China 
Africa 
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Intangible ethicality
Published in Philippe d’Anjou, Ethical Design Intelligence, 2020
John Rawls provides a means to avoid the logical incoherence problem that skepticism poses for ethical deliberation. Unlike what skepticism is trying to challenge, there is no need to adhere to irrefutable proposals that act as a basis from which all ethical knowledge can be founded. Rawls proposes a continuous process that he calls “reflective equilibrium,” in which principles and deliberative judgments on specific cases are compared. If they cannot constitute a consistent whole, then adjustments have to be made. In this case, principles or judgments are further refined so as to achieve an internal coherence among principles that coincide with almost all ethical judgments. None takes precedence between principles and judgments. They mutually adjust and, during this process, significant, relevant, and applicable knowledge, views, and facts are brought into consideration. At a high level of ethical deliberation, intuitions, beliefs, and principles are brought into consideration of judgments and thus interconnect in a consistent way. Rawls is a designer.
How to bridge the gap between social acceptance and ethical acceptability
Published in Friedo Zölzer, Gaston Meskens, Environmental Health Risks, 2018
In this chapter, I have argued that concentrating solely on social acceptance threatens to obscure several important moral issues, especially when it comes to technologies with international and intergenerational risks. Good governance of risky technology must involve addressing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability, because it is only in conjunction that these two concepts gain serious relevance for policy-making. Conceptually, it is helpful to combine these notions, because they are mostly complementary; social acceptance studies are often in need of an ethical addendum, while existing ethical analysis would very much benefit from including stakeholders’ opinions. One method for bridging this gap is the Wide Reflective Equilibrium, which aims to establish coherence among the three levels of ethical theory, guiding principles and stakeholders’ considered moral judgments. While a complete coherence seems to be the ideal (perhaps unrealistic) solution, we must seek the best approximation of that ideal. More precisely, we want to investigate if an acceptable approximation of that ideal, or a reasonable overlapping consensus is achievable.
Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences
Published in Wendell Wallach, Peter Asaro, Machine Ethics and Robot Ethics, 2020
The question then becomes what do we do about the hard cases that arise today? Thoughts about the shape of an answer can begin with the nature of justification and argumentation, both moral and legal. Our unreflective intuitions and well-considered moral and legal judgments are rooted in particular cases. These paradigm cases are the stuff of ordinary practical discourse. We make analogies to the familiar cases. We try to bring order to our particular judgments by advancing more general theories. We seek reflective equilibrium between our considered judgments and general theories. Ordinary practical discourse is shallow in the sense that it can be (and usually is) limited to arguments rooted in our common sense and ordinary experience.
Defending the substance view against its critics
Published in The New Bioethics, 2022
McMahan explains that John Rawls’ method of ‘reflective equilibrium’ is a common approach to using our intuitions in moral enquiry (McMahan 2017, p.110, Rawls 1999, p.18-19). Beginning with a set of intuitions, we filter out those intuitions that ‘are the obvious products of distorting influences’, such as ancient superstitions and taboos (McMahan 2017, p.110). We use the remaining intuitions to infer moral principles, and we subsequently modify these principles when conflicting intuitions are found. As a result, a good deal of moral philosophy involves thought experiments that attempt to elucidate our intuitions to provide evidence for or against moral theories. It is common for critics of theories to create thought experiments that produce intuitions contrary to these theories, while defenders of these theories try to explain away such intuitions (Climenhaga 2018). This suggests that intuitions contrary to a moral theory are regarded as evidence against that theory.
Moral and social ramifications of autonomous vehicles: a qualitative study of the perceptions of professional drivers
Published in Behaviour & Information Technology, 2023
Veljko Dubljević, Sean Douglas, Jovan Milojevich, Nirav Ajmeri, William A. Bauer, George List, Munindar P. Singh
Parties in the original position employ reflective equilibrium (Rawls 1999), a prominent method to test the normative and empirical adequacy of ethical principles. It implies there is a coherent procedure for applying general principles from theories to specific moral intuitions or considered moral judgments of stakeholders. Specifically, self-interested interlocutors propose principles of justice and test them against considered judgments on particular examples.
Belief systems and ideological deep disagreement
Published in International Journal of General Systems, 2022
J. L. Usó-Doménech, J. A. Nescolarde-Selva, H. Gash
A possible internal criterion of “truth” is conviction in the idea of reflective equilibrium. If a deontic norm is intuitively compelling after proper reflection, the BS-belief system may be the truest. We do not intend to support this criterion based solely on exclusively psychological criteria, but for some researchers, it can be very attractive.