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22Gamification, Side Effects, and Praise and Blame for OutcomesMinds and Machines 34 (1): 1-21. 2024.Abstract“Gamification” refers to adding game-like elements to non-game activities so as to encourage participation. Gamification is used in various contexts: apps on phones motivating people to exercise, employers trying to encourage their employees to work harder, social media companies trying to stimulate user engagement, and so on and so forth. Here, I focus on gamification with this property: the game-designer (a company or other organization) creates a “game” in order to encourage the playe…Read more
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25Responsibility Gaps and Black Box Healthcare AI: Shared Responsibilization as a SolutionDigital Society 2 (3): 52. 2023.As sophisticated artificial intelligence software becomes more ubiquitously and more intimately integrated within domains of traditionally human endeavor, many are raising questions over how responsibility (be it moral, legal, or causal) can be understood for an AI’s actions or influence on an outcome. So called “responsibility gaps” occur whenever there exists an apparent chasm in the ordinary attribution of moral blame or responsibility when an AI automates physical or cognitive labor otherwis…Read more
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19Employers have a Duty of Beneficence to Design for Meaningful Work: A General Argument and Logistics Warehouses as a Case StudyThe Journal of Ethics 1-28. forthcoming.Artificial intelligence-driven technology increasingly shapes work practices and, accordingly, employees’ opportunities for meaningful work (MW). In our paper, we identify five dimensions of MW: pursuing a purpose, social relationships, exercising skills and self-development, autonomy, self-esteem and recognition. Because MW is an important good, lacking opportunities for MW is a serious disadvantage. Therefore, we need to know to what extent employers have a duty to provide this good to their e…Read more
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61Is Academic Enhancement Possible by Means of Generative AI-Based Digital Twins?American Journal of Bioethics 23 (10): 44-47. 2023.Large Language Models (LLMs) “assign probabilities to sequences of text. When given some initial text, they use these probabilities to generate new text. Large language models are language models u...
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397Social Robots and SocietyIn Ibo van de Poel (ed.), Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies: An Introduction, Open Book Publishers. pp. 53-82. 2023.Advancements in artificial intelligence and (social) robotics raise pertinent questions as to how these technologies may help shape the society of the future. The main aim of the chapter is to consider the social and conceptual disruptions that might be associated with social robots, and humanoid social robots in particular. This chapter starts by comparing the concepts of robots and artificial intelligence and briefly explores the origins of these expressions. It then explains the definition of…Read more
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70Artificial Intelligence and Human Enhancement: Can AI Technologies Make Us More (Artificially) Intelligent?Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (1): 76-88. 2024.This paper discusses two opposing views about the relation between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence: on the one hand, a worry that heavy reliance on AI technologies might make people less intelligent and, on the other, a hope that AI technologies might serve as a form of cognitive enhancement. The worry relates to the notion that if we hand over too many intelligence-requiring tasks to AI technologies, we might end up with fewer opportunities to train our own intelligence. Con…Read more
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233Generative AI entails a credit–blame asymmetryNature Machine Intelligence 5 (5): 472-475. 2023.Generative AI programs can produce high-quality written and visual content that may be used for good or ill. We argue that a credit–blame asymmetry arises for assigning responsibility for these outputs and discuss urgent ethical and policy implications focused on large-scale language models.
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36Tools and/or Agents? Reflections on Sedlakova and Trachsel’s Discussion of Conversational Artificial IntelligenceAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (5): 17-19. 2023.Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) consider conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) as a new way of providing psychotherapy to patients. This is an important topic, and Sedlakova and Trachsel have...
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48Robotic Animism: The Ethics of Attributing Minds and Personality to Robots with Artificial IntelligenceIn Tiddy Smith (ed.), Animism and Philosophy of Religion, Springer Verlag. pp. 313-340. 2022.In this chapter, I use the expression “robotic animism” to refer to the tendency that many people have to interact with robots as if the robots have minds or a personality. I compare the idea of robotic animism with what philosophers and psychologists sometimes refer to as “mind-reading”, as it relates to human interaction with robots. The chapter offers various examples of robotic animism and mind-reading within different forms of human-robot interaction, and it also considers ethical and prude…Read more
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57Meaning in Life in AI Ethics—Some Trends and PerspectivesPhilosophy and Technology 36 (2): 1-24. 2023.In this paper, we discuss the relation between recent philosophical discussions about meaning in life (from authors like Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, and others) and the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). Our goal is twofold, namely, to argue that considering the axiological category of meaningfulness can enrich AI ethics, on the one hand, and to portray and evaluate the small, but growing literature that already exists on the relation between meaning in life and AI ethics, on the other hand.…Read more
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36Climate Change and Anti-MeaningEthical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (5): 709-724. 2023.In this paper, we propose meaningfulness as one important evaluative criterion in individual climate ethics and suggest that most of our greenhouse gas emitting actions, behaviours, and lives are the opposite of meaningful: anti-meaningful. We explain why such actions etc. score negatively on three important dimensions of the meaningfulness scale, which we call the agential, narrative, and generative dimensions. We suggest that thinking about individual climate ethics also in terms of (anti-) me…Read more
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732Ethical Accident Algorithms for Autonomous Vehicles and the Trolley Problem: Three Philosophical DisputesIn Hallvard Lillehammer (ed.), The Trolley Problem, Cambridge University Press. pp. 211-230. 2022.
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105This is Technology Ethics: An IntroductionWiley-Blackwell. 2023.In the Technology Age, innovations in medical, communications, and weapons technologies have given rise to many new ethical questions: Are technologies always value-neutral tools? Are human values and human prejudices sometimes embedded in technologies? Should we merge with the technologies we use? Is it ethical to use autonomous weapons systems in warfare? What should a self-driving car do if it detects an unavoidable crash? Can robots have morally relevant properties? This is Technology Ethics…Read more
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47Emotional Embodiment in Humanoid Sex and Love RobotsIn Janina Loh & Wulf Loh (eds.), Social Robotics and the Good Life: The Normative Side of Forming Emotional Bonds with Robots, Transcript Verlag. pp. 233-256. 2022.
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32Review of Jennifer S. Blumenthal-Barby, Good Ethics and Bad Choices: The Relevance of Behavioral Economics for Medical Ethics (review)American Journal of Bioethics 22 (5): 4-5. 2022.When Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby was a bioethics intern at the Cleveland Clinic while she was still a graduate student, she was puzzled by the decision making of some patients at the clinic. For exam...
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23Should We Use Technology to Merge Minds?Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (4): 585-603. 2021.
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47Kantianism and the Problem of Child Sex RobotsJournal of Applied Philosophy 39 (1): 132-147. 2021.Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.
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565Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life and What Happens After We DieRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90 11-31. 2021.The absence of meaningfulness in life is meaninglessness. But what is the polar opposite of meaningfulness? In recent and ongoing work together with Stephen Campbell and Marcello di Paola respectively, I have explored what we dub ‘anti-meaning’: the negative counterpart of positive meaning in life. Here, I relate this idea of ‘anti-meaningful’ actions, activities, and projects to the topic of death, and in particular the deaths or suffering of those who will live after our own deaths. Connecting…Read more
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1447The Technological Future of LoveIn André Grahle, Natasha McKeever & Joe Saunders (eds.), Philosophy of Love in the Past, Present, and Future, Routledge. pp. 224-239. 2022.How might emerging and future technologies—sex robots, love drugs, anti-love drugs, or algorithms to track, quantify, and ‘gamify’ romantic relationships—change how we understand and value love? We canvass some of the main ethical worries posed by such technologies, while also considering whether there are reasons for “cautious optimism” about their implications for our lives. Along the way, we touch on some key ideas from the philosophies of love and technology.
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43Should a medical digital twin be viewed as an extension of the patient's body?Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (6): 401-402. 2021.The concept of a digital twin comes from engineering.1 It refers to a digital model of an artefact in the real world, which takes data about the artefact itself, data about other such artefacts, among other things, as inputs. The idea is that the maintenance of artefacts—such as jet engines—can be vastly improved if we work with digital twins that simulate actual objects. Similarly, personalised medicine might benefit from the digital modelling of body parts or even whole human bodies. A medical…Read more
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310Ethics of Artificial IntelligenceInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.Ethics of Artificial Intelligence This article provides a comprehensive overview of the main ethical issues related to the impact of Artificial Intelligence on human society. AI is the use of machines to do things that would normally require human intelligence. In many areas of human life, AI has rapidly and significantly affected human society … Continue reading Ethics of Artificial Intelligence →
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12David Edmonds (ed.), Ethics and the Contemporary WorldJournal of Moral Philosophy 17 (6): 699-702. 2020.
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22Love Troubles: Human Attachment and Biomedical EnhancementsJournal of Applied Philosophy 32 (2): 190-202. 2014.In fascinating recent work, Julian Savulescu and his various co‐authors argue that human love is one of the things we can improve upon using biomedical enhancements. Is that so? This article first notes that Savulescu and his co‐authors mainly treat love as a means to various other goods. Love, however, is widely regarded as an intrinsic good. To investigate whether enhancements can produce the distinctive intrinsic good of love, this article does three things. Drawing on Philip Pettit's recent …Read more
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54Meaning and Anti-Meaning in LifeIn Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press. pp. 277-91. 2022.
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606Automation, Work and the Achievement GapAI and Ethics 1 (3). 2021.Rapid advances in AI-based automation have led to a number of existential and economic concerns. In particular, as automating technologies develop enhanced competency they seem to threaten the values associated with meaningful work. In this article, we focus on one such value: the value of achievement. We argue that achievement is a key part of what makes work meaningful and that advances in AI and automation give rise to a number achievement gaps in the workplace. This could limit people’s abil…Read more
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31In Evaluating Technological Risks, When and Why Should We Consult Our Emotions?Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (4): 1903-1912. 2020.
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42Is tomorrow’s car appealing today? Ethical issues and user attitudes beyond automationAI and Society 35 (4): 1033-1046. 2020.The literature on ethics and user attitudes towards AVs discusses user concerns in relation to automation; however, we show that there are additional relevant issues at stake. To assess adolescents’ attitudes regarding the ‘car of the future’ as presented by car manufacturers, we conducted two studies with over 400 participants altogether. We used a mixed methods approach in which we combined qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first study, our respondents appeared to be more concerned …Read more
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119Can a Robot Be a Good Colleague?Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (4): 2169-2188. 2020.This paper discusses the robotization of the workplace, and particularly the question of whether robots can be good colleagues. This might appear to be a strange question at first glance, but it is worth asking for two reasons. Firstly, some people already treat robots they work alongside as if the robots are valuable colleagues. It is worth reflecting on whether such people are making a mistake. Secondly, having good colleagues is widely regarded as a key aspect of what can make work meaningful…Read more
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73Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency, and AnthropomorphismRowman & Littlefield International. 2020.This book argues that we need to explore how human beings can best coordinate and collaborate with robots in responsible ways. It investigates ethically important differences between human agency and robot agency to work towards an ethics of responsible human-robot interaction.
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Ludwig Maximilians Universität, MünchenFaculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of ReligionProfessor
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Value Theory |
Neuroethics |
Technology Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Kantian Ethics |
Objections to Kantian Ethics |
Kantian Ethics, Misc |