Professional Ethics and Social Responsibility: Military Work and Peacebuilding

The paper considers a number of important questions related to the involvement of engineers in peacebuilding and military work, including the preference of many countries for high tech weapons based security over peacebuilding, whether and in what circumstances, if any, it is justified for engineers to be involved in military work; and how engineers can persuade their colleagues to apply their skills to support peacebuilding. It is introduced by an overview of what is meant by the term military work and the extent and consequences of the use of military technology worldwide. This is followed by the applications of different approaches and theories of ethics to discuss the questions presented in the introduction. The approaches and theories applied include considerations of micro-and macro-ethics, codes of ethics, virtue ethics, considerations of gender and paradigms and the ethical imperative. Initial insights include the importance of considering the associated context and the need to avoid othering, which can make different treatment of minority groups, including the use of high tech weapons against them, seem acceptable

Sven Ove Hansson’s contribution to Philosophy of Technology and Engineering

Paper presented at the symposium on the occasion of the retirement of Sven Ove Hansson. The symposium took place on 13-14 December 2019 at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden

A qualitative study of stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment

Over two billion people are using the Internet at present, assisted by the mediating activities of software agents which deal with the diversity and complexity of information. There are, however, ethical issues due to the monitoring-and-surveillance, data mining and autonomous nature of software agents. Considering the context, this study aims to comprehend stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment in order to identify the main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services in the near future. Twenty-one stakeholders, belonging to three key stakeholder groups, were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy for unstandardised semi-structured e-mail interviews. The interview data were analysed using a qualitative content analysis method. It was possible to identify three main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services, which were classified into the following categories: comprehensive understanding of users' perception of privacy, user type recognition algorithms for software agent development and existing software agents enhancement

Vulnerabilities and responsibilities: dealing with monsters in computer security

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze information security assessment in terms of cultural categories and virtue ethics, in order to explain the cultural origin of certain types of security vulnerabilities, as well as to enable a proactive attitude towards preventing such vulnerabilities.\ud \ud Design/methodology/approach – Vulnerabilities in information security are compared to the concept of “monster” introduced by Martijntje Smits in philosophy of technology. The applicability of different strategies for dealing with monsters to information security is discussed, and the strategies are linked to attitudes in virtue ethics.\ud \ud Findings – It is concluded that the present approach can form the basis for dealing proactively with unknown future vulnerabilities in information security.\ud \ud Research limitations/implications – The research presented here does not define a stepwise approach for implementation of the recommended strategy in practice. This is future work.\ud \ud Practical implications – The results of this paper enable computer experts to rethink their attitude towards security threats, thereby reshaping their practices.\ud \ud Originality/value – This paper provides an alternative anthropological framework for descriptive and normative analysis of information security problems, which does not rely on the objectivity of risk

The ‘responsibility’ factor in imagining the future of education in China

Design and creativity have been a considerable force for improving life conditions. A lot of effort has been invested in explaining the design process and creativity mainly through the design thinking methodology, but design accountability and responsible actions in the design process are, yet, to be fully explored. The concept of design ethics is now increasingly scrutinized on both the level of business organization and of the individual designer. A 4-day design workshop that involved creativity techniques provided the base to explore responsibility in the fuzzy front end of the design process. The future of education in 2030 was defined as the workshop's theme and fifty-six students from China were asked to create detailed alternative scenarios. A number of imagination exercises, implementation of technological innovations and macro-environment evolutions employed in the workshop are discussed. The aim was to incite moral and responsible actions among students less familiar with creative educational contexts of student-led discovery and collaborative learning. This paper reflects on the use of creativity methods to stimulate anticipation in (non)design students

An Introduction to the Integrated Community-Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection Framework (I-CELER)

Cultivating ethical Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics researchers and practitioners requires movement beyond reducing ethical instruction to the rational exploration of moral quandaries via case studies and into the complexity of the ethical issues that students will encounter within their careers. We designed the Integrated Community-Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection (I-CELER) framework as a means to promote the ethical becoming of future STEM practitioners. This paper provides a synthesis of and rationale for I-CELER for promoting ethical becoming based on scholarly literature from various social science fields, including social anthropology, moral development, and psychology. This paper proceeds in five parts. First, we introduce the state of the art of engineering ethics instruction; argue for the need of a lens that we describe as ethical becoming; and then detail the Specific Aims of the I-CELER approach. Second, we outline the three interrelated components of the project intervention. Third, we detail our convergent mixed methods research design, including its qualitative and quantitative counterparts. Fourth, we provide a brief description of what a course modified to the I-CELER approach might look like. Finally, we close by detailing the potential impact of this study in light of existing ethics education research within STEM

Sustainable Marketing: Philosophies, Economies and Strategies for a New Consumer Metabolism

Sustainable marketing is a subset of the sustainable development field recently formed in 1992. Both fields are complex and development elusive, but diverse bodies of knowledge are involved including, philosophy, economics, social sciences, business strategy, marketing, and environmental. The concern is about our ravenous, consumer demands or metabolism, with the world population increasing by 50% in the next forty-five years. This necessitates change in our economic structures, consumer pricing and goods, social responsibility and long-term business viability. In short, sustainable marketing stands to become an imperative for businesses seeking to have or maintain their competitive advantage

World Class Supply Chain 2019: Next Generation Ideas

Next Generation Ideas, being the theme for the Fourth Annual World Class Supply Chain Summit, reflected summit’s focus on understanding what is becoming and what will continue to be of increasingly of high priority for current and future supply chain professionals. The summit, which was held on May 8th, 2019 in Milton, Ontario, brought together invited executives, scholars, and students to present and carefully examine a range of emerging ideas that are worthy of the supply chain community’s interest. The diversity of such ideas (e.g., new technologies, geopolitical developments, and the role of supply chain analytics) necessitated a diverse range of perspectives for structuring the summit deliberations. This was done through a summit program comprising three presentations to feature the following perspectives: Perspectives of a vastly experienced industry executive perspective who has amassed an extensive body of material on ecological considerations in supply chains Perspectives of an economist with evidence-based understanding of how decisions by national governments impact firms with both domestic and transnational supply chains Perspectives of a supply chain scholar whose research projects are strongly motivated by how companies have had (and will have) to rethink their distribution networks From the formal presentations and the question and answer component for each presentation, the essence of the insights could be summarized by this notion: While firms must still exemplify traditional supply chain fundamentals (trusted partners, robust IT infrastructure, etc.), they face the additional and an increasingly pressing imperative of needing the agility to be responsive to changes, especially from customers and competitors. Arguably, this is not an original statement because one can make a convincing case that dynamic change has always been a feature of the business landscape. Rather than originality, the statement is meant to underscore that, at this time in the development of the supply chain field, practitioners seem to be experiencing a very distinct level of bewilderment about the array of changes to be contemplated. The summit not only brought that bewilderment to the fore, it also: facilitated discussion of the opportunities resulting from the changes presented real-world examples of innovative and entrepreneurial responses to the changes addressed the interests and concerns of students - the next generation of supply chain professionals This white paper reports on (1) the substantive specifics of those elements of the summit and (2) issues requiring further study in order to be understood more clearly

Explorative Nanophilosophy as Tecnoscienza: An Italian Perspective on the Role of Speculation in Nanoindustry

There are two primary camps in which nanotechnology today can be categorized normal nanotechnology and speculative nanotechnology. The birth of nanotechnology proper was conceived through discourses of speculative nanotechnology. However, current nanotech-nology research has detracted from its speculative promises in favour of more attainable material products. Nonetheless, normal nanotechnology has leveraged the popular support and consequential funding it needs to conduct research and development (R&D) as a result of popular conceptions of speculative nanotechnology and its promises. Similarly, the scholarly literature has shifted its focus away from speculative nanofutures towards normal nanotech-nology R&D. This paper shows that there is an incongruence between the representation of nanotechnology in the media, scholarly journals and industry