Editorial introduction [to Strategic uncertainties: ethics, politics and risk in contemporary educational research]

Strategic Uncertainties: Ethics, Politics and Risk in Contemporary Educational Research offers new perspectives on contemporary educational research in a wide range of contexts and settings. The authors provide fresh insights into the ethics, politics and risks of educational research through their deployment of up-to-date concepts and methods. They also bring educational research ‘to life’ as a series of meaningful and significant issues and dilemmas, and by drawing on the voices of ‘real-life’ research participants and practitioners. In 2001, a theme issue of the Queensland Journal of Educational Research (Coombes & Danaher, 2001) was published under the title Cui Bono?: Investigating Benefits and Interests in Educational Research. In that issue, a group of authors from a range of academic disciplines explored the notion of who benefits from educational research and how such benefits might be identified, evaluated and weighed against potential costs to the research participants. The purpose of the contributors was not to view the intentions and results of research through rose-coloured glasses (‘everyone benefits and everyone is happy’) but to establish, as honestly as possible, whether the perceived benefits of a particular research project would actually occur without some cost to those involved. The key concepts, which were the focus of each article, were therefore the benefits and costs of educational research. In Strategic Uncertainties, the focus of attention shifts to the potential risks of educational research and to the strategies that researchers might employ to minimise or from some perspectives try to eliminate these risks (and from other perspectives to embrace and celebrate such risks). Educational research, by its very nature, is concerned with people; it cannot function in a sterile vacuum. Where people are concerned, complete agreement among the participants can never be guaranteed. Thus stakeholders may compete for powerful speaking positions. Research projects, though conceived with the best of intentions, may serve to highlight the gap between researcher and researched by reinforcing the socioeconomic and educational inequities of their relationships with one another. These particular risks, among many others, emphasise the ethical and political dimensions of relationships among the participants and subject to critical scrutiny claims that research projects confer particular kinds of benefits. Educational research is indeed a ‘risky business’, but this should not deter researchers from engaging in the practice. It is the purpose of Strategic Uncertainties to apply theoretically informed, methodologically rigorous and experientially grounded critique to the ‘murky shadows’ and ‘no-go areas’ of contemporary educational research. The title of this book, Strategic Uncertainties, is taken from the text of Ian Stronach and Maggie MacLure (1997), Educational Research Undone: The Postmodern embrace. The authors focused on postmodern researchers’ efforts to avoid being caught in the snares of: the binary oppositions that have traditionally promised the comforts of certainty in philosophical thinking – between reality and appearance, reason and superstition, causes and effects, meaning and language, identity and imposture, local and universal etc. – they choose not to choose between them, not to work to transcend them, nor, importantly, to ignore them, but instead to complicate the relations between them. (p. 5; emphasis in original) According to Stronach and MacLure (1997): The kind of opening which such work attempts is that of the rupture – or interruption and disruption – in the (uncertain) hope that this will generate possibilities for things to happen that are closed off by the epistemologies of certainty….These are uncanny openings, then. They rupture things, not in order to let the light pour in, but to make it harder to see clearly. They open spaces which turn out not to be spaces, but knots, complications, folds and partial connections. It is impossible even to tell for sure whether they are openings or closings, since they are also blocking manoeuvres, which would prevent escape routes to happy endings…We try to practise this kind of strategic uncertainty throughout, and within this book. Our aim is to mobilise meaning…rather than to fix it. (p, 5; emphasis in original; emphasis added) Elaborating and expanding on these propositions by Stronach and MacLure (1997), the content of Strategic Uncertainties is a set of accounts by contemporary educational researchers of the ethics, politics and risk of their own research projects. While those accounts draw on a multiplicity of theoretical, methodological and empirical resources to frame and inform their respective engagements with educational research, they have in common a general commitment to, and at the same time an ongoing interrogation of, the ideas encapsulated in the term ‘strategic uncertainties’

Mobilising spatial risks: reflections on researching Venezuelan and Australian fairground people's educational experiences

[Abstract]: One approach to conducting educational research is to strive for ‘risk minimisation’. This is presumably on the assumption that risk is always and inevitably dangerous and harmful (see also McDougall, Jarzabkowski, Mills & Gale, Moore, Danaher and Walker-Gibbs, this volume), and to be avoided at all costs. Following the theme of celebrating ‘strategic uncertainties’ (Stronach & MacLure, 1997), we prefer a different approach, one grounded in the recognition of risk as the prerequisite of new conceptual, methodological and empirical understandings. Rather than being minimised or avoided, risk should be mobilised and enthusiastically pursued – carpe diem transposed to an educational research framework. Our conviction of the utility, even the necessity, of mobilising risk derives in part from our ongoing research into the educational experiences of Venezuelan and Australian fairground people (Anteliz & Danaher, 2000; Anteliz, Danaher & Danaher, 2001). In multiple ways, the fairground people routinely enter the spaces of permanently resident communities, and in so doing they challenge the stereotypes attached to mobile groups (McVeigh, 1997). From this perspective, their physical mobility becomes allied with their mobilisation of spatial risks in order to earn their living and to sustain their cultural heritage. We see this process of mobilising spatial risks as potentially both a template and a metaphor for educational researchers. Space can be conceptualised as the site of multiple and often conflicting beliefs, discourses and values. In the context of an educational research project, space can indeed be risky and unpredictable, yet it can also become the place in which transformational educational practices are conceived and developed. This is precisely why spatial risks need to be mobilised – and why ‘strategic uncertainties’ need to be celebrated

Welcoming Robots into the Moral Circle: A Defence of Ethical Behaviourism

Can robots have significant moral status? This is an emerging topic of debate among roboticists and ethicists. This paper makes three contributions to this debate. First, it presents a theory – ‘ethical behaviourism’ – which holds that robots can have significant moral status if they are roughly performatively equivalent to other entities that have significant moral status. This theory is then defended from seven objections. Second, taking this theoretical position onboard, it is argued that the performative threshold that robots need to cross in order to be afforded significant moral status may not be that high and that they may soon cross it (if they haven’t done so already). Finally, the implications of this for our procreative duties to robots are considered, and it is argued that we may need to take seriously a duty of ‘procreative beneficence’ towards robots

Regulating Child Sex Robots: Restriction or Experimentation?

In July 2014, the roboticist Ronald Arkin suggested that child sex robots could be used to treat those with paedophilic predilections in the same way that methadone is used to treat heroin addicts. Taking this onboard, it would seem that there is reason to experiment with the regulation of this technology. But most people seem to disagree with this idea, with legal authorities in both the UK and US taking steps to outlaw such devices. In this paper, I subject these different regulatory attitudes to critical scrutiny. In doing so, I make three main contributions to the debate. First, I present a framework for thinking about the regulatory options that we confront when dealing with child sex robots. Second, I argue that there is a prima facie case for restrictive regulation, but that this is contingent on whether Arkin’s hypothesis has a reasonable prospect of being successfully tested. Third, I argue that Arkin’s hypothesis probably does not have a reasonable prospect of being successfully tested. Consequently, we should proceed with utmost caution when it comes to this technology

Why Internal Moral Enhancement Might Be politically Better than External Moral Enhancement

Technology could be used to improve morality but it could do so in different ways. Some technologies could augment and enhance moral behaviour externally by using external cues and signals to push and pull us towards morally appropriate behaviours. Other technologies could enhance moral behaviour internally by directly altering the way in which the brain captures and processes morally salient information or initiates moral action. The question is whether there is any reason to prefer one method over the other? In this article, I argue that there is. Specifically, I argue that internal moral enhancement is likely to be preferable to external moral enhancement, when it comes to the legitimacy of political decision-making processes. In fact, I go further than this and argue that the increasingly dominant forms of external moral enhancement may already be posing a significant threat to political legitimacy, one that we should try to address. Consequently, research and development of internal moral enhancements should be prioritised as a political project

Robot Betrayal: a guide to the ethics of robotic deception

If a robot sends a deceptive signal to a human user, is this always and everywhere an unethical act, or might it sometimes be ethically desirable? Building upon previous work in robot ethics, this article tries to clarify and refine our understanding of the ethics of robotic deception. It does so by making three arguments. First, it argues that we need to distinguish between three main forms of robotic deception (external state deception; superficial state deception; and hidden state deception) in order to think clearly about its ethics. Second, it argues that the second type of deception – superficial state deception – is not best thought of as a form of deception, even though it is frequently criticised as such. And third, it argues that the third type of deception is best understood as a form of betrayal because doing so captures the unique ethical harm to which it gives rise, and justifies special ethical protections against its use

In Defence of the Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Theory

Divine command theories come in several different forms but at their core all of these theories claim that certain moral statuses exist in virtue of the fact that God has commanded them to exist. Several authors argue that this core version of the DCT is vulnerable to an epistemological objection. According to this objection, DCT is deficient because certain groups of moral agents lack epistemic access to God’s commands. But there is confusion as to the precise nature and significance of this objection, and critiques of its key premises. In this article, I try to clear up this confusion and address these critiques. I do so in three ways. First, I offer a simplified general version of the objection. Second, I address the leading criticisms of the premises of this objection, focusing in particular on the role of moral risk/uncertainty in our understanding of God’s commands. And third, I outline four possible interpretations of the argument, each with a differing degree of significance for the proponent of the DCT

Should we be thinking about sex robots?

The chapter introduces the edited collection Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications. It proposes a definition of the term 'sex robot' and examines some current prototype models. It also considers the three main ethical questions one can ask about sex robots: (i) do they benefit/harm the user? (ii) do they benefit/harm society? or (iii) do they benefit/harm the robot

Why We Should Create Artificial Offspring: Meaning and the Collective Afterlife

This article argues that the creation of artificial offspring could make our lives more meaningful. By ‘artificial offspring’ I mean beings that we construct, with a mix of human and non-human-like qualities. Robotic artificial intelligences are paradigmatic examples of the form. There are two reasons for thinking that the creation of such beings could make our lives more meaningful and valuable. The first is that the existence of a collective afterlife—i.e. a set of human-like lives that continue after we die—is likely to be an important source and sustainer of meaning in our present lives. The second is that the creation of artificial offspring provides a plausible and potentially better pathway to a collective afterlife than the traditional biological pathway. Both of these arguments are defended from a variety of objections and misunderstandings