Liberal Prepping as Apocalyptic Eco-Religion

The term “prepper” or “survivalist” has long been associated with more conservative or politically right-leaning communities who have operated at the fringe of society for decades. Since the new millennium, this hobby of preparedness has increased and, most recently, shown a rise among liberal or left-leaning communities. This essay addresses the rise in liberal prepper culture not only as a political response to right-wing politics, but as a fear heightened by the realities of climate change and its impact on humanity, thus creating an eco-religion centred on ethical and moral responsibilities, with an overall apocalyptic hue.

Extreme Speech, Democratic Deliberation, and Social Media

Social media are now central sites of democratic discourse among citizens. But are some contributions to social media too extreme to be permitted? This entry considers the permissibility of suppressing extreme speech on social media, such as terrorist propaganda and racist hate speech. It begins by considering the argument that such restrictions on speech would wrong democratic citizens, violating their freedom of expression. It proceeds to investigate the moral responsibilities of social media companies to suppress extreme speech, and whether these ought to be enforced through the law. Finally, it explores an alternative mechanism for combatting extreme speech on social media—counter-speech—and evaluates its prospects.

Slow motion ethics: Narrative responsibility in clinical care

Narrative theory is a dynamic and evolving field of inquiry that has made tremendous inroads in the medical humanities over the past 40 years. Numerous authors have popularized the idea that “thinking narratively” can produce important insights about the illness experience for physician and patient alike. This paper draws on aspects of narrative theory to emphasize the moral responsibilities that arise when we step into another person's life narrative, becoming a character in her or his story. This has especially significant ethical implications for the physician–patient encounter in that each character in this shared story experiences time somewhat differently. This gives rise to the notion of “slow motion ethics” and a somewhat unique perspective on the moral responsibilities clinicians bear toward their patients.

On the three constraints of the development of artificial intelligence: Value, liberation, and responsibility

The socialization of technology and the technicalization of society have accelerated the speed, scope and scale of human liberation from nature. In our past technological society, “liberation” mainly referred to people's physical strength. An intelligent society, characterized by the wide application of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI), will further liberate not only people's physical strength, but also their mental power, greatly changing social forms and social operation modes, as well as people themselves. In the application of technologies and the design and manufacture of equipment on which the intelligent society depends, a new tension is formed between instrumental rationality and value rationality. While promoting the liberation of human beings, intelligent society will also cause humans to be dominated and enslaved by AI, which will lead to human alienation. Intelligent society is more in pursuit of how the invested capital and technology can multiply in the process of accumulation and circulation; meanwhile, it will ignore the moral responsibilities of relevant parties, such as researchers, manufacturers, and users. In the process of developing an intelligent society, instrumental rationality should be regulated by value rationality, thus promoting the liberation of human beings and eliminating their alienation. As capital appreciation occurs, the moral responsibilities of relevant parties should be clarified.

“All in this together”: the global duty to contribute towards combating the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper explores the unique realities and effects of Covid-19 as experienced in the global North and global South with special reference to Canada and sub-Saharan Africa; it also examines the moral responsibilities countries have towards their own people and the duty they have to work together to minimise and mitigate the devastating effects of the pandemic worldwide. We illuminate the importance of countries sharing their own world views, strengths, and expertise, and learning from one another in order to better situate all in tackling the pandemic. We argue that it is only insofar as all countries work collaboratively commensurate to each party’s capacity to contribute towards the tackling of the Covid-19 pandemic that we may truly be said to be “all in this together”.

Understanding Responsibility in Stem Cell Research

"Over the years, numerous ethical implications in stem cell research have been identified. Consequentially, there is a need to anticipate, prevent and/or mitigate these implications. In literature and in the guidelines of the International Society for Stem Cell Research some of these implications have been reframed into (moral) responsibilities. What exactly is meant by responsibility and which notions of responsibility are important often remains unclear. As a consequence, this encumbers the possibility to deal with these responsibilities in a systematic way. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to discuss how the concept of responsibility in stem cell research could best be understood. This paper addresses which notions of responsibility are relevant for the field of stem cell research. This will be done by first distinguishing between backward-looking and forward-looking notions of responsibilities, where backward-looking responsibilities are about reactive attitudes and forward-looking responsibilities are about what could be expected from someone to prevent ethical implications. Subsequently, ethical implications of and wrongdoings in stem cell research will be categorized in these notions of responsibility. Taking one step back and looking at the different notions of responsibility could help to identify gaps in responsibilities as well as to distinguish obligatory and supererogatory responsibilities. Consequentially, this informs how to prioritize, distribute and delegate responsibilities over the different stakeholders in stem cell research. This paper concludes by discussing the distribution of responsibilities and different strategies to promote responsibility in stem cell research. "

Introduction

This introductory chapter seeks a preliminary clarification of what prejudice is and why it is a cause of persistent normative concern. It then distinguishes between two normative vocabularies in which that concern can be framed: the moral and the epistemic. When we consider prejudice from a moral point of view, we are concerned with the harms suffered by people who are targeted by prejudiced beliefs, and the moral responsibilities incurred by those who hold these beliefs. When we consider prejudice from an epistemological point of view we are concerned with the cognitive processes by which people come to hold these beliefs. This book is primarily focused on the epistemology of prejudice: the first order of the day is to explain why we should not hope to ground our account of the moral wrongs flowing from prejudice in an account of the epistemic wrongs committed by those who hold these beliefs.

Some are more equal than others

How do people treat robot teammates compared to human opponents? Past research indicates that people favor, and behave more morally toward, ingroup than outgroup members. People also perceive that they have more moral responsibilities toward humans than nonhumans. This paper presents a 2×2×3 experimental study that placed participants (N = 102) into competing teams of humans and robots. We examined how people morally behave toward and perceive players depending on players’ Group Membership (ingroup, outgroup), Agent Type (human, robot), and participant group Team Composition (humans as minority, equal, or majority within the ingroup compared to robots). Results indicated that participants favored the ingroup over the outgroup and humans over robots – to the extent that they favored ingroup robots over outgroup humans. Interestingly, people differentiated more between ingroup than outgroup humans and robots. These effects generalized across Team Composition.

Consumer Versus Corporate Moral Responsibilities for Creating a Circular Fashion: Virtue or Accountability?

Scholars in the fashion discipline have become more attentive to investigating how the fashion business can become more circular. In the past, many of the studies focused on identifying the supporting and/or hindering factors when creating a circular fashion (CF). Despite the insights these studies provide, their contributions are relatively limited in that many of them are exploratory in nature and skewed toward understanding CF from the stance of fashion companies who are situated at the supply side of the fashion economy. In contrast, little attention has been given to how consumers, on the demand side, perceive a CF. We employed a mixed-method approach using 332 respondents’ narrative data and empirically identified whether consumers attribute moral responsibility to fashion companies as well as to themselves for creating a CF and, if so, whether there are any nuanced differences in their perceptions of consumer versus corporate moral responsibilities for a CF.