perceive these decisions to be and whether they experience respectful treatment (i.e., interactional justice). In this experimental survey study with open-ended qualitative questions, we examine decision making in six HRM functions and manipulate the decision maker (AI or human) and decision valence (positive or negative) to determine their impact on individuals’ experie…Read more
  •  253
    Beyond Ideal Theory: Foundations for a Critical Rawlsian Theory of Climate Justice
    with Paul Clements
    New Political Science 1-20. forthcoming.
    Rawls’s contractualist approach to justice is well known for its adoption of ideal theory. This approach starts by setting out the political goal or ideal and leaves it to non-ideal or partial compliance theory to map out how to get there. However, Rawls’s use of ideal theory has been criticized by Sen from the right and by Mouffe from the left. We critically address these concerns in the context of developing a Rawlsian approach to climate justice. While the importance of non-ideal theory for c…Read more
  •  536
    Social robots are robots that can interact socially with humans. As social robots and the artificial intelligence that powers them becomes more advanced, they will likely take on more social and work roles. This has many important ethical implications. In this paper, we focus on one of the most central of these, the impacts that social robots can have on human autonomy. We argue that, due to their physical presence and social capacities, there is a strong potential for social robots to enhance h…Read more
  •  549
    A Kantian approach to education for moral sensitivity
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 55 (6): 1017-1028. 2022.
    An important aspect of moral expertise is moral sensitivity, which is the ability to be sensitive to the presence of morally salient features in a context. This requires being able to see and acquire the morally relevant information, as well as organise and interpret it, so that you can undertake the related work of moral judgement, focus (or motivation) and action. As a distinct but interrelated component of ethical expertise, moral sensitivity can and must be trained and educated. However, des…Read more
  •  1430
    Making moral machines: why we need artificial moral agents
    with Malcolm Ryan
    AI and Society. forthcoming.
    As robots and Artificial Intelligences become more enmeshed in rich social contexts, it seems inevitable that we will have to make them into moral machines equipped with moral skills. Apart from the technical difficulties of how we could achieve this goal, we can also ask the ethical question of whether we should seek to create such Artificial Moral Agents (AMAs). Recently, several papers have argued that we have strong reasons not to develop AMAs. In response, we develop a comprehensive analysi…Read more
  •  761
    Toleration and Some Related Concepts in Kant
    Kantian Review 25 (2): 167-192. 2020.
    In this article we examine Kant’s understanding of toleration by including a study of all instances in which he directly uses the language of toleration and related concepts. We use this study to resolve several key areas of interpretative dispute concerning Kant’s views on toleration. We argue that Kant offers a nuanced and largely unappreciated approach to thinking about toleration, and related concepts, across three normative spheres: the political, the interpersonal and the personal. We exam…Read more
  •  364
    Book review of "The Evil Within: Why we need Moral Philosophy", by Diane Jeske
  •  628
    Kant and the demandingness of the virtue of beneficence
    European Journal of Philosophy 27 (3): 625-642. 2019.
    We discuss Kant’s conception of beneficence against the background of the overdemandingness debate. We argue that Kant’s conception of beneficence constitutes a sweet spot between overdemandingess and undemandingess. To this end we defend four key claims that together constitute a novel interpretation of Kant’s account of beneficence: 1) for the same reason that we are obligated to be beneficent to others we are permitted to be beneficent to ourselves; 2) we can prioritise our own ends; 3) it is…Read more
  •  1122
    Measuring morality in videogames research
    with Malcolm Ryan, Stephanie Howarth, and Dan Staines
    Ethics and Information Technology 22 (1): 55-68. 2020.
    There has been a recent surge of research interest in videogames of moral engagement for entertainment, advocacy and education. We have seen a wealth of analysis and several theoretical models proposed, but experimental evaluation has been scarce. One of the difficulties lies in the measurement of moral engagement. How do we meaningfully measure whether players are engaging with and affected by the moral choices in the games they play? In this paper, we survey the various standard psychometric i…Read more
  •  1230
    When AI meets PC: exploring the implications of workplace social robots and a human-robot psychological contract
    with Sarah Bankins
    European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 2019. 2019.
    The psychological contract refers to the implicit and subjective beliefs regarding a reciprocal exchange agreement, predominantly examined between employees and employers. While contemporary contract research is investigating a wider range of exchanges employees may hold, such as with team members and clients, it remains silent on a rapidly emerging form of workplace relationship: employees’ increasing engagement with technically, socially, and emotionally sophisticated forms of artificially int…Read more
  •  415
    All morally wrong actions deserve some form of moral condemnation. But the degree of that condemnation is not the same in all cases. Some wrongs are so morally extreme that they seem to belong to a different category because they deserve our very strongest form of moral condemnation. For example, telling a white lie to make a friend feel better might be morally wrong, but intuitively such an act is in a different moral category to the sadistic, brutal, and violent rape and torture of a child. Th…Read more
  •  205
    Book review of 'Means, Ends, and Persons: The Meaning and Psychological Dimensions of Kant's Humanity Formula, by Robert Audi, OUP'.
  •  555
    Focus, Sensitivity, Judgement, Action: Four Lenses for Designing Morally Engaging Games
    with Malcolm Ryan and Dan Staines
    Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 2 (3): 143-173. 2017.
    Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how these skills can be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and des…Read more
  •  357
    Four Lenses for Designing Morally Engaging Games
    with Malcolm Ryan and Dan Staines
    Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG. 2016.
    Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how they may be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe th…Read more
  •  597
    Playing Around With Morality: Introducing the Special Issue on “Morality Play”
    with Malcolm Ryan and Rowan Tulloch
    Games and Culture 14 (4). 2019.
    This special issue of Games and Culture focuses on the intersection between video games and ethics. This introduction briefly sets out the key research questions in the research field and identifies trends in the articles included in this special issue