Applied Ethics Commons^™

European Values For Ethics In Digital Technology, Ethics4eu Consortium

Reports

Digital Ethics deals with the impact of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on our societies and the environment at large. It covers a wide spectrum of societal and ethical impacts including issues such as data governance, privacy and personal data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithmic decision-making and pervasive technologies. Importantly, it is not only about hardware and software, but it also concerns systems, how people and organizations and society and technology interact. In addition, with Digital Ethics comes the added variable of assessing the ethical implications of artefacts which may not yet exist, or artefacts which may have impacts we …

Diagnostic Justice: Testing For Covid-19, Ashley Graham Kennedy, Bryan Cwik

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Diagnostic testing can be used for many purposes, including testing to facilitate the clinical care of individual patients, testing as an inclusion criterion for clinical trial participation, and both passive and active surveillance testing of the general population in order to facilitate public health outcomes, such as the containment or mitigation of an infectious disease. As such, diagnostic testing presents us with ethical questions that are, in part, already addressed in the literature on clinical care as well as clinical research (such as the rights of patients to refuse testing or treatment in the clinical setting or the rights of …

Factory To Table: A Philosophic Analysis Of The Justice Or Lack Thereof Of Agricultural Markets, Will Carter

CMC Senior Theses

How food is produced has dramatic consequences on how we live, our world’s justice, and the future of our planet. In a world increasingly driven by neoliberalism, agricultural markets have been incentivized to industrialize, globalize, and consolidate. This has resulted in the global dominance of a new type of agriculture, industrial agriculture, driven by the market logic of lowering costs and raising profits. Industrial agriculture has undoubtedly generated the profound benefit of cheaper, more plentiful food in much of the world. These favorable innovations lead many scholars to argue that free markets produce the most just and efficient arrangements for …

The Economic And Philosophic Manuscripts Of Data, Sage D. Young

CMC Senior Theses

Society is filled with words and images that elucidate the positive force radiating from technology entities. I push back against this imprecise and inaccurate narrative by breaking down the illusions created by surveillance capitalism. I argue that there exists a unique relationship between an individual and their environment in creating value, especially in the form of data. This relationship tears down the smokescreens prompted up by the surveillance state because it demonstrates the costs of technology and surveillance capitalism. I found that how data is created and made monetarily valuable has significant, adverse repercussions on the capability to flourish as …

On The Wrongs Of Fake News, Samuel Fiske

CMC Senior Theses

While fake news has become a hot political issue in the past years, it presents novel and apolitical philosophical problems that are often neglected. This paper explores the epistemic and moral wrong of fake news, drawing on work from Immanuel Kant, Seana Shiffrin, and Miranda Fricker to explain exactly why fake news is so problematic. I argue that creating and sharing fake news violates Kant’s Categorical Imperative because it cannot be willed into a universal law and because it fails to respect rational agents as ends in themselves. I also argue that fake news presents distinct epistemic harms as it …

“Emotion, Executive Dysfunction, And Agency: Can Emotional Disability Impair An Agent’S Likelihood Of Virtue?” In Faith & Virtue Formation: Christian Philosophy In Aid Of Becoming Good, Edited By Adam C. Pelser And W. Scott Cleveland, Kevin Timpe

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Factors Influencing Nurse Spiritual Care Practices At The End Of Life: A Systematic Review, Rita Mascio, Megan Best, Sandra Lynch, Jane Phillips, Kate Jones

IES Papers and Journal Articles

Objectives: The aim was to identify determinants of nurse spiritual/existential care practices toward end-of-life patients. Nurses can play a significant role in providing spiritual/existential care, but they actually provide this care less frequently than desired by patients.

Methods: A systematic search was performed for peer-reviewed articles that reported factors that influenced nurses’ spiritual/existential care practices toward adult end-of-life patients.

Results: The review identified 42 studies and included the views of 4,712 nurses across a range of hospital and community settings. The most frequently reported factors/domains that influenced nurse practice were patient-related social influence, skills, social/professional role and identity, intentions …

Environmental Reforestation And Social Justice In Cameroon: A Test Case For Pope Francis' Concept Of 'Integral Ecology' In Laudato Sí, Augustin Vondou

Dissertations

The following quotation from Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Sí is one of the most quoted parts of his well-known encyclical: We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature (139).

This is a very challenging statement. Not everyone accepts this idea of an ‘integral ecology’; that is, the notion that the condition of human society is directly linked to the …

Ethical Price For Essential Pharmaceuticals?, Sang T. Truong

Student Research

Azidothymidine or AZT is an antiretroviral medication used to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS. Nowadays, AZT remains to be the primary active drug that can elongate the life of infected patients. Without treatment, patients can live for 5 to 10 years after infected. With the treatment, their life expectancy approaches the norm.

However, it is important to note that AZT is a life-saver for HIV patients only if they can afford it. An HIV patient needs to spend about $17,000 for AZT every year until the end of his life. Therefore, the estimated lifetime cost of HIV will be $600,000. This …

An Ethical Market For Kidney?, Sang T. Truong

Student Research

The kidney performs several vital functions that maintain our general health condition, including filtering waste chemicals out of our blood. Kidney failure is a condition where patients’ kidneys lose their ability to filter the waste from their blood, leading to accumulating toxin in their body. Without any medical care, a patient with kidney failure has a couple days to a couple of weeks to live. One way to elongate the life of the kidney-failure patient is through kidney transplant, where another kidney is implanted into the patient’s body.

In the U.S, it is illegal to trade a kidney for money. …

You Can't Lose A Game If You Don't Play The Game: Exploring The Ethics Of Gamification In Education, Dympna O'Sullivan, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon, Andrea Curley, Brendan Tierney, Emma Murphy, Michael Collins, Anna Becevel

Articles

Gamification has been hailed as a meaningful solution to the perennial challenge of sustaining student attention in class. It uses facets of gameplay in an educational context, including things such as points, leaderboards and badges. These are clearly efforts to make the student experience more entertaining and engaging, but nonetheless, they are also clearly digital nudges and attempts to change the students’ behaviours and attitudes to a specific set of concepts, and in which case they must, and should, be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as any other form of persuasion technique, as they may be unintentionally eroding the …

Heeding The Call Of Covid-19, David Wiebers, Valery Feigin

Animal Sentience

We are grateful to all of our commentators. They have provided a wide range of valuable perspectives and insights from many fields, revealing a broad interest in the subject matter. Nearly all the commentaries have helped to affirm, refine, expand, amplify, deepen, interpret, elaborate, or apply the messages in the target article. Some have offered critiques and suggestions that help us address certain issues in greater detail, including several points concerning industrialized farming and the wildlife trade. Overall, there is great awareness and strong consensus among commentators that any solution for preventing future pandemics and other related health crises must …

Data: The Good, The Bad And The Ethical, John D. Kelleher, Filipe Cabral Pinto, Luis M. Cortesao

Articles

It is often the case with new technologies that it is very hard to predict their long-term impacts and as a result, although new technology may be beneficial in the short term, it can still cause problems in the longer term. This is what happened with oil by-products in different areas: the use of plastic as a disposable material did not take into account the hundreds of years necessary for its decomposition and its related long-term environmental damage. Data is said to be the new oil. The message to be conveyed is associated with its intrinsic value. But as in …

Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, And Artificial Intelligence, Os Keyes

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems shift to interact with new domains and populations, so does AI ethics: a relatively nascent subdiscipline that frequently concerns itself with questions of “fairness” and “accountability.” This fairness-centred approach has been criticized for (amongst other things) lacking the ability to address discursive, rather than distributional, injustices. In this paper I simultaneously validate these concerns, and work to correct the relative silence of both conventional and critical AI ethicists around disability, by exploring the narratives deployed by AI researchers in discussing and designing systems around autism. Demonstrating that these narratives frequently perpetuate a dangerously dehumanizing model …

Ishi, Briet's Antelope, And The Documentality Of Human Documents, Martin I. Nord

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Ishi, the “last wild Indian in North America,” was “discovered” in 1911 and spent the last years of his life living in an anthropology museum. There he was studied by anthropologists and viewed by the public as a living exhibit. In this paper, I take some initial steps in arguing that Ishi, the person, became a document to most people. The similarities between Ishi and Suzanne Briet’s hypothetical antelope, newly discovered and placed in a zoo, are eerie. Ishi, like the antelope, is brought into public knowledge as both an initial document and a wide variety of secondary documents derived …

“How Could You Even Ask That?”: Moral Considerability, Uncertainty And Vulnerability In Social Robotics, Alexis Elder

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

When it comes to social robotics (robots that engage human social responses via “eyes” and other facial features, voice-based natural-language interactions, and even evocative movements), ethicists, particularly in European and North American traditions, are divided over whether and why they might be morally considerable. Some argue that moral considerability is based on internal psychological states like consciousness and sentience, and debate about thresholds of such features sufficient for ethical consideration, a move sometimes criticized for being overly dualistic in its framing of mind versus body. Others, meanwhile, focus on the effects of these robots on human beings, arguing that psychological …

Autonomous Vehicles And The Ethical Tension Between Occupant And Non-Occupant Safety, Jason Borenstein, Joseph Herkert, Keith Miller

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Given that the creation and deployment of autonomous vehicles is likely to continue, it is important to explore the ethical responsibilities of designers, manufacturers, operators, and regulators of the technology. We specifically focus on the ethical responsibilities surrounding autonomous vehicles that these stakeholders have to protect the safety of non-occupants, meaning individuals who are around the vehicles while they are operating. The term “non-occupants” includes, but is not limited to, pedestrians and cyclists. We are particularly interested in how to assign moral responsibility for the safety of non-occupants when autonomous vehicles are deployed in a complex, land-based transportation system.

Perceived Benefits And Barriers To Participation In Exercise Among Jordanian University Students, Khaldoun Hamdan

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

Insufficient physical activity is a risk factor for many non-communicable diseases, therefore; the purpose of this study is to examine university students’ perceived exercise benefits and barriers. This cross-sectional descriptive study used Exercise Benefits/Barriers Scale to examine perceived benefits and barriers to exercise among a convenience sample of 517 university students in Jordan. Participants reported significantly higher perceived barriers to exercise than perceived benefits from exercise. The most important perceived barrier to exercise was “I am too embarrassed to exercise”. Moreover, “I will live longer if I exercise” and “exercising increases being accepted by others” were the most important perceived …

Project Management: A Help Or Hindrance A Collaborative Research, Ayman Abu-Rumman

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

This small-scale mixed method study explored perceptions of how different project management approaches and tools are used by those working in industry and within academia, and how this may impact on collaborative research projects given their distinct and unique nature. The study also aimed to generate suggestions for how collaboration between industry and academia could be strengthened in the future. Underpinned by a phenomenological perspective, a survey and interviews were conducted with a sample of Jordanian professionals from different industry and academic organisations who had previous experience of working on collaborative research projects. The study identified, consistent with other studies, …

Build A Job Satisfaction Scale From The Views Of Aau Academic Staff In According With The Item Response Theory, Mohammed Marshoud

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

The study aimed to build a job satisfaction scale from the views of AAU academic staff in according with the item response theory, where the population study consisted of all academic members at Al-Ahliyya Amman University (AAU) for the year (2018/2017), and they approximately reach (257) academic members, the sample consisted of (154) academic members, which constituted 60 of the original study population, (92) males and (62) females who were randomly selected. The study tool was designed and built based on theoretical literature and scales on measuring job satisfaction at universities. the study tool consisted of (60) items which were …