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Practicing narrative virtue ethics of technology in research and innovation

Reijers, Wessel (2019) Practicing narrative virtue ethics of technology in research and innovation. PhD thesis, Dublin City University.

Abstract
This dissertation develops a novel approach for practising ethics in research and innovation, called narrative virtue ethics of technology. The increasing speed of technological developments in fields such as AI, robotics, biomedicine, and nanotechnologies, calls for proactive ethical reflection on the impacts of technologies. As a response, myriad methods for practising ethics in research and innovation have been developed. The first part of this research reviews existing methods and analyses how they deal with the anticipation of ethical issues of emerging technologies, the shaping of ethical design practices, and the evaluation of ethical impacts of existing technologies. This is followed by a critical discussion of the existing methods, outlining their shortcomings and offering recommendations for improvements. Subsequently, a novel philosophical approach is developed that offers responses to the recommendations. This approach synthesises insights from work on virtue ethics by MacIntyre and Vallor with Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s narrative theory is used to construct an account of how technologies mediate people’s experience and understanding of the social world, centring on the hermeneutic concepts of textuality, literacy, temporality, and distancing. Accordingly, virtue ethics and the approach of narrative technologies are integrated into an account of technical practice that is linked with Ricoeur’s notion of the ethical aim as the good life, with and for others, in just institutions. Finally, the philosophical approach is translated into a concrete method consisting of three phases that offer ways for analysing technical practices, evaluating them, and developing a broad set of prescriptions, including the use of an ethical oath, civic education and democratic decision-making in research and innovation practices. To demonstrate how this method could be practically used, a concrete tool is developed and evaluated in practice: the Ethics Canvas. This is a collaborative tool that enables researchers to discuss the ethical impacts of their work.
Metadata
Item Type:Thesis (PhD)
Date of Award:March 2019
Refereed:No
Supervisor(s):Gordijn, Bert and O’Sullivan, Declan
Subjects:UNSPECIFIED
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. View License
ID Code:22891
Deposited On:01 Apr 2019 15:19 by Bert Gordijn . Last Modified 01 Apr 2019 15:19
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