Cultivating Moral Attention: a Virtue-Oriented Approach to Responsible Data Science in Healthcare

In the past few years, the ethical ramifications of AI technologies (in particular data science) have been at the center of intense debates. Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how a morally responsible practice of data science can be promoted and which values have to shape it. In this context, ethics and moral responsibility have been mainly conceptualized as compliance to widely shared principles. However, several scholars have highlighted the limitations of such a principled approach. Drawing from microethics and the virtue theory tradition, in this paper, we formulate a different approach to ethics in data science which is based on a different conception of “being ethical” and, ultimately, of what it means to promote a morally responsible data science. First, we develop the idea that, rather than only compliance, ethical decision-making consists in using certain moral abilities (e.g., virtues), which are cultivated by practicing and exercising them in the data science process. An aspect of virtue development that we discuss here is moral attention, which is the ability of data scientists to identify the ethical relevance of their own technical decisions in data science activities. Next, by elaborating on the capability approach, we define a technical act as ethically relevant when it impacts one or more of the basic human capabilities of data subjects. Therefore, rather than “applying ethics” (which can be mindless), data scientists should cultivate ethics as a form of reflection on how technical choices and ethical impacts shape one another. Finally, we show how this microethical framework concretely works, by dissecting the ethical dimension of the technical procedures involved in data understanding and preparation of electronic health records.

The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

Descriptive Moral Philosophy

The final chapter develops the conception of a descriptive, pluralistic, and elucidatory moral philosophy established throughout the book and investigates the relationship between moral philosophy and moral life. It expands on two central suggestions of this work, namely that moral philosophy is fundamentally descriptive, and that the moral cannot be delineated, but is a pervasive presence in moral life. This leads to a discussion of how we are to understand the practicality of moral philosophy, and how it can be said to be aiding moral life, namely by advancing moral orientation, by making recommendations for moral attention, and by inviting us to develop and engage with new forms of moral thought, even forms of moral change. A central discussion concerns the role of the moral philosopher, and it is argued that philosophical work is an activity that itself involves a two-sided responsibility, an inward responsibility to continuously work on one’s wants and expectations and an outward responsibility to continuously stay open and attentive towards the investigated phenomenon. The last section recapitulates and evaluates the work done in the book.

The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

Why Is Voting Special?

This chapter concentrates on the argument that voting is a moral duty even if it is true that other ways of helping society exist, many of which are discharged in non-political ways. The chapter shows that voting is morally special in its own right regardless of the fact that citizens may also be bound to discharge other duties of aid. Because governments are powerful entities that distribute and shape access to basic social goods as no other organization does, the mechanism to install them is unique and deserves moral attention separately. Other political, non-electoral ways of influencing government matter, but they lose all relevance if elections are absent.

The Scales Integral to Ecology: Hierarchies in Laudato Si’ and Christian Ecological Ethics

Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ advocates for an “ecological conversion” to the ideal of “integral ecology”. In so doing, it offers insights into different scales of moral attention, resonating with sophisticated thinking in scientific ecology and environmental ethics. From the encyclical, Christian ecological ethicists can learn about the importance of identifying spatial and temporal scales in moral terms and the usefulness of hierarchical levels that distinguish between local, community, and global concerns. However, the encyclical assumes some hierarchical relationships—among genders, among species, and with the divine—that it does not question. Scalar thinking is a key strength of Laudato Si’ and also a signal of the work it leaves undone regarding the constructedness and limitations of all hierarchical assumptions.

Christian Ethics and Ecologies of Violence

This essay introduces “ecologies of violence” as a problem for Christian ethics. Understanding the links between violence and the natural environment will be critical to the pursuit of justice, peace, and sustainability in the twenty-first century. Yet these links often evade political action and escape moral attention because they do not fit comfortably within any of the fields requisite to address them. In most cases, the available resources for confronting these issues—“environmental issues” and “peace and conflict issues”—exist in separate toolkits, and no single discourse has developed resources to address their progressively merging spheres of concern. The essay outlines four types of ecological violence, examines recent work in Christian ethics relevant to them, and then argues for a dialogical method of ethics to confront them. Doing Christian ethics at the intersections of violence and environmental issues will require careful attention to environmental ethics as well as to the ethics of violence. More than that, it will require judicious efforts to navigate between them within case-based and place-based ethical analyses. Ecologies of violence invite Christian ethics to develop possibilities of ethical discernment and reparative action that do justice to the deep entanglement of ecological and sociopolitical systems.

What Is Feminist Ethics?

The chapter explains what is meant by ethics, feminism, and gender, drawing contrasts between feminist and nonfeminist ways of doing ethics. An ethics sketch map shows students the various branches of ethics and how feminists approach them. It is followed by a discussion of power and the moral attention it requires, with a specific focus on gender as an abusive power system that pervades everyday social life.

Bentham’s Equality-Sensitive Theory of Value

Equality lies at the heart of Bentham’s theory of value, and hence at the core of his utilitarian moral and political theory.The thesis of this chapter is that a proper understanding of the foundational role of equality in Bentham’s moral and political theory will give us further insight into his distinctive theory of value. Equality was not merely an ad hoc addition to his principle of utility, undermining the coherence of the entire theory, as critics have charged. Rather, Bentham thought of equality as involved in the very meaning of the principle, as Mill put it. This equality-sensitive principle of utility draws on a person-regarding conception of value that recognizes the equal claim that each person’s well-being has on our moral attention. This conception of value that contrasts sharply with the one standardly attributed to classical utilitarians.

Porn culture, embodied experiences and knowledge of sexual practices

Much research has been conducted to date on the online pornography consumption of young people and adults. Very little has been done, however, to investigate its fallout on the sexual knowledge and attitudes (acceptance or rejection) of individuals who are online pornography consumers from early adolescence. In an exploratory study on Online Sexual Activities conducted with a sample of 301 students attending Padua University (between 20 and 25 years old), participants were asked to judge 24 sexual practices based on five options: ‘arousing’, ‘arousing but immoral’, ‘disgusting’, ‘unappealing’ or ‘no idea what it means’. The results showed that online pornography consumption enables individuals to accumulate an encyclopedic personal ‘erudition’, while it also tends to confirm their orientation towards ‘normal’ sexual practices, and to reproduce gender stereotypes, albeit in a setting where more ‘moral’ attention is paid to socially less acceptable online content.