Technology and Ethics. A European Quest for Responsible Engineering, edited by B. Heriard Dubreuil and his team (University Lille) is in many regards an innovative publication. It is the first fully European contribution to the field of engineering ethics and the result of an intensive cooperation between ethicists and engineers from all the member countries of the European Union. The basic structure of the book is both the distinction and interaction between three levels of analysis: personal responsibility of engineers, the (...) institutional level (business organisations) and the impact of technology on society and culture. On the personal level, the book deals with problems such as the role of professional codes and the fact that engineers must cope with flexibility, shorter lines of decision and erosion of the boundaries between private and professional life. On the meso level, the book deals with different aspects of decision making in the context of business organizations, such as quality management, technology assessment procedures, business ethics committees etc... On the macro level, the authors focus on the power of technology. Together with the influences from other social, economic and political actors, the decisions of engineers change the world in a way which is of moral significance. (shrink)

Microcosme de la société, espace symbolique où se nouent des rapports humains et sociaux fondamentaux, lieu de mémoire, l'hôpital public a vu ses fonctions se transformer au fil du temps. Successivement lieu d'accueil, maison d'enfermement, « machine à guérir », pivot de l'action sanitaire, il est aujourd'hui à la fois une administration et une entreprise de soins. Cependant, sous la pression de quelques évolutions sociales fondamentales, l'hôpital ne serait-il pas en train de s'ouvrir progressivement sur l'extérieur, de se transformer de (...) « citadelle » du service public de santé en « espace public » aux vertus culturelles et solidaires. Parmi ces évolutions, le développement d'initiatives solidaires en milieu hospitalier, telles que l'organisation de solidarités de proximité en partenariat avec le « dehors », paraît jouer un rôle essentiel.Hospitals are microcosms of society, symbolic places where basic human and social relationships are formed and places of memory and as such have witnessed great changes to their functions over the years. In turn they have been places of welcome, places of confinement, “healing machines”, the mainspring of health policies and nowadays seem to be both government-run institutions and healthcare businesses however contradictory that may sometimes appear. However, the pressure of a few basic social shifts seems to have led hospitals to gradually open up to the outside world, turning themselves from publich health system strongholds into “spaces open to the public” with culturally supportive values. Among these shifts in society, the development of support initiatives in the hospital environment such as local community-based solidarity projects run in partnership with “the outside world” seems to be playing an important role. (shrink)

Dans le christianisme d’aujourd’hui, les textes spirituels sont lus et appréciés pour la saveur de la vie chrétienne qu’ils révèlent, et l’élan à vivre la foi qu’ils communiquent. L’adjectif « spirituel » qualifie des textes qui traitent de la vie de foi dans la prière ou dans l’action. Il renvoie explicitement à l’Esprit qui conduisait Jésus de Nazareth selon les Écritures. Les textes spirituels nous feraient voir ainsi comment il est possible de mener une existence chrétienne. Dire cela ne doit (...) pas masquer la situation dans laquelle nous lisons ces textes aujourd’hui : ils se trouvent au carrefour d’intérêts et de démarches tantôt complémentaires, tantôt conflictuelles, situés sur une ligne qui semble départager la foi de l’absence de foi en Jésus Christ. Aussi, parler à l’intérieur du christianisme de la relation des textes spirituels à l’existence chrétienne suppose de s’inscrire en ce lieu de divergences herméneutiques. Ainsi nous a-t-il paru fécond, dans le contexte de ces lectures plurielles, de nous interroger sur la relation qui s’instaure entre les lecteurs et ces textes. Nous montrerons dans un premier temps quels problèmes surgissent de la constitution du corpus des textes spirituels pour préciser les types d’interprétations qui ont cours. Nous pourrons nous demander dans un second temps ce qui se donne à lire dans ces textes afin de dégager, dans une troisième partie, la manière dont ils peuvent être lus aujourd’hui au sein de la foi chrétienne. In Christianity today, spiritual texts are read and appreciated for the vivid intensity of Christian life that they reveal and the impetus to living faith that they communicate. The adjective “spiritual” describes texts that deal with the life of faith in prayer or action. It refers explicitly to the Spirit which led Jesus of Nazareth according to the Scriptures. Spiritual texts thus help us to see how it is possible to lead a Christian existence. However, saying this must not mask the context in which we read these texts today: they stand at a crossroads of interests and approaches that may be complementary or conflictual, on what appears to be the dividing line between the absence of faith and faith in Jesus Christ. Endeavouring to speak from inside Christianity of the relation between spiritual texts and Christian existence supposes that we situate ourselves inside this realm of hermeneutical divergences. It thus appeared fruitful, in the context of this plurality of readings, to explore the relationship that gradually takes shape between readers and these texts. We shall first outline the problems that arise from the way the corpus of spiritual texts is brought together in order to show the types of interpretation commonly to be found. Then, we can look into the content of these texts in order, in the third part, to bring out the ways in which they can be read today within the framework of Christian faith. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to criticise ad hoc approaches to ethics in research and development in technology as descriptive and non‐ethical, and based upon a narrow conception of rationality.Design/methodology/approachThe approach deploys a theory of normativity that can incorporate values and a broad conception of rationality, in order to account for the relevance of issues for the addressees of normative injunctions.FindingsA normative approach is possible and required in order to implement ethics in research and development in technology.Originality/valueThe approach draws (...) together themes from current alternative approaches that each fail to deploy the full resources of the normative approach, and so fail to fully account for ethics. This approach identifies and moves beyond present limited approaches. (shrink)

The way Cambodian patients and health professionals judge the priority of HIV-infected patients in relation to the allocation of antiretroviral drugs was examined. Participants were either HIV-infected patients attending the HIV/AIDS Care and Support Centre for People Living with HIV/AIDS in Phnom Penh (29 females and 21 males) or members of the staff (9 physicians, 6 pharmacists and 15 health counsellors and health educators). They were presented with stories of a few lines depicting a patient's situation and were instructed to (...) judge the extent to which the patient should be given priority for HIV drugs. The stories were composed according to a four within-subject factor design: (a) the patient's family responsibilities, (b) the severity of infection, (c) the time elapsed since the first consultation, and (d) the financial difficulties of the family. Most patients expressed the view that the drugs should be used for the patients who are most important from a familial point of view, namely, when the family contains small children and/or is already in a precarious financial condition. (shrink)

Ethical issues of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are important because they can have significant effects on human liberty, happiness, their ability to lead a good life. They are also of functional interest because they can determine whether technologies are used and whether their positive potential can unfold. For these reasons policy makers are interested in finding out what these issues are and how they can be addressed. The best way of creating ICT policy that is sensitive to ethical issues (...) would be to be proactive and address such issues at early stages of the technology life cycle. The present paper uses this position as a starting point and discusses how knowledge of ethical aspects of emerging ICTs can be gained. It develops a methodology that goes beyond established futures methodologies to cater for the difficult nature of ethical issues. The paper goes on to outline some of the preliminary findings of a European research project that has applied this method. (shrink)

Released mid-November 2022, Galactica is a set of six large language models (LLMs) of different sizes (from 125 M to 120B parameters) designed by Meta AI to achieve the ultimate ambition of “a single neural network for powering scientific tasks”, according to its accompanying whitepaper. It aims to carry out knowledge-intensive tasks, such as publication summarization, information ordering and protein annotation. However, just a few days after the release, Meta had to pull back the demo due to the strong hallucinatory (...) tendencies or underwhelming performances of the model. This article aims to study, through a critical threefold argument, the potential impacts of LLMs once deployed in the scientific value chain. Our first argument is a technical one. By examining the technicity of Galactica, it is possible to explain the descripancies between its promotional corporate discourse and abysmal outputs. Second, by going back to debates in both computer science and computational philosophy on the automation of abduction, we argue from the epistemological front that LLMs indeed cannot produce strong abductions and, therefore, claims about the automation of hypothesis generation remains chambering. Finally, our third argument is a sociological one. By conceptualizing the scientific field through Nancy Katherine Hayles’ cognitive assemblage theory, we aim to outline the potential steering of science by LLMs, mainly through information ordering. The core of our argument rests on the assertion that excessive control on information risks contravening a certain serendipitous aspect inherent to scientific discoveries. (shrink)

Ethical issues of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are important because they can have significant effects on human liberty, happiness, and people’s ability to lead a good life. They are also of functional interest because they can determine whether technologies are used and whether their positive potential can unfold. For these reasons, policy makers are interested in finding out what these issues are and how they can be addressed. The best way of creating ICT policy that is sensitive to ethical (...) issues pertain to being proactive in addressing such issues at an early stage of the technology life cycle. The present paper uses this position as a starting point and discusses how knowledge of ethical aspects of emerging ICTs can be gained. It develops a methodology that goes beyond established futures methodologies to cater for the difficult nature of ethical issues. The authors outline how the description of emerging ICTs can be used for an ethical analysis. (shrink)

The Revenge Problem threatens every approach to the semantic paradoxes that proceeds by introducing nonclassical semantic values. Given any such collection Δ of additional semantic values, one can construct a Revenge sentence:This sentence is either false or has a value in Δ.TheEmbracing Revengeview, developed independently by Roy T. Cook and Phlippe Schlenker, addresses this problem by suggesting that the class of nonclassical semantic values is indefinitely extensible, with each successive Revenge sentence introducing a new ‘pathological’ semantic value into the (...) discourse. The view is explicitly motivated in terms of the idea that every notion thatseemsto be expressible should, if at all possible,beexpressible. Extant work on the Embracing Revenge view has failed to live up to this promise, since the formal languages developed within such work are expressively impoverished. We rectify this here by developing a much richer formal language, and semantics for that language, and we then prove an extremely powerful expressive completeness result for the system in question. (shrink)

Malgré un renouveau d'intérêt pour les techniques de fabrication des sculptures grecques, certaines questions n'ont encore fait l'objet d'aucune recherche détaillée : c'est le cas pour les têtes travaillées séparément à l'époque archaïque. Les trois principaux modes de raccord de la tête sur le tronc (par goujon, par tenon et mortaise, dans une cuvette d'encastrement) sont successivement présentés, avec de nouveaux dessins réalisés au musée de l'Acropole. La relation entre la pratique d'une technique particulière et une aire géographique apparaît (...) clairement : Athènes pour les deux premiers modes de raccord (surtout le second), la Grèce de l'Est pour le troisième; dans ce dernier groupe, la grande koré du sanctuaire d'Athéna à Erythrées mérite une attention particulière, et le rapprochement entre cette œuvre et les statues du célèbre sculpteur Endoios que Pausanias a vues à cet endroit doit être sérieusement pris en considération. (shrink)