Moral food lab: Transforming the food system with crowd-sourced ethics
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In this article, we describe a study on the impact of an ethics program aimed at strengthening the ethical agency of 15 social workers of three welfare organizations. The goal of the study was to make an inventory of the impact of the program, and to evaluate the relevance of this impact with the help of several stakeholders. The most significant change (MSC) approach was used as a research strategy, though some changes to the approach were made with a view to our research goal. We explain the MSC approach and how we used it in our study design. Further, we describe the research process, answering the question whether our adaptation of the MSC was helpful to inventory the impact of our ethics program and the evaluation of its relevance. The implications of MSC's focus on "most significant" changes and the need for a thorough feedback of the results of the evaluation process in the participating organizations are discussed.
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In physiotherapy practice, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly common. For instance, you may be familiar with STarT Back Tool, a decision-support model designed for individuals with low back pain.1 This model can assess risks and recommends the most appropriate treatment while enhancing clients’ self-management. However, the use of AI also raises ethical questions. In this editorial we explore these ethical questions through a moral case deliberation that, while still futuristic, is rapidly approaching reality. n this editorial, we explore ethical issues regarding AI in physiotherapy. We do so through the lens of the sports medicine dialogue, a method for moral case deliberation that supports a care-ethical approach for physiotherapists and sport physicians.3 This method employs the metaphor of a sports match: itandapos;s about winning and losing, the players on the field, as well as the broader context in which the game takes place. In this method, we evaluate the perspectives of all those involved in the sport match regarding a central question. The central question that is deliberated is: “What is at stake?”.3 By use of the sports metaphor we are invited to look at an ethical question from multiple perspectives, delay our primary reactions and simplify difficult ethical problems such as the usage of AI.
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The Dutch research project “Wijs met techniek” (Tech-Wise) explores ethics education from a tool-based, practical perspective. Especially if and how practical tools for ethical deliberation on the impact of technology can be helpful in ethics education for engineering students. The approach is first intended as a variation on theories in ethics and technology. Secondly, the approach uses a focus on the impact of technology as a way toward ethical deliberation. Both characteristics are intended to better appeal to engineering students. In the project we cover three levels of higher education: a University, a University of Applied Sciences and a School for Vocational Training. Together we are developing and testing a suite of activating working methods that can be tailored to various engineering programmes. A first result of this is the simple workshop format “ethics for engineers”, consisting of five steps with four effective ingredients. In this paper we present the general format of this workshop and dive in particular into a specific instance of the workshop called “Wonderberries”. The experiences from the workshop show that with a carefully chosen combination of engaging orientation, a specific ‘technology’ and a concrete design exercise the ethical questions and subsequent deliberation and reflection can be very rich.
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In this track we therefore welcomed papers that investigate or show how incorporating ethical reflection in the design process can foster creative solutions for future use of technology. Or the other way around: how design can cater for a creative approach to ethical deliberation. Completely in line with the theme of our track, the submitted papers show that there are multiple other creative ways to connect ethics and design.
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Value-loaded critical thinking refers to a combination of critical thinking, moral value development and reflection. It is important to teach value-loaded critical thinking in secondary education and philosophy seems the pre-eminent subject to do so. This article describes the theoretical foundations of value-loaded critical thinking, its educational objectives, and what is known about effective teaching strategies. Value-loaded critical thinking is best taught in teacher-led philosophical dialogues. Four design principles summarize effective teaching strategies for teaching value-loaded critical thinking in dialogue: teachers should (1) explicitly address moral values in dialogue; (2) apply moral values to engaging or realistic examples; (3) promote critical reasoning about moral values; and (4) provide opportunities for reflection.It is important that secondary school students learn to reason critically about normative issues. Philosophy teachers can contribute to this educational objective by promoting value-loaded critical thinking during philosophical dialogues. Value-loaded critical thinking is critical and reflective reasoning focused on deciding what is the right thing to believe or to do (Frijters et al. 2008). This paper describes the theoretical foundations of value-loaded critical thinking and presents four design principles for promoting value-loaded critical thinking during philosophical dialogues. The four design principles are: teachers should explicitly address moral values in dialogue (1), apply moral values to engaging or realistic examples (2), promote critical reasoning about moral values (3), and provide opportunities for reflection (4). To provide authentic illustrations and practical suggestions for teachers, each design principle includes selected excerpts of classroom dialogues of 10th grade philosophy classes in Dutch.
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Social media firestorms pose a significant challenge for firms in the digital age. Tackling firestorms is difficult because the judgments and responses from social media users are influenced by not only the nature of the transgressions but also by the reactions and opinions of other social media users. Drawing on the heuristic-systematic information processing model, we propose a research model to explain the effects of social impact (the heuristic mode) and argument quality and moral intensity (the systematic mode) on perceptions of firm wrongness (the judgment outcome) as well as the effects of perceptions of firm wrongness on vindictive complaining and patronage reduction. We adopted a mixed methods approach in our investigation, including a survey, an experiment, and a focus group study. Our findings show that the heuristic and systematic modes of information processing exert both direct and interaction effects on individuals’ judgment. Specifically, the heuristic mode of information processing dominates overall and also biases the systematic mode. Our study advances the literature by offering an alternative explanation for the emergence of social media firestorms and identifying a novel context in which the heuristic mode dominates in dual information processing. It also sheds light on the formulation of response strategies to mitigate the adverse impacts resulting from social media firestorms. We conclude our paper with limitations and future research directions.
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In the context of the designers responsibility for the impact of technology, ethical considerations are important. However, these considerations are often seen as limiting innovation and the freedom of the designer. Is it possible, on the contrary, that ethics can also foster creativity in design? The research project Tech-Wise is about a practice oriented approach in ethics; developing tools to engage people with ethical deliberation on the impact of technology. One result of the project is a workshop format for stimulating ethical deliberation that can be tailored to particular technologies and design disciplines. We argue from the results of one particular instance of this workshop format that such an approach to ethics has a fruitful reciprocal effect. It can stimulate creativity in design by enriching the question about the purpose of an innovation, and the other way around enrich ethical reasoning by opening up to often surprising impacts of technologies.
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While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moral challenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation of these robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholder perspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectives however mainly focus on single stakeholders. In this exploratory study, we examine and compare the attitudes of multiple stakeholders on the use of social robots in primary education, using a novel questionnaire that covers various aspects of moral issues mentioned in earlier studies. Furthermore, we also group the stakeholders based on similarities in attitudes and examine which socio-demographic characteristics influence these attitude types. Based on the results, we identify five distinct attitude profiles and show that the probability of belonging to a specific profile is affected by such characteristics as stakeholder type, age, education and income. Our results also indicate that social robots have the potential to be implemented in education in a morally responsible way that takes into account the attitudes of various stakeholders, although there are multiple moral issues that need to be addressed first. Finally, we present seven (practical) implications for a responsible application of social robots in education following from our results. These implications provide valuable insights into how social robots should be implemented
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This study analyses how the social construction of integrity takes place within the context of football in the Netherlands. Combining a contextual approach to sports integrity with the analytic lens of sensemaking, this qualitative multi-method case study analyses – in one extreme case in Dutch youth amateur football – why and when the ‘incident’ was perceived as an ‘integrity issue’, and how the meaning of (the) integrity (issue) was socially constructed by (interactions between) stakeholders involved in the case. Our findings show why, when, and how moral norms and values are (not) debated and at stake, and that the social construction of sports integrity is intertwined with the institutional context and the role of secondary stakeholders. It provides insights that can help sports organizations to identify risks in their moral sports culure and to develop measures or policies to safeguard integrity in sport.
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