Robotic Nudges: The Ethics of Engineering a More Socially Just Human Being

Robots are becoming an increasingly pervasive feature of our personal lives. As a result, there is growing importance placed on examining what constitutes appropriate behavior when they interact with human beings. In this paper, we discuss whether companion robots should be permitted to “nudge” their human users in the direction of being “more ethical”. More specifically, we use Rawlsian principles of justice to illustrate how robots might nurture “socially just” tendencies in their human counterparts. Designing technological artifacts in such a way to influence human behavior is already well-established but merely because the practice is commonplace does not necessarily resolve the ethical issues associated with its implementation.     

Publishing in Scientific Journals: We're Not Just Talking to Ourselves Anymore

ABSTRACT— Increasingly, psychological research is part of the integrative science that spans multiple disciplines, but variable publication standards undermine some of the integrative progress that might otherwise be made. Word limits for articles, norms for shorter reviews (which would improve turnaround time), electronic availability, and appropriate marketing of research will bring psychology closer to the central role it could play in integrative science.     

Science, Human Nature, and a New Paradigm for Ethics Education

For centuries, religion and philosophy have been the primary basis for efforts to guide humans to be more ethical. However, training in ethics and religion and imparting positive values and morality tests such as those emanating from the categorical imperative and the Golden Rule have not been enough to protect humankind from its bad behaviors. To improve ethics education educators must better understand aspects of human nature such as those that lead to ??self-deception?? and ??personal bias.?? Through rationalizations, faulty reasoning and hidden bias, individuals trick themselves into believing there is little wrong with their own unethical behavior. The application of science to human nature offers the possibility of improving ethics education through better self-knowledge. The author recommends a new paradigm for ethics education in contemporary modern society. This includes the creation of a new field called ??applied evolutionary neuro-ethics?? which integrates science and social sciences to improve ethics education. The paradigm can merge traditional thinking about ethics from religious and philosophical perspectives with new ideas from applied evolutionary neuro-ethics.     

Aesthetics and Ethics in Engineering: Insights from Polanyi

Polanyi insisted that scientific knowledge was intensely personal in nature, though held with universal intent. His insights regarding the personal values of beauty and morality in science are first enunciated. These are then explored for their relevance to engineering. It is shown that the practice of engineering is also governed by aesthetics and ethics. For example, Polanyi’s three spheres of morality in science—that of the individual scientist, the scientific community and the wider society—has parallel entities in engineering. The existence of shared values in engineering is also demonstrated, in aesthetics through an example that shows convergence of practitioner opinion to solutions that represent accepted models of aesthetics; and in ethics through the recognition that many professional engineering institutions hold that the safety of the public supersedes the interests of the client. Such professional consensus can be seen as justification for studying engineering aesthetics and ethics as inter-subjective disciplines.     

Exploring a Moral Landscape: Genetic Science and Ethics

This project draws on scholarship of feminist and womanist scholars, and on results of interviews with scientists currently involved in molecular genetics. With reference to Margaret Urban Walker's “practices of moral responsibility,” the social practices of molecular geneticists are exphred, and strategies identified through which scientists negotiate their moral responsibilities. The implications of this work for scientists and for feminists are discussed.     

Psychoanalysis--Myth and Science: The Challenge to Become Open-Minded to Infinite Complexity

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

心脏死亡器官捐献家属决定的影响因素及对策研究

2010年3月起我国开始推行心脏死亡器官捐献试点工作.通过对51例潜在心脏死亡器官捐献案例进行开放式访谈;探讨协调介入时机和环境、协调员专业水平、家属对脑死亡及捐献流程信息的了解、家庭组成、传统文化对器官捐献决定的影响;针对性提出提高器官捐献数量和捐献率的策略.     

生物学和生物医学科学中的复杂性

自牛顿时代以来,经典力学和还原论一直是科学研究的基石.然而,还原论和决定论无法分析和恰当地解释复杂系统特征性的突现性质.以认识论的观点看,还原论和整体论结合起来才能综合评估复杂生物系统.突现,非线性和自组织等复杂性理论的概念正改变和塑造着生物医学研究范式.还阐述了理解生物系统复杂性的重要价值.     

生物学和生物医学科学中的复杂性

自牛顿时代以来,经典力学和还原论一直是科学研究的基石。然而,还原论和决定论无法分析和恰当地解释复杂系统特征性的突现性质。以认识论的观点看,还原论和整体论结合起来才能综合评估复杂生物系统。突现,非线性和自组织等复杂性理论的概念正改变和塑造着生物医学研究范式。还阐述了理解生物系统复杂性的重要价值。     

Getting Started: Helping a New Profession Develop an Ethics Program

Both of us have been involved with helping professions, especially new scientific or technological professions, develop ethics programs—for undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners. By “ethics program”, we mean any strategy for teaching ethics, including developing materials. Our purpose here is to generalize from that experience to identify the chief elements needed to get an ethics program started in a new profession. We are focusing on new professions for two reasons. First, all the older professions, both in the US and in most other countries, now have ethics programs of some sort. They do not need our advice to get started. Second, new professions face special problems just because they are new—everything from deciding who belongs to the profession to formalizing ethical standards so that they can be taught. Our purpose in this paper is to generalize from our experience and to identify some of the fundamentals for getting an ethics program started in a new profession. We present our recommendations in the form of response to 6 questions anyone designing an ethics program for a new profession should ask. We realize that our brief discussion does not provide a complete treatment of the subject. Our purpose has been to point in the right direction those considering an ethics program for new profession.     

Teaching Science and Ethics to Undergraduates: A Multidisciplinary Approach

The teaching of the ethical implications of scientific advances in science courses for undergraduates has significant advantages for both science and non-science majors. The article describes three courses taught by the author as examples of the concept, and examines the disadvantages as well as the advantages. A significant advantage of this approach is that many students take the courses primarily because of the ethical component who would not otherwise take science. A disadvantage is less time in the course for the science; arguably, this is outweighed by the greater retention of the science when it is put into context.     

Reverence and Ethics in Science

Codes of ethics abound in science, but the question of why such codes should be obeyed is rarely asked. Various reasons for obeying a professional code have been proposed, but all are unsatisfactory in that they do not really motivate behavior. This article suggests that the long forgotten virtue of reverence provides both a reason to obey a professional code and motivation to do so. In addition, it discusses the importance of reverence as a cardinal virtue for scientists drawing on the ideas of Paul Woodruff on the role of virtue in community.     

正义的战争与战争的正义——关于战争伦理的反思

战争可以定义为两个或两个以上的国家间的有组织的政治暴力。根据战争的目的、过程和结果,战争伦理大致包括“战争权利伦理”、“战争行为伦理”和“战争责任伦理”三个方面。在战争伦理中最重要的是所谓“正义”问题。“正义”与“非正义”这对概念并非规定战争的客观性质,而是一种煽动人们拥战或反战热情的主观态度和伦理立场的表达。     

Globalization, Population Aging, and Ethics, Part II: Toward a Just Global Society

In Globalization, Population Aging, and Ethics, Part I (2001), we described how globalization, through the neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank) has substantially reduced the capacities of developing countries to meet the educational, economic, and healthcare needs of their growing populations. We also described how these needs will increase over the next several decades with the huge growth of the elderly population across Asia and Latin America. We concluded our analysis with a discussion of the ethical implications of this increasing discrepancy between resource capacity and human needs in the developing world and two perspectives (Rawls's theory of justice and liberation philosophy, 2000) that could help sharpen the debate over the ethics of globalization. In this article, we summarize our analysis and discussion of Part I and include new information from additional sources. We then extend our discussion of the ethical implications of this analysis by describing a range of political and policy options that we think are consistent with the ethical perspective suggested in Part I and that have the potential to help reduce the widening gap between resource capacity and human need in many developing countries.     

Science and Human Behavior: a tutorial in behavior analysis

B. F. Skinner's Science and Human Behavior (1953) became the main source of my understanding of behavior during my first semester as a college professor in 1955 at Kansas University. It has continued to exert a major influence throughout my career as the basis for a completely deterministic science of behavior, as a handbook to be consulted as a first step in dealing with any issue in behavior analysis, and as a tutorial in behavioral interpretive analysis--in the use of a small number of behavioral concepts and principles to understand behavior of all degrees of complexity. I describe four general interpretive orientations or maxims that are of broad significance for behavior analysis, and also two underappreciated major theoretical contributions.     

Science,Technology and Ethics: From Critical Perspective to Dialectical Perspective

It has been agreed upon, according to critical perspective, to distinguish the problems raised by scientific issues on the one hand and the problems raised by moral issues on the other. This distinction, at the genesis of theoretical ideology, postulates that experimental science is mere knowledge which, since it has nothing to do with action, cannot raise a moral problem. Yet the use of experimental techniques turns out to be a necessary means, although an insufficient one, to put to the test and to confirm the theoretical hypothesis of science. Thus, those techniques produce perceptible effects which can be assimilated to genuine transformation and are consequently capable of raising moral problems. It follows that the technical imperative of science can be conditioned by a moral imperative of technique, which leads to modification of the object of the research and dubs it, a dialectical object. It is, however, advisable to effect a demarcation between that which, within the frame work of research in experimental science, can pose a moral problem and which cannot. The criterion of refusability of practical projects, by analogy with Popper’s criterion of refutability of theoretical conjectures, allows for this demarcation to be implemented. It postulates that only the technical projects of science, apart from scientific theories, can pose a moral problem or can be recognized as moral, providing that the conditions of a possible ethical refusal can be expressed. From the analysis and the synthesis of heterogeneous possibilities, dialectical perspective thus outlined represents an endeavour to go beyond critical perspective, while trying to seek an intermediary channel between the “progressist dogmatism” of science and the “obscurantist scepticism” of morals.     

Clocks,Creation and Clarity: Insights on Ethics and Economics from a Feminist Perspective

This essay discusses the origins, biases, and effects on contemporary discussions of economics and ethics of the unexamined use of the metaphor an economy is a machine. Both neoliberal economics and many critiques of capitalist systems take this metaphor as their starting point. The belief that economies run according to universal laws of motion, however, is shown to be based on a variety of rationalist thinking that – while widely held – is inadequate for explaining lived human experience. Feminist scholarship in the philosophy of science and economics has brought to light some of the biases that have supported the mechanistic worldview. Possible alternatives to the an economy is a machine include an economy is a creative process and an economy is an organism. Such metaphors are intellectually defensible as guides to scientific inquiry and provide a richer ground for moral imagination.     

Dynamical Social Psychology: Complexity and Coherence in Human Experience

Human experience reflects the interplay of multiple influences operating on various time scales to promote constantly evolving patterns of thought, emotion, and action. Although the complexity and dynamism of personal and social phenomena have long been recognized, they are difficult to investigate using traditional research methods. This article provides an overview of dynamical social psychology, an approach adapted from dynamical systems theory that is designed to capture the complementary tendencies of stability and dynamism at different levels of social reality, from private thoughts to intergroup relations. Utilizing time-series analyses and computer simulations, this perspective documents the emergence of global properties from the interaction of basic elements in mental and social systems and investigates the time-dependent relation between external influences and a system’s internally generated dynamics. The dynamical approach enables social psychology to advance as a precise science while preserving the basic insights that launched the field over a century ago.