Wulf Loh

Automated pain assessment systems (APAS) are currently being developed to facilitate third-party pain assessments in patients with limited verbal communication abilities. They come with the danger, however, of disregarding patients in their capacity as competent knowers of their own pain experiences. Favoring the predictions of APAS over the self-reports of pain experiences may constitute a particular severe form of testimonial injustice, as we seem to have a special epistemic authority with regard to them. By investigating these potential dangers, the paper a) points to implications for pain management in the face of an emerging technology and thereby b) initiates new debates within the realm of ethics of technology. This discussion touches c) on fundamental questions with regard to the epistemology of pain and the epistemic status of a (competent) knower. The paper seeks to better understand testimonial injustice as a concept by transferring it to the epistemically challenging topic of pain knowledge.

In this chapter, we give a brief overview of the traditional notion of responsibility and introduce a concept of distributed responsibility within a responsibility network of engineers, driver, and autonomous driving system. In order to evaluate this concept, we explore the notion of man–machine hybrid systems with regard to self-driving cars and conclude that the unit comprising the car and the operator/driver consists of such a hybrid system that can assume a shared responsibility different from the responsibility of other actors in the responsibility network. Discussing certain moral dilemma situations that are structured much like trolley cases, we deduce that as long as there is something like a driver in autonomous cars as part of the hybrid system, she will have to bear the responsibility for making the morally relevant decisions that are not covered by traffic rules.

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots.

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots.

Automated pain recognition technology (APR) promises to monitor patients with severe communication impairments on a continuous basis, thereby providing better pain diagnosis and treatment. Increasingly, APR is used in non-clinical contexts, in which users are very much capable of verbalizing their own pain experiences. In this paper, we assess the viability of transferring the technology to the terrain of workplace health management, health insurance benefit programs, fitness, or other well-being applications. In such a setting, not only epistemic conflicts between the self-reports of patients and the automated pain recognition tools may arise, which could result in forms of epistemic injustice. At the same time, automated pain recognition tools could form and digitally support intelligent habits that may reduce cognitive load and enhance bodily awareness. We suggest a dialogic design procedure to ensure these ethical considerations during application design.

In this paper, we focus on privacy risks in smart home environments and their implications for privacy and data protection. As with other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the collection and processing of user data in smart home environments currently lack transparency and control. Smart home applications operate within the home, a space that is both morally and legally particularly protected and characterized by a implicit expectation of privacy from the user’s perspective. In contrast to these higher privacy risks, the current regulatory efforts are not yet up to speed with respect to smart home environments. As an interim workaround solution, in this paper, we propose a meta-assistant for the smart home that increases users’ data autonomy and thereby their privacy. In the first section, we give a brief overview of smart home applications, their data collection mechanisms, and the implications for user privacy. Following this, we argue in the second section that consent to datafication, i.e., the prevalent legal option to obtain legal grounds for data collection and processing, in most smart home contexts is—albeit legally sufficient—morally inadequate to provide meaningful possibilities for users to exercise their data autonomy and manage their privacy. The third section introduces an interim solution, outlining the possibility of a meta-assistant, which is capable of operating all other devices—if necessary, by shutting them off completely.

Following the recent practice turn in privacy research, informational privacy is increasingly analyzed with regard to the “appropriate flow of information” within a given practice, which preserves the “contextual integrity” of that practice (Nissenbaum, 2010, p. 149; 2015). Such a practice-theoretical take on privacy emphasizes the normative structure of practices as well as its structural injustices and power asymmetries, rather than focusing on the intentions and moral considerations of individual or institutional actors. Since privacy norms are seen to be institutionalized via the role obligations of the practice's participants, this approach can analyze structural and systematic privacy infringements in terms of “defective role performances and defective social relations” (Roessler & Mokrosinska, 2013, p. 780). Unfortunately, it is still often somewhat unclear what this exactly means within the context of informational privacy, why these performances and relations are defective and for whom. This raises the common objection of a so-called “practice positivism” (Applbaum, 1999, p. 51), that is, the difficulty of practice–theoretical accounts to take a practice-independent standpoint, from which to normatively evaluate the existing practice norms themselves. For example, Nissenbaum herself initially argues for a “presumption in favor of the status quo” with respect to the appropriateness and flow of privacy norms within a practice (Nissenbaum, 2004, p. 127). Such a “practice conservatism” (Nissenbaum, 2010, p. 169) comes dangerously close to committing a naturalistic fallacy, if not undergirded by practice-external criteria (which is ultimately what she does). Merely resorting to existing practice norms to assess what defective role performances amount to, only shifts the question from how to recognize an appropriate flow of information to the question of how to recognize those defective role performances and social relations. Against this backdrop, the central aim of this article is to shed light on this question without resorting to practice-independent first principles or far-reaching universalistic anthropological assumptions. For this, I will analyze the notion of “defective role performances and social relations” in terms of social pathologies.1 Doing so has two advantages: First of all, it can draw on already existing concepts and distinctions, which help to categorize the different levels of analysis that exist in informational privacy research and situate the notion of “defective role performances” within them (Section 1). Second, those concepts and distinctions can serve as a basis for establishing a typology of phenomena with regard to deficient practices of informational privacy (Section 4).

Robots as social companions in close proximity to humans have a strong potential of becoming more and more prevalent in the coming years, especially in the realms of elder day care, child rearing, and education. As human beings, we have the fascinating ability to emotionally bond with various counterparts, not exclusively with other human beings, but also with animals, plants, and sometimes even objects. Therefore, we need to answer the fundamental ethical questions that concern human-robot-interactions per se, and we need to address how we conceive of »good lives«, as more and more of the aspects of our daily lives will be interwoven with social robots.

In seiner „Unabhängigkeitserklärung des Cyberspace“ zeichnete John Perry BarlowBarlow, John Perry eine Welt jenseits staatlicher Kontrolle und kapitalistischer Verwertungslogiken. Diese frühe egalitäre, anarchistische und antikapitalistische Utopie des Internet ist einer gewissen Ernüchterung gewichen. Zwar vermag es das Netz, besonders in seiner Eigenschaft als Agglomeration von vernetzten Öffentlichkeiten, traditionelle Hierarchien und Zugangsbeschränkungen abzubauen und auf diese Weise Partizipation und Teilhabe inklusiver und egalitärer zu gestalten.

This paper discusses various forms and sources of algorithmic discrimination. In particular, we explore the connection between – at first glance – ‘voluntary’ shar- ing or selling of one’s data on the one hand and potential risks of automated decision-making based on big data and artificial intelligence on the other. We argue that the implementation of algorithm-driven profiling or decision-making mechanisms will, in many cases, disproportionately disadvantage certain vul- nerable groups that are already disadvantaged by many existing datafication practices. We call into question the voluntariness of these mechanisms, especially for certain vulnerable groups, and claim that members of such groups are often- times more likely to give away their data. If these existing datafication practices exacerbate prior disadvantages, they ‘compound historical injustices’ (Hellman, 2018) and thereby constitute forms of morally wrong discrimination. To make matters worse, they are even more prone to further algorithmic discriminations based on the additional data collected from them.

To integrate social robots in real-life contexts, it is crucial that they are accepted by the users. Acceptance is not only related to the functionality of the robot but also strongly depends on how the user experiences the interaction. Established design principles from usability and user experience research can be applied to the realm of human–robot interaction, to design robot behavior for the comfort and well-being of the user. Focusing the design on these aspects alone, however, comes with certain ethical challenges, especially regarding the user’s privacy and autonomy. Based on an example scenario of human–robot interaction in elder care, this paper discusses how established design principles can be used in social robotic design. It then juxtaposes these with ethical considerations such as privacy and user autonomy. Combining user experience and ethical perspectives, we propose adjustments to the original design principles and canvass our own design recommendations for a positive and ethically acceptable social human–robot interaction design. In doing so, we show that positive user experience and ethical design may be sometimes at odds, but can be reconciled in many cases, if designers are willing to adjust and amend time-tested design principles.

Political participation lies at the heart of normative democratic theory. To foster participatory interactions between citizens, some advocates and designers are resorting to gamification as the use of psycho-motivational involvement strategies from games in non-game contexts. The hope is that through gamification mechanisms, citizens will be drawn more easily towards participation platforms, apps, and digital services, as well as remain there longer, thereby effectively enhancing participation numbers and time. In this article, I will explore the potential problems of these involvement strategies, namely the worry that they may be able to undermine citizen’s individual and political autonomy by manipulating them into participating. Depending on the severity of the psycho-motivational effect as well as the covertness of the mechanism, gamification may constitute inadmissible forms of paternalism.

This paper discusses the ethical implications of perverse incentives with regard to autonomous driving. We define perverse incentives as a feature of an action, technology, or social policy that invites behavior which negates the primary goal of the actors initiating the action, introducing a certain technology, or implementing a social policy. As a special form of means-end-irrationality, perverse incentives are to be avoided from a prudential standpoint, as they prove to be directly self-defeating: They are not just a form of unintended side effect that must be balanced against the main goal or value to be realized by an action, technology, or policy. Instead, they directly cause the primary goals of the actors—i.e., the goals that they ultimately pursue with the action, technology, or policy—to be “worse achieved”. In this paper, we elaborate on this definition and distinguish three ideal-typical phases of adverse incentives, where only in the last one the threshold for a perverse incentive is crossed. In addition, we discuss different possible relevant actors and their goals in implementing autonomous vehicles. We conclude that even if some actors do not pursue traffic safety as their primary goal, as part of a responsibility network they incur the responsibility to act on the common primary goal of the network, which we argue to be traffic safety.

Ausgehend von einem „standard social role model“ von Privatheit als Set von Normen sozialer Rollen in sozialen Kontexten bzw. Praktiken sollen in diesem Text die sozialontologischen Bedingungen für Privatheit erörtert und das sozialontologische Anerkennungsmodell von Privatheit, das ich an anderer Stelle ausgearbeitet habe, weiterentwickelt werden. Genauer gesagt soll das „super-skilled performer“-Argument zurückgewiesen werden. Diesem Argument zufolge zeige das hohe Maß an nötigem ökonomischen und technischen Vorwissen für eine wohlinformierte Einwilligung in Verdatungspraktiken eigentlich nur, dass die verdateten Subjekte als mit besonders hoher digitaler Medienkompetenz ausgestattete Interpreten dieser Verdatungspraktiken anerkannt würden. Wenn dies zuträfe, wären die verdateten Individuen als „super-skilled performer“ doch letztlich als „Standardautoritäten“ anerkannt und das SORM hätte keine Möglichkeit, hier eine pathologische Praxis auszumachen.

An der Schnittstelle zwischen Computerspielen und Politik lassen sich vier primäre Themenfelder ausmachen, die prima facie für eine philosophische Untersuchung von Interesse sind. Zunächst einmal könnte man über Computerspielpolitik sprechen, d. h. das Politikfeld ›Computerspiele‹, in dem politische Zielsetzungen, Normen und Handlungen debattiert, Entscheidungen getroffen und diese auch konkret in Rechtsnormen umgesetzt werden. Computerspielpolitik in diesem Sinne ist ein Unterressort der Medien- bzw. der Kulturpolitik. Urheberrechts- und Weiterverwertungsfragen, Fragen der Kulturförderung, aber auch die Frage der Altersfreigabe und Indizierung von Computerspielen gehören hier hinein. Aus moralischer Perspektive ist in diesem Zusammenhang bspw. die Überlegung virulent geworden, sogenannte ›Killerspiele‹ zu verbieten.

Wie lässt sich der Bereich des Privaten heute genau beschreiben? Welchen Wert besitzt Privatheit in digitalisierten Gesellschaften für den Einzelnen und die Gesellschaft als Ganzes? Welche Werte und Lebensformen werden durch Privatheit geschützt, welche eingeschränkt? Entstehen durch die Informationsasymmetrie zwischen Technologieunternehmen, staatlichen Verdatungsinstitutionen und Verbrauchern/Bürgern möglicherweise neue Machtstrukturen? Welche rechtlichen Implikationen ergeben sich hieraus? Dieser Band geht diesen und anderen Fragen, die sich im Hinblick auf die etablierte Gleichung von Freiheit und Privatheit stellen, nach und versucht Antworten zu finden.

While recent studies suggest that augmented learning employing smart glasses increases overall learning performance, in this paper we are more interested in the question which repercussions ALSG will have on the type of knowledge that is acquired. Drawing from the theoretical discussion within epistemology about the differences between Knowledge-How and Knowledge-That, we will argue that ALSG furthers understanding as a series of epistemic and non-epistemic Knowing-Hows. Focusing on academic knowledge acquisition, especially with respect to early curriculum experiments in various STEM disciplines as investigated by the BmBF “Be-Greifen” project, we take the Be-Greifen holo.lab setup as an example for showing that ALSG shifts the learning focus from propositional knowledge to epistemic competencies, which can be differentiated as “grasping”, “wielding”, and “transferring”.

This paper distinguishes between two main questions regarding the notion of privacy: “What is privacy?” and “Why do/should we value privacy?”. In developing a social-ontological recognitional model of privacy (SORM), it gives an answer to the first question. According to the SORM, Privacy is a second order quality of roles within social practices. It is a function of who is or should be recognized as a “standard authority”. Enjoying standard authority means to have the right to interpret and contest role behavior and role obligations within a specific practice (first level), as well as evaluate the normative structure, the fundamental practice norms as well as the roles and their status (second level). The SORM utilizes the concept of standard authority to explicate privacy with regard to two categories that capture the relevant phenomena of privacy: decisional and informational privacy. Within a practice, an actor is said to have decisional privacy if she as a BCR does not (or does not have to) recognize bearers of accidental roles as standard authorities. Vice versa, an actor is said to enjoy informational privacy if all other BCRs (and especially data collecting actors) recognize her as a standard authority. Additionally, the requirement of mutual recognition by the practice participants as standard authorities introduces a “weak normativity” into the theory, which can be used to identify deficient privacy arrangements within practices.