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AbstractToday, a major technological trend is the increasing focus on the person: technical systems personalize, customize, and tailor to the person in both beneficial and troubling ways. This trend has moved beyond the realm of commerce and has become a matter of public governance, where systems for citizen risk scoring, predictive policing, and social credit scores proliferate. What these systems have in common is that they may target the person and her ethical and political dispositions, her virtues. Virtue ethics is the most appropriate approach for evaluating the impacts of these new systems, which has translated in a revival of talk about virtue in technology ethics. Yet, the focus on individual dispositions has rightly been criticized for lacking a concern with the political collective and institutional structures. This paper advocates a new direction of research into civic virtue, which is situated in between personal dispositions and structures of governance. First, it surveys the discourse on virtue ethics of technology, emphasizing its neglect of the political dimension of impacts of emerging technologies. Second, it presents a pluralist conception of civic virtue that enables us to scrutinize the impact of technology on civic virtue on three different levels of reciprocal reputation building, the cultivation of internal goods, and excellence in the public sphere. Third, it illustrates the benefits of this conceptions by discussing some paradigmatic examples of emerging technologies that aim to cultivate civic virtue.

Published online August 13, 2020 ; Recent developments in responsible innovation have focused on the governance of innovation processes. The dimension of virtue in innovation processes has thereby been largely overlooked, and more significantly the constitutive relation between virtue and governance that enables responsible innovation. To understand responsible innovation in terms of this relation, this paper turns to Hannah Arendt's ontology of the Vita Activa. First, it problematises responsible innovation in Arendt's work, but then points at a hitherto undiscussed possibility of responsible innovation as 'work in the mode of action'. Second, it explores this possibility as it arises out of nine modes for human activity in Arendt's work, arguing that it constitutes a hybrid activity between world and plurality, durability and fragility, and the firm and the public sphere. Third, it explains how the 'web of stories' links virtuous action and governance, which points at a novel understanding of the role of narrative for responsible innovation. ; This research is partly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [Grant Agreement No 716350].This research is partly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [Grant Agreement No 716350].

In this paper, I argue that marketization trends affecting universities in general are strongly present in the management and education of technical universities. Partly, this is due to the historical background of the technical university as such, but marketization can nonetheless negatively affect the purpose of technical universities, which I argue should be to educate virtuous engineers. Marketization trends tend to promote technical and administrative reason and culminate in the idea of an engineer that is "tuned" to his future position. As an alternative to the tuned engineer, I discuss the idea of "bildung" of the virtuous engineer, whose education includes a strong reflexive component. This reflective component, I argue, should enable engineers to distance themselves from their disciplines and reflect on their discipline-specific goals by juxtaposing them with their perception of what it means to be a virtuous engineer (how one envisions ones role as engineer in society). Instead of exclusively focusing on sets of skills that are preferred due to societal and business constraints, universities should also encourage students to reflect on their discipline as a whole; not only from a technical, but also from a historical, ethical and political perspective

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Tables -- 1: Introduction -- Mediation, Virtue, Responsibility -- Towards a Hermeneutic Technology Ethics -- References -- 2: Praxis and Contemporary Philosophy of Technology -- Gaps in the Empirical Turn -- Revisiting Practice -- Narrative Embeddedness of Practice -- Objections to MacIntyre -- A Narrative Turn -- Conclusion -- References -- 3: Ricoeur's Hermeneutic Concept of Technical Practice -- Turning to Ricoeur -- Problematising Technical Practice -- A Hermeneutic Account of Technical Practice -- Action < -- > -- Practice -- Practice < -- > -- Life Plan -- Life Plan < -- > -- Narrative Unity of Life -- Conclusion -- References -- 4: A Narrative Theory of Technology -- Exploring Ricoeur's Narrative Theory -- The Model of Emplotment -- Narrativity and Technological Mediation -- Narrative Technologies -- Textuality, Literacy -- Temporality and Distancing -- Technical Practice and Technological Emplotment -- Conclusion -- References -- 5: Narrative Ethics of Technical Practice -- Virtue Ethics and Technology -- Technology and the Virtues -- Lack of an Account of Technological Mediation -- The Ethical Aim -- The Good Life -- With and for Others -- In Just Institutions -- Conclusion -- References -- 6: A Method for Technology Ethics -- An Iterative, Tripartite Method -- Illustrating the Method: Automated Borders -- Phase I: Description < -- > -- Interpretation -- Mapping Technical Practices -- Gathering Narratives -- Hermeneutic Analysis -- Phase II: Interpretation < -- > -- Evaluation -- Standards of Excellence -- Life Plans -- Narrative Unity of Life -- Phase III: Evaluation < -- > -- Prescription -- The Good Life -- With and for Others -- In Just Institutions -- Conclusion -- References -- 7: Conclusion: Hermeneutic Ethics for the Digital Age -- Summary.

Publication date: 13 May 2019 ; The purpose of this paper is to develop a critique of value sensitive design (VSD) and to propose an alternative approach that does not depart from a heuristic of value(s), but from virtue ethics, called virtuous practice design (VPD). Design/methodology/approach: this paper develops a philosophical argument, draws from a philosophical method (i.e. virtue ethics) and applies this method to a particular case study that draws from a narrative interview. Findings: in this paper, authors show how an approach that takes virtue instead of value as the central notion for aiming at a design that is sensitive to ethical concerns can be fruitful both in theory and in practice. Originality/value: this paper presents the first attempt to ground an approach aimed at ethical technology design on the tradition of virtue ethics. As such, it presents VPD as a potentially fruitful alternative to VSD. ; This research is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No 716350).

This article is a reply to Kostakis' paper 'In Defense of Digital Commoning'. It welcomes the criticisms raised by Kostakis against our initial account of the Illusion of the Digital Commons. We argue that we can largely defend our initial account by (1) justifying our choice for discussing 'hybrid' forms of digital commoning, (2) explaining the strategy of our approach, and (3) offering an additional critique of the digital platform as a basis for political action.

Digital commons such as Wikipedia, open-source software, and hospitality exchanges are frequently seen as forms of resistance to capitalist modes of production and consumption, as elements of alternative economies. In this article, however, we argue that the digital commons cannot by themselves constitute genuine forms of resistance for they are vulnerable to what we call 'the illusion of the digital commons', which leads to a form of 'false consciousness' that Sloterdijk designates as deep-rooted cynicism. This cynicism, we argue, ties in with the contemporary discontent with practices in the 'sharing economy', in which we pay particular attention to the practice of hospitality exchange on platforms such as BeWelcome, Couchsurfing, and Airbnb. We utilize Georg Simmel's theory of money to explicate how exchange relations are mediated by technologically enabled explicit and implicit price mechanisms. Accordingly, we argue that the technologically mediated practice of digital commoning can constitute the 'illusion of the commons', an apparent form of commoning through digital exchanges that is inherently vulnerable to foster non-emancipatory practices. We argue that this results in a form of cynicism: of commoners that are disillusioned by 'the power of things'. Only a 'politics of the digital commons', a democratic governance that keeps a check on the vulnerability of digital exchanges, and a free relation to technologies can help in avoiding the illusion of the digital commons.

Interpreting Technology puts Ricoeur's work at the center of contemporary philosophical thinking concerning technology. It investigates his project of critical hermeneutics, the growing ethical and political impacts of technologies on the modern lifeworld, and ways of analyzing global sociotechnical systems such as the Internet.

This paper is placed in the context of a growing number of social and political critiques of blockchain technologies. We focus on the supposed potential of blockchain technologies to transform political institutions that are central to contemporary human societies, such as money, property rights regimes, and systems of democratic governance. Our aim is to examine the way blockchain technologies canbring about - and justify - new models of governance. To do so, we draw on the philosophical works of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Rawls, analyzing blockchain governance in terms of contrasting social contract theories. We begin by comparing the justifications of blockchain governance offered by members of the blockchain developers' community with the justifications of governance presented within social contract theories. We then examine the extent to which the model of governance offered by blockchain technologies reflects key governance themes and assumptions located within social contract theories, focusing on the notions of sovereignty, the initial situation, decentralization and distributive justice.