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Human-Environment Dichotomy

This entry begins by reviewing the definitions of “human”, “environment” and “dichotomy”, consequently turning to the debates concerning the human–environment relationship. Synthesizing various studies, the capability of advanced tool use; language, hyper-sociality, advanced cognition, morality, civilization, technology, and free will are supposed to be distinctly human. However, other studies describe how nonhuman organisms share these same abilities. The biophysical or natural environment is often associated with all living and non-living things that occur naturally. The environment also refers to ecosystems or habitats, including all living organisms or species. The concepts of the biophysical or natural environment are often opposed to the concepts of built or modified environment, which is artificial - constructed or influenced by humans. The built or modified environment typically refers to structures or spaces from gardens to car parks. Today, one of the central questions in regard to human-environment dichotomies centres around the concept of sustainability. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118924396 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/

‘What do you mean by ethical compass?’

This article aims to explore the moral ideas and experiences that students at Dutch universities of applied sciences (UAS) have of being a professional with an ‘ethical compass.’Semi-structured interviews were held with 36 fourth-year Bachelor students divided over four institutions and three different programmes: Initial Teacher Educa- tion, Business Services and Information and Communication Technology. Findings show that students say they strive to be(come) moral professionals, but that they have difficulties recognising and articulating the moral aspects of their professional roles. They seem to lack a moral vocabulary and the moral knowledge to verbalise their aspirations and to provide arguments to explicate or legitimise their moral behaviour. While most students were critical of the support they received from their universities, they indicated that various other role models and (work) experiences did have a strong and positive influence on their moral development. In this article, we reflect on the findings in relation to international empirical research on students’ moral development and highlight the characteristics of UAS students.

Development, Reliability and Validity of the Assessment-tool for Moral Authorship

This presentation reports on the status of an assessment-tool for Moral Authorship that is being developed for teachers and discusses its reliability and validation. Moral Authorship refers to the ability of teachers to observe, identify, articulate and reflect on moral aspects in their work in a thoughtful and dialogical way. The developed assessment tool is based on the concept of Moral Authorship, which describes moral meaning-making in a narrative way and distinguishes six tasks as points of attention, to identify topics of concern which arise when reflecting on the development of one’s morality (Gertsen, Schaap & Bakker, 2017). Paper presented at the AME 2017 Conference

Robots and moral obligations

From the article: Using Roger Crisp’s arguments for well-being as the ultimate source of moral reasoning, this paper argues that there are no ultimate, non-derivative reasons to program robots with moral concepts such as moral obligation, morally wrong or morally right. Although these moral concepts should not be used to program robots, they are not to be abandoned by humans since there are still reasons to keep using them, namely: as an assessment of the agent, to take a stand or to motivate and reinforce behaviour. Because robots are completely rational agents they don’t need these additional motivations, they can suffice with a concept of what promotes well-being. How a robot knows which action promotes well-being to the greatest degree is still up for debate, but a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches seem to be the best way. The final publication is available at IOS Press through http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-708-5-184

Spontaneous morality development in online affinity spaces for neighborhood commemoration

In our network culture totally different and new spaces have developed. In cyberspace there are new forms of location-based communities. No communities based on membership, ideology or doctrine, but open spaces where people find each other in a shared interest: fluid communities, in jargon called ‘affinity spaces’. Places where people are close to each other because of affinity. (translated from Post, 2018, p. 6)

Customer service and morality