The Middle Ground for Nuclear Waste Management

The 2001 terrorist attacks in the USA and the 2011 seismic events in Japan have brought into sharp relief the vulnerabilities involved in storing nuclear waste on the land’s surface. Nuclear engineers and waste managers are deciding that disposing nuclear waste deep underground is the preferred management option. However, deep disposal of nuclear waste is replete with enormous technical uncertainties. A proposed solution to protect against both the technical vagaries of deep disposal and the dangers of surface events is to store the nuclear waste at shallow depths underground. This paper explores social and ethical issues that are relevant to such shallow storage, including security motivations, intergenerational equity, nuclear stigma, and community acceptance. One of the main ethical questions to emerge is whether it is right for the present generation to burden local communities and future generations with these problems since neither local peoples nor future people have sanctioned the industrial and military processes that have produced the waste in the first place.

Cellular Telephones and Social Interactions

Changes in technology often affect patterns of social interaction. In the current study, the authors examined how cellular telephones have made it possible for members of romantically involved couples to keep track of each other. The authors surveyed 69 undergraduates on their use of cellular telephones as well as their relationships and their level of sexual jealously. Results find that nearly a quarter of romantically involved cellular telephone users report tracking their significant other, and evidence shows that tracking behavior correlates with jealousy. Furthermore, participants frequently reported using countermeasures such as turning off their cellular telephones in order to avoid being tracked by others. In conclusion, newer communication technologies afford users to act upon protectiveness and jealousy more readily than before these technologies were available to the general public.

Perverting Activism

This paper analyzes the impact of new technologies on a range of practices related to activism. The first section shows how the functioning of democratic institutions can be impaired by scarce political accountability connected with the emergence of moral hazard; the second section displays how cyberactivism can improve the transparency of political dynamics; in the last section the authors turn specifically to cyberactivism and isolate its flaws and some of the most pernicious and self-defeating effects.

Internet History

This paper outlines and analyzes milestones in the history of the Internet. As technology advances, it presents new societal and ethical challenges. The early Internet was devised and implemented in American research units, universities, and telecommunication companies that had vision and interest in cutting-edge research. The Internet then entered into the commercial phase (1984-1989). It was facilitated by the upgrading of backbone links, the writing of new software programs, and the growing number of interconnected international networks. The author examines the massive expansion of the Internet into a global network during the 1990s when business and personal computers with different operating systems joined the universal network. The instant and growing success of social networking-sites that enable Netusers to share information, photos, private journals, hobbies, and personal as well as commercial interests with networks of mutual friends and colleagues is discussed.

Without Informed Consent

The requirement of always obtaining participants’ informed consent in research with human subjects cannot always be met, for a variety of reasons. This paper describes and categorises research situations where informed consent is unobtainable. Some of these kinds of situations, common in biomedicine and psychology, have been previously discussed, whereas others, for example, those more prevalent in infrastructure research, introduce new perspectives. The advancement of new technology may lead to an increase in research of these kinds. The paper also provides a review of methods intended to compensate for lack of consent, and their applicability and usefulness for the different categories of situations are discussed. The aim of this is to provide insights into one important aspect of the question of permitting research without informed consent, namely, how well that which informed consent is meant to safeguard can be achieved by other means.

Technoethics and the State of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Canada

University degree programs in STS (Science and Technology Studies) represent a popular training ground for scholars and other professions dealing with advanced studies in science and technology. Degree programs in STS are currently offered at universities around the globe with various specializations and orientations. This study explores the nature of science and technology in Canada and the state of ethics within STS curriculum in Canada. STS degree programs offered under various titles at nine universities in Canada are examined. Findings reveal that ethical aspects of science and technology study is lacking from the core content of most Canadian academic programs in STS. Key challenges are addressed and suggestions are made on how to leverage STS programs within Canadian universities. This study advances the understanding of the developing field of STS in Canada from a technoethical perspective.

Fairness and Regulation of Violence in Technological Design

The purpose of this article is to explore how the design of technology relates to the fairness of the distribution of violence in modern society. Deliberately or not, the design of technological artifacts embodies the priorities of its designers, including how violence is meted out to those affected by the design. Designers make implicit predictions about the context in which designs will perform, predictions that will not always be satisfied. Errors from failed predictions can affect people in ways that designers may not appreciate. In this article, several examples of how artifacts distribute violence are considered. The Taylor-Russell diagram is introduced as a means of representing and exploring this issue. The role of government regulation, safety, and social role in design assessment is discussed.

Facebook Has It

Over the past years, mass media increasingly identified many aspects of social networking with those of established social practices such as gossip. This produced two main outcomes: on the one hand, social networks users were described as gossipers mainly aiming at invading their friends’ and acquaintances’ privacy; on the other hand the potentially violent consequences of social networking were legitimated by referring to a series of recent studies stressing the importance of gossip for the social evolution of human beings. This paper explores the differences between the two kinds of gossip-related sociability, the traditional one and the technologically structured one (where the social framework coincides with the technological one, as in social networking websites). The aim of this reflection is to add to the critical knowledge available today about the effects that transparent technologies have on everyday life, especially as far as the social implications are concerned, in order to prevent (or contrast) those “ignorance bubbles” whose outcomes can be already dramatic.

Structural and Technology-Mediated Violence

A kind of common prejudice is the one that tends to assign the attribute “violent” only to physical and possibly bloody acts – homicides, for example – or physical injuries; but linguistic, structural, and other various aspects of violence – also embedded in artifacts – have to be taken into account. The paper will deal with the so-called “technology-mediated violence” taking advantage of the illustration of the case of profiling. If production of knowledge is important and central, this is not always welcome and so people have to acknowledge that the motto introduced in the book Morality in a Technological World (Magnani, 2007) knowledge as a duty has various limitations. Indeed, a warning has to be formulated regarding the problem of identity and cyberprivacy. The author contends that when too much knowledge about people is incorporated in external artificial things, human beings’ “visibility” can become excessive and dangerous. Two aims are in front of people to counteract this kind of technological violence, which also jeopardizes Rechtsstaat and constitutional democracies: preserving people against the various forms of circulation of knowledge about them and building new suitable “technoknowledge” (also to originate new “embodied” legal institutions) to reach this protective result.

Chicken Killers or Bandwidth Patriots?

In 2008, a resident of a computerized virtual world called “Second Life” programmed and began selling a “realistic” virtual chicken. It required food and water to survive, was vulnerable to physical damage, and could reproduce. This development led to the mass adoption of chicken farms and large-scale trade in virtual chickens and eggs. Not long after the release of the virtual chickens, a number of incidents occurred which demonstrate the negotiated nature of territorial and normative boundaries. Neighbors of chicken farmers complained of slow performance of the simulation and some users began terminating the chickens, kicking or shooting them to “death.” All of these virtual world phenomena, from the interactive role-playing of virtual farmers to the social, political and economic repercussions within and beyond the virtual world, can be examined with a critical focus on the ethical ramifications of virtual world conflicts. This paper views the case of the virtual chicken wars from three different ethical perspectives: as a resource dilemma, as providing an argument from moral and psychological harm, and as a case in which just war theory can be applied.