On the moral responsibility of military robots

This article discusses mechanisms and principles for assignment of moral responsibility to intelligent robots, with special focus on military robots. We introduce the concept autonomous power as a new concept, and use it to identify the type of robots that call for moral considerations. It is furthermore argued that autonomous power, and in particular the ability to learn, is decisive for assignment of moral responsibility to robots. As technological development will lead to robots with increasing autonomous power, we should be prepared for a future when people blame robots for their actions. It is important to, already today, investigate the mechanisms that control human behavior in this respect. The results may be used when designing future military robots, to control unwanted tendencies to assign responsibility to the robots. Independent of the responsibility issue, the moral quality of robots’ behavior should be seen as one of many performance measures by which we evaluate robots. How to design ethics based control systems should be carefully investigated already now. From a consequentialist view, it would indeed be highly immoral to develop robots capable of performing acts involving life and death, without including some kind of moral framework.     

The amoralist challenge to gaming and the gamer’s moral obligation

According to the amoralist, computer games cannot be subject to moral evaluation because morality applies to reality only, and games are not real but “just games”. This challenges our everyday moralist intuition that some games are to be met with moral criticism. I discuss and reject the two most common answers to the amoralist challenge and argue that the amoralist is right in claiming that there is nothing intrinsically wrong in simply playing a game. I go on to argue for the so-called “endorsement view” according to which there is nevertheless a sense in which games themselves can be morally problematic, viz. when they do not only represent immoral actions but endorse a morally problematic worldview. Based on the endorsement view, I argue against full blown amoralism by claiming that gamers do have a moral obligation when playing certain games even if their moral obligation is not categorically different from that of readers and moviegoers.     

基本公共服务均等化的政治伦理涵义析论

学界在给予"基本公共服务均等化"概念相当关注的同时,却众说纷纭,连基本公共服务均等化的涵义和范围都很难达成共识,而只有从伦理维度阐述基本公共服务均等化才是从本质上把握了概念。"公共服务"的意涵来自于民众权利在先的公共权力责任伦理的中间层面。"基本"公共服务的"基本"之所以受到争议,根源于自由与理性的关系等深层次的政治哲学问题。而"均等化"的争论更多的是在"道德应得"与"权利应得"之间的选择不同,但基本的共识还是能够达致。     

Moral Responsibility for Harm Caused by Computer System Failures

When software is written and then utilized in complex computer systems, problems often occur. Sometimes these problems cause a system to malfunction, and in some instances such malfunctions cause harm. Should any of the persons involved in creating the software be blamed and punished when a computer system failure leads to persons being harmed? In order to decide whether such blame and punishment are appropriate, we need to first consider if the people are “morally responsible”. Should any of the people involved in creating the software be held morally responsible, as individuals, for the harm caused by a computer system failure?This article provides one view of moral responsibility and then discusses some barriers to holding people morally responsible. Next, it provides information about the Therac-25, a computer-controlled medical linear accelerator, and its computer systems failures that led to deaths and injuries. Finally it investigates whether two key people involved in the Therac-25 case could reasonably be considered to have some degree of moral responsibility for the deaths and injuries. The conclusions about whether or not these people were morally responsible necessarily rest upon a certain amount of speculation about what they knew and what they did. These limitations, however, should not cause us to conclude that discussions of moral responsibility are fruitless. In some cases, determinations of moral responsibility may be made and in others the investigation is still worthwhile, as the article demonstrates.     

重大水资源配置工程网络化治理框架构建

我国重大水资源配置工程具有跨区域分布、点多面广量大、利益相关者多、复杂程度高等情境特征,传统治理理论与手段难以满足实践需求。针对重大水资源配置工程合力困境问题,在借鉴国外重大工程治理经验基础上,根据网络化治理的核心思想,结合委托代理理论、新制度经济学、公共管理理论、协同理论等,从主体维、过程维、对象维提出了重大水资源配置工程网络化治理体系总体框架。在此基础上,讨论多元主体及协同治理结构的构建,以及责权匹配机制、协同联合机制、激励监督机制等复合治理机制的设计。     

The ethics of designing artificial agents

In their important paper “Autonomous Agents”, Floridi and Sanders use “levels of abstraction” to argue that computers are or may soon be moral agents. In this paper we use the same levels of abstraction to illuminate differences between human moral agents and computers. In their paper, Floridi and Sanders contributed definitions of autonomy, moral accountability and responsibility, but they have not explored deeply some essential questions that need to be answered by computer scientists who design artificial agents. One such question is, “Can an artificial agent that changes its own programming become so autonomous that the original designer is no longer responsible for the behavior of the artificial agent?” To explore this question, we distinguish between LoA1 (the user view) and LoA2 (the designer view) by exploring the concepts of unmodifiable, modifiable and fully modifiable tables that control artificial agents. We demonstrate that an agent with an unmodifiable table, when viewed at LoA2, distinguishes an artificial agent from a human one. This distinction supports our first counter-claim to Floridi and Sanders, namely, that such an agent is not a moral agent, and the designer bears full responsibility for its behavior. We also demonstrate that even if there is an artificial agent with a fully modifiable table capable of learning* and intentionality* that meets the conditions set by Floridi and Sanders for ascribing moral agency to an artificial agent, the designer retains strong moral responsibility.     

Free will and moral responsibility in video games

Can a player be held morally responsible for the choices that she makes within a videogame? Do the moral choices that the player makes reflect in any way on the player’s actual moral sensibilities? Many videogames offer players the options to make numerous choices within the game, including moral choices. But the scope of these choices is quite limited. I attempt to analyze these issues by drawing on philosophical debates about the nature of free will. Many philosophers worry that, if our actions are predetermined, then we cannot be held morally responsible for them. However, Harry Frankfurt’s compatibilist account of free will suggests that an agent can be held morally responsible for actions that she wills, even if the agent is not free to act otherwise. Using Frankfurt’s analysis, I suggest that videogames represent deterministic worlds in which players lack the ability to freely choose what they do, and yet players can be held morally responsible for some of their actions, specifically those actions that the player wants to do. Finally, I offer some speculative comments on how these considerations might impact our understanding of the player’s moral psychology as it relates to the ethics of imagined fictional events.     

Moral luck and computer ethics: Gauguin in cyberspace

I argue that the problem of ‘moral luck’ is an unjustly neglected topic within Computer Ethics. This is unfortunate given that the very nature of computer technology, its ‘logical malleability’, leads to ever greater levels of complexity, unreliability and uncertainty. The ever widening contexts of application in turn lead to greater scope for the operation of chance and the phenomenon of moral luck. Moral luck bears down most heavily on notions of professional responsibility, the identification and attribution of responsibility. It is immunity from luck that conventionally marks out moral value from other kinds of values such as instrumental, technical, and use value. The paper describes the nature of moral luck and its erosion of the scope of responsibility and agency. Moral luck poses a challenge to the kinds of theoretical approaches often deployed in Computer Ethics when analyzing moral questions arising from the design and implementation of information and communication technologies. The paper considers the impact on consequentialism; virtue ethics; and duty ethics. In addressing cases of moral luck within Computer Ethics, I argue that it is important to recognise the ways in which different types of moral systems are vulnerable, or resistant, to moral luck. Different resolutions are possible depending on the moral framework adopted. Equally, resolution of cases will depend on fundamental moral assumptions. The problem of moral luck in Computer Ethics should prompt us to new ways of looking at risk, accountability and responsibility.     

医德教育过程中主体性的缺失问题及对策刍议

医德教育中一个突出问题就是学生主体性的缺失,主体性德育是一种强调学生主体性的新的德育理念。本文从对医学生进行主体性德育的意义出发,通过分析医德教育主体性的缺失问题,将医学生医德教育中的主体性培养分为三个时期,并从德育的视角探讨主体性德育模式,以期提高医学生医德教育的实效性。     

Fields and pathways: Contrasting or complementary views of information seeking

This research contrasts two different conceptions, fields and pathways, of individual information behavior in context. These different approaches imply different relationships between actors and their information environments and, thus, encapsulate different views of the relationship between individual actions and contexts. We discuss these different theoretical views, then empirically compare and contrast them. The operationalization of these conceptions is based on different analytic treatments of the same raw data: a battery of three questions based on respondent’s unaided recall of the sources they would consult for information on inherited cancers, a particularly rich information seeking problem. These operationalizations are then analyzed in a nomological network of related concepts drawn from an omnibus survey of 882 adults. The results indicated four clusters for fields and 16 different pathways, indicating increased fragmentation of information environments, with different underlying logics and active ingredients, although the use of the Internet appears to be an emerging common theme. The analysis of the nomological network suggests that both approaches may have applications for particular problems. In the implications, we compare and contrast these approaches, discussing their significance for future methodological, analytical, and theoretical developments.     

Real wrongs in virtual communities

Beginning with the well-knowncyber-rape in LambdaMOO, I argue that it ispossible to have real moral wrongs in virtualcommunities. I then generalize the account toshow how it applies to interactions in gamingand discussion communities. My account issupported by a view of moral realism thatacknowledges entities like intentions andcausal properties of actions. Austin's speechact theory is used to show that real people canact in virtual communities in ways that bothestablish practices and moral expectations, andwarrant strong identifications betweenthemselves and their online identities. Rawls'conception of a social practice is used toanalyze the nature of the wrong and thestage-setting aspect of engaging in a practice.     

Contrastive and attentive graph learning for multi-view clustering

Graph-based multi-view clustering aims to take advantage of multiple view graph information to provide clustering solutions. The consistency constraint of multiple views is the key of multi-view graph clustering. Most existing studies generate fusion graphs and constrain multi-view consistency by clustering loss. We argue that local pair-view consistency can achieve fine-modeling of consensus information in multiple views. Towards this end, we propose a novel Contrastive and Attentive Graph Learning framework for multi-view clustering (CAGL). Specifically, we design a contrastive fine-modeling in multi-view graph learning using maximizing the similarity of pair-view to guarantee the consistency of multiple views. Meanwhile, an Att-weighted refined fusion graph module based on attention networks to capture the capacity difference of different views dynamically and further facilitate the mutual reinforcement of single view and fusion view. Besides, our CAGL can learn a specialized representation for clustering via a self-training clustering module. Finally, we develop a joint optimization objective to balance every module and iteratively optimize the proposed CAGL in the framework of graph encoder–decoder. Experimental results on six benchmarks across different modalities and sizes demonstrate that our CAGL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.     

CVC联合投资,成员异质性与企业技术创新

以2016—2019年公司风险投资(CVC)支持的创业板上市制造业企业为样本,研究CVC联合投资对被投资企业技术创新的影响.研究发现,相比CVC单独投资的企业,CVC联合投资的企业技术创新能力较弱;联合投资成员持股比例的差异显著抑制被投资企业技术创新的提升;联合投资成员产权性质的多元化显著促进被投资企业技术创新的提升;联合投资成员母公司的行业异质性促进被投资企业的技术创新;而联合投资成员母公司与被投资企业的行业相似度不利于被投资企业技术创新.     

‘I keep a close watch on this child of mine’: a moral critique of other-tracking apps

Smartphones and mobile applications are omnipresent in our lives. At the core of this article are ‘other-tracking apps’, i.e. mobile applications that make it possible, via location technology, to track others. These apps ensure that we are never unconnected from the network of ubiquitous information and, via that network, from others. In specific, focus lies on apps designed for parents to remotely track the whereabouts of their child(ren). This particular case can be considered as one example of broader reflection on what continuous technical connectivity means in moral terms. Other-tracking apps give new ground to moral queries related to information technologies. Even though there is little doubt that parents might implement these technologies with good intention to extend care and responsibility over a distance, our concern is that they mistake control for care. This article seeks to demonstrate that a critical stance towards other-tracking by parents is required, because these apps raise a number of concerns that should be recognized as they are implemented. A number of moral critiques are expressed and discussed. These apps have the potential to engender a situation of ‘over-proximity’. A framework is hence required that emphasizes maintaining the critical distance to respect the other’s heterogeneity, autonomy, and privacy.     

浅论现代教师的教学良心

良心是社会的个人形成人格的基础。而对于教学主体的教师来讲,教学良心不仅是其职业道德的底线,也是一个教师一种自觉的道德责任感,是教师进行教学的灵魂。本论文对良心及教学良心的相关概念进行了分析,并在此基础上对教师教学良心的内涵做了较为详尽的阐释。     

负责任停滞视角下地球工程的伦理再思考

地球工程中已有的“贾米森原则”、“牛津原则”和“收费门原则”明确了地球工程的责任主体和行动框架，但在伦理层面对于实验过程和部署的要求略显不足，而且忽视了地球工程如若产生不利影响后如何应对的现实问题。负责任停滞是在对负责任创新研究的质疑中新提出的概念。它是一种保护机制，在地球工程中它从宏观层面批判毫无意义和背离人类福祉的实验项目，倡导创新的产生要源于责任；其次要求在极端情况下，社会和极具危险性的创新活动必须停滞，以确保人类的安全和为孕育有效的应对举措争取时间。在微观层面它要求以责任为导向重构实验设计；以强道德约束为条件解构实验部署；以停滞为双重指向建构化解危机的稳妥法则。负责任停滞原则弥补了地球工程已有原则在过程和结果阶段伦理指导不足和补救措施的缺位。     

延括认知假说：认知科学的新范式？

近年来认知科学中出现了一种被称为延括认知假说的新认知观。按照这种观点,人类认知嵌入其中的那个语境就是认知本身的组成部分,认知主体并不是传统认为的人类有机体,而是人类有机体与其认知环境要素共同构成的那个统一体。虽然这种观点对人类认知和智能提出的一些新看法颇具启发意义,也应该给予深入研究,但这种观点存在诸多理论误区,整体上并不成立,更不足以作为认知科学的新研究范式。     

Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics

The essential difficulty about Computer Ethics' (CE) philosophical status is a methodological problem: standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with CE-problems, which appear to strain their conceptual resources, and CE requires a conceptual foundation as an ethical theory. Information Ethics (IE), the philosophical foundational counterpart of CE, can be seen as a particular case of “environmental” ethics or ethics of the infosphere. What is good for an information entity and the infosphere in general? This is the ethical question asked by IE. The answer is provided by a minimalist theory of deseerts: IE argues that there is something more elementary and fundamental than life and pain, namely being, understood as information, and entropy, and that any information entity is to be recognised as the centre of a minimal moral claim, which deserves recognition and should help to regulate the implementation of any information process involving it. IE can provide a valuable perspective from which to approach, with insight and adequate discernment, not only moral problems in CE, but also the whole range of conceptual and moral phenomena that form the ethical discourse.     

Sustainable transition of electronic products through waste policy

The European Union's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive makes a challenging case for transition theory and its different aspects, as it represents an ongoing and still open-ended case. At present the objectives of the directive are not met: the amount of electronic waste is increasing, and the resulting waste is poorly managed. With its starting point in the multi-level perspective of transition theory, this case study analyzes how the outcome of the WEEE directive is constituted in the interplay between the somewhat detached regimes of electronics and waste management. The two regimes are described and analyzed together with the underlying regulatory principle of extended producer responsibility, which has guided the design of the directive. Conflicting interpretations of sustainability, in combination with a simplistic understanding and agency introduced from the top-down, has eliminated waste minimization as the main outcome of the directive. The concluding discussions raise the issues of the role of sustainable niche initiatives in electronics compared to multi-regime interaction. Guiding visions may need to be supplemented with other alignment devices in order to support co-evolution of regimes and coherent actions within transition processes.