Sabine Roeser’s research while affiliated with Delft University of Technology and other places

W. D. Ross is a major figure in the history of moral philosophy, and his work has been increasingly discussed since at least the 1990s. He provided the first sustained articulation and defense of a new moral theory: a moderate deontology embodying a pluralistic theory of the right built around his most famous innovation, the concept of prima facie duty. His theory of the good is also pluralistic and, particularly in incorporating moral goodness, can be fruitfully contrasted both with Sidgwick’s hedonism and Moore’s value pluralism. Ross is an exemplar of clear moral reflection, a defender of the irreducible plurality of common-sense moral standards, a powerful opponent of absolute certainty in moral matters, and an insightful critic of utilitarianism. As a great Aristotelian scholar with a mastery of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, he is able to clarify how practical wisdom informs moral deliberation and to portray, in illuminating detail, both virtue and virtuous action as paradigms of intrinsic value. Ross is an astute and often informative interpreter of Kant and Mill, of his own immediate predecessors in British moral philosophy, and of major positions of ethical theory. The chapters of this book explore all of these topics and extend to Ross’s aesthetics, his intuitionist epistemology, his metaphysics, and his value for applied ethics. They are written to advance understanding of Ross, to elicit engagement with his moral philosophy, and to contribute to ethical inquiry in ways that reflect their authors’ own views.

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking.

In most countries, including the Netherlands, decision-making about the COVID-19 policy measures was initially based on medical information, and only later did it also include insights from social sciences. However, ethical implications of COVID-19 policy measures have not frequently been explicitly considered. As a result, critical ethical issues have been overlooked, and values, concerns, and emotions have not been considered appropriately. In this chapter, I will argue that emotions can help to make important moral dilemmas around decision-making about COVID-19 explicit and to make ethically justified decisions. I will do so by zooming in specifically on how the Netherlands has handled the pandemic so far. My discussion aims to contribute to morally better and more socially acceptable decision-making about the challenges that COVID-19 poses, as well as to hopefully learn lessons for possible future pandemics.

Emotions may play an important role in how citizens respond to public policies, and energy policies in particular. Yet, little insights exist into causes of those emotions. This study investigates ethical concerns as the basis of emotions. We test whether people perceive an unequal distribution of negative outcomes of a local energy project as more unfair than an equal distribution thereof and, in turn, experience stronger negative emotions (hypothesis 1) and whether these effects depend on whether the project has personal consequences or not (i.e. the self-relevance of the project; hypothesis 2). In an experiment with a 2 (equal vs. unequal distribution) by 2 (self-relevant vs. not self-relevant) design (N = 282), we find support for hypothesis 1, but not 2. Furthermore, we find that perceived total amount of harm, an ethical concern about the total amount of negative outcomes bestowed on all people together, is also (marginally significantly) affected by the unequal distribution and relates to the emotions. We argue that justified ethical concerns are at the root of emotions about renewable energy projects and therefore emotions and their underlying ethical concerns should be considered for socially responsible as well as successful energy policy making.

In this chapter, we review and expand on the current ethical research on Human–Robot Collaboration in industrial settings. To date, the ethical issues discussed include: job loss, reorganization of labour, informed consent and data collection, user-involvement in design, hierarchy in decision-making, and coerced acceptance of robots. These wide-ranging issues are a useful starting point for discussion, yet as the number of robots designed and deployed as collaborators in industrial settings grows, ethical research must evolve to allow for more nuance in the previously listed issues as well as a recognition of novel concerns as they arise. In this paper, we suggest new ethical aspects related to collaborative robots in industrial settings, including: emotional impact on workers; effects of limited movement; the potential effects of working with one’s replacement; the ‘chilling effects’ of performance monitoring; the possibility for disclosure of new and unintended information through data collection; and the inability to challenge computerized decisions. Taken together these thoughts are meant to open the door towards new forms of moral learning necessary for assessing the ethical acceptability of human–robot collaborations on the factory floor.

Technologische Entwicklungen, zum Beispiel in der Energieerzeugung, Robotik und Biotechnologie, vollziehen sich in einem schnellen Tempo und können tiefgreifende Auswirkungen auf die Gesellschaft haben, indem sie unsere Lebensweise auf oft unvorhersehbare Weise verändern und unvorhergesehene Risiken hervorrufen. Wie von Risikoethikern argumentiert wurde, erfordert dies ethische Überlegungen und demokratische Deliberation (z. B. Shrader-Frechette 1991, Hansson 2004, Asveld/Roeser 2009, Roeser et al. 2012). Debatten über technologische Risiken sind jedoch häufig hitzig und münden in Pattsituationen. Dies ist auf die Komplexitäten dieser Debatten zurückzuführen, da sie wissenschaftliche Informationen und Unsicherheiten beinhalten sowie ethische Überlegungen und emotionale Reaktionen hervorrufen (Slovic 2010, Roeser 2010a, s. Kap. 41, 4 und 29).

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft's approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach developed at TU Delft is deeply informed by the research of the Section, which is centred around Responsible Research and Innovation, Design for Values, and Risk Ethics. These theoretical approaches are premised on the notion that technologies are inherently value-laden, and as such contain the possibility of fostering or hindering moral values. Each of these approaches encourages students to take a proactive attitude with respect to their projects and profession, thinking creatively about-and taking responsibility for-how to both prevent harm and do good via the technologies they help develop. To explain how this is put into practice, this paper sketches a brief history of ethics teaching at TU Delft, outlines current activities, and presents future plans for Bachelor and Master's level engineering ethics education at TU Delft.

Augmentative and Alternative Communication Technology [AAC Tech] is a relatively young, multidisciplinary field aimed at developing technologies for people who are unable to use their natural speaking voice due to congenital or acquired disability. In this paper, we take a look at the role of AAC Tech in promoting an ‘empathic turn’ in the perception of non-speaking autistic persons. By the empathic turn we mean the turn towards a recognition of non-speaking autistic people as persons whose ways of engaging the world and expressing themselves are indicative of psychologically rich and intrinsically meaningful experiential lives. We first identify two ways in which AAC Tech contributes positively to this development. We then discuss how AAC Tech can simultaneously undermine genuine empathic communication between autistic persons and typically developed communicators (or neurotypicals). To mitigate this concern, we suggest the AAC field should incorporate philosophical insights from Design for Emotions and enactive embodied cognitive science into its R&D practices. To make our proposal concrete, we home in on stimming as an autistic form of bodily expressivity that can play an important role in empathic communicative exchanges between autistic persons and neurotypicals and that could be facilitated in AAC Tech designed for autistic people.

Elderly care receivers are extensively and profoundly affected by interacting with care robots. This paper focuses on autonomy as a core value in elderly care and demonstrates its complexity. Few studies have been able to address this complexity in elderly care in the robot era. Therefore, a taxonomy of autonomy is introduced to discern the complexity and tailored as a tool to evaluate ethical aspects of the effects of care robots on autonomy in elderly care. It concludes that this taxonomy is instrumental for impact assessments of care robots on care receivers’ autonomy both retrospectively and prospectively.