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In this paper we discuss the social and ethical issues that arise as a result of digitization based on six dominant technologies: Internet of Things, robotics, biometrics, persuasive technology, virtual & augmented reality, and digital platforms. We highlight the many developments in the digitizing society that appear to be at odds with six recurring themes revealing from our analysis of the scientific literature on the dominant technologies: privacy, autonomy, security, human dignity, justice, and balance of power. This study shows that the new wave of digitization is putting pressure on these public values. In order to effectively shape the digital society in a socially and ethically responsible way, stakeholders need to have a clear understanding of what such issues might be. Supervision has been developed the most in the areas of privacy and data protection. For other ethical issues concerning digitization such as discrimination, autonomy, human dignity and unequal balance of power, the supervision is not as well organized.

Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s definition of creativity as a virtue and distinguish three components in it: creative output, mastery and intrinsic motivation. We argue that all of these components can meaningfully be attributed to innovation groups. This means that we can also attribute the virtue of creativity to group agents involved in innovation. Recognizing creativity as a collective virtue in innovation is important because it allows for a more accurate evaluation of how successful innovation generally happens. The innovator who takes a collective virtue account of creativity seriously will give attention to the facilitation of an environment where the group can flourish collectively, rather than only nurturing the individual genius.

This article investigates the social significance of robotics for the years to come in Europe and the US by studying robotics developments in five different areas: the home, health care, traffic, the police force, and the army. Our society accepts the use of robots to perform dull, dangerous, and dirty industrial jobs. But now that robotics is moving out of the factory, the relevant question is how far do we want to go with the automation of care for children and the elderly, of killing terrorists, or of making love? This literature review attempts to provide an engaged but sober (non-speculative) insight into the societal issues raised by the new robotics: which robot technologies are coming; what are they capable of; and which ethical and regulatory questions will they consequently raise?

Social entrepreneurship—a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality—is in a transitional phase, from a rough cowboy market to a more established market niche. This process results in two interconnected dilemmas for the social entrepreneur. First, how it can capture market share despite its role as an antagonist to current market values. Second, how it can prevent the loss of its own core values in the course of greater interaction with the incumbent regimes. Using a tool known from innovation sciences to analyse radical innovations, namely strategic niche management, and both survey data and interviews from actors in the Netherlands, this article shows that social entrepreneurs have an attitude that is still more in line with the cowboy market than with the new diplomatic role they are expected to take on. Subsequently, it provides recommendations on how to achieve this new attitude. L'entrepreneuriat social – un nouveau modèle économique qui combine un objectif social avec une mentalité d'entreprise – est dans une phase de transition, passant d'un marché d'amateurs difficile à un marché de niche bien établi. Ce phénomène donne lieu à deux difficultés interconnectées pour l'entrepreneur social. Tout d'abord, comment ce dernier peut gagner des parts de marché en dépit de son rôle d'antagoniste de la valeur marchande actuelle. Deuxièmement, comment il peut éviter la perte de ses valeurs fondamentales propres à l'occasion de relations plus étroites avec les régimes en place. En utilisant un outil connu des sciences de l'innovation pour analyser les innovations radicales, à savoir la gestion des créneaux stratégiques, les données d'études et les interviews de protagonistes aux Pays-Bas, cet article montre que les entrepreneurs sociaux ont une attitude qui est encore davantage conforme au marché d'amateurs qu'au nouveau rôle diplomatique qu'ils sont appelés à jouer. Il émet par la suite des recommandations sur la façon d'accéder à une nouvelle attitude. Die soziale Unternehmerschaft - ein neues Unternehmensmodell, dass ein soziales Ziel mit einer Geschäftsmentalität vereint - befindet sich in einer Übergangsphase von einem primitiven Cowoboy-Markt zu einer etablierteren Marktnische. Dieser Prozess hat für den sozialen Unternehmer zwei ineinandergreifende Dilemma zur Folge. Erstens, wie kann er trotz seiner Antagonistenrolle gegenüber aktuellen Marktwerten einen Marktanteil gewinnen? Zweitens, wie kann er den Verlust seiner eigenen grundsätzlichen Werte im Zuge der vermehrten Interaktion mit den herrschenden Regimen vermeiden? Anhand eines Hilfsmittels, das in der Innovationswissenschaft zur Analyse radikaler Innovationen bekannt ist, nämlich dem strategischen Nischenmanagement, und mittels Erhebungsdaten und Befragungen von Akteuren in den Niederlanden zeigt dieser Beitrag, dass soziale Unternehmer noch immer eine Haltung einnehmen, die mehr dem Cowboy-Markt entspricht als der neuen diplomatischen Rolle, die sie übernehmen sollen. Anschließend werden Empfehlungen dazu abgegeben, wie diese neue Haltung erreicht werden kann. El espíritu emprendedor (un nuevo modelo empresarial que combina los objetivos sociales con la mentalidad empresarial) constituye una fase de transición: de un mercado de duros cowboys a un nicho de mercado más consolidado. Este proceso provoca dos dilemas interrelacionados con el espíritu social. En primer lugar, cómo puede captar la cuota de mercado pese a su función como antagonista de los valores del mercado actual; y en segundo lugar, cómo puede evitar la pérdida de sus valores esenciales en el transcurso de una interacción mayor con los regímenes interesados. Utilizando una herramienta conocida por las ciencias de la innovación para analizar las innovaciones radicales, es decir, la gestión de nichos estratégicos y tanto datos como las entrevistas y las encuestas a actores en los Países Bajos, este trabajo revela que los emprendedores sociales siguen mostrando una actitud más en consonancia con el mercado de los cowboys que con el nuevo papel diplomático que se espera que asuma. Posteriormente, se ofrece una serie de recomendaciones sobre cómo lograr esta nueva actitud.

In this paper, we develop a formalisation of the main ideas of the work of Van de Poel on responsibility. Using the basic concepts through which the meanings of responsibility are defined, we construct a logic which enables to express sentences like “individual i is accountable for φ ”, “individual i is blameworthy for φ ” and “individual i has the obligation to see to it that φ ”. This formalization clarifies the definitions of responsibility given by Van de Poel and highlights their differences and similarities. It also helps to assess the consistency of the formalisation of responsibility, not only by showing that definitions are not inconsistent, but also by providing a formal demonstration of the relation between three main meanings of responsibility (accountability, blameworthiness, and obligation). The formal account can be used to derive new properties of the concepts. With the help of the formalisation, we detect the occurrence of the problem of many hands (PMH) by defining a logical framework for reasoning about collective and individual responsibility. This logic extends the Coalition Epistemic Dynamic Logic (CEDL) by adding a notion of group knowledge (and generalize the definitions of individual responsibility to groups of agents), agent ability and knowing how to its semantics.

There are concerns amongst researchers and the general public that social media platforms threaten democratic values. Social media corporations and their engineers have responded to these concerns with various design solutions. Though the objective of designing social media democratically sounds straightforward, the concrete reality is not. The authors discuss what a democratic design for social media platforms could look like by exploring two classical conceptions of democracy, one in the liberal tradition and the other in the deliberative tradition. In particular, they discuss three concerns: 1) mis- and disinformation; 2) hate speech; and 3) the relations between filter bubbles, echo chambers, and public debate. By describing the underlying ideals of the two traditions and translating these into design guidelines, the authors make explicit how varied and contrary the implications of different conceptions of democracy can be for addressing public concerns and designing for democratic social media. With these things in mind, this article responds to a call, which is to raise awareness among social media corporations, engineers, and policymakers about varying democratic ideals and the implications that these may have for social media.

The new wave of digitization and the ensuing cybernetic loop lead to the fact that biological, social, and cognitive processes can be understood in terms of information processes and systems, and thus digitally programmed and controlled. Digital control offers society and the individuals in that society a multitude of opportunities, but also brings new social and ethical challenges. Important public values are at stake, closely linked to fundamental and human rights. This paper focuses on the public value of autonomy, and shows that digitization—by analysis and application of data—can have a profound effect on this value in all sorts of aspects in our lives: in our material, biological, and socio-cultural lives. Since the supervision of autonomy is hardly organized, we need to clarify through reflection and joint debate about what kind of control and human qualities we do not want to lose in the digital future.

In the last decade we have entered the era of remote controlled military technology. The excitement about this new technology should not mask the ethical questions that it raises. A fundamental ethical question is who may be held responsible for civilian deaths. In this paper we will discuss the role of the human operator or so-called ‘cubicle warrior’, who remotely controls the military robots behind visual interfaces. We will argue that the socio-technical system conditions the cubicle warrior to dehumanize the enemy. As a result the cubicle warrior is morally disengaged from his destructive and lethal actions. This challenges what he should know to make responsible decisions (the so-called knowledge condition). Nowadays and in the near future, three factors will influence and may increase the moral disengagement even further due to the decrease of locus of control orientation: (1) photo shopping the war; (2) the moralization of technology; (3) the speed of decision-making. As a result, cubicle warriors cannot be held reasonably responsible anymore for the decisions they make.

Developers and designers make all sorts of moral decisions throughout an innovation project. In this article, we describe how teams of developers and designers engaged with ethics in the early phases of innovation based on case studies in the SUBCOP project (SUBCOP stands for ‘SUicide Bomber COunteraction and Prevention’). For that purpose, Value Sensitive Design (VSD) will be used as a reference. Specifically, we focus on the following two research questions: How can researchers/developers learn about users’ perspectives and values during the innovation process? and How can researchers/developers take into account these values, and related design criteria, in their decision-making during the innovation process? Based on a case study of several innovation processes in this project, we conclude the researchers/developers involved are able to do something similar to VSD (without them knowing about VSD or calling it ‘VSD’), supported by relatively simple exercises in the project, e.g., meetings with potential end-users and discussions with members of the Ethical Advisory Board of the project. Furthermore, we also found—possibly somewhat counterintuitively—that a commercial, with its focus on understanding and satisfying customers’ needs, can promote VSD.

In some situations in which undesirable collective effects occur, it is very hard, if not impossible, to hold any individual reasonably responsible. Such a situation may be referred to as the problem of many hands. In this paper we investigate how the problem of many hands can best be understood and why, and when, it exactly constitutes a problem. After analyzing climate change as an example, we propose to define the problem of many hands as the occurrence of a gap in the distribution of responsibility that may be considered morally problematic. Whether a gap is morally problematic, we suggest, depends on the reasons why responsibility is distributed. This, in turn, depends, at least in part, on the sense of responsibility employed, a main distinction being that between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility.