On and beyond artifacts in moral relations: accounting for power and violence in Coeckelbergh’s social relationism

Tollon, F., Naidoo, K. 

AI & Soc (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01303-z

Abstract

The ubiquity of technology in our lives and its culmination in artificial intelligence raises questions about its role in our moral considerations. In this paper, we address a moral concern in relation to technological systems given their deep integration in our lives. Coeckelbergh develops a social-relational account, suggesting that it can point us toward a dynamic, historicised evaluation of moral concern. While agreeing with Coeckelbergh’s move away from grounding moral concern in the ontological properties of entities, we suggest that it problematically upholds moral relativism. We suggest that the role of power, as described by Arendt and Foucault, is significant in social relations and as curating moral possibilities. This produces a clearer picture of the relations at hand and opens up the possibility that relations may be deemed violent. Violence as such gives us some way of evaluating the morality of a social relation, moving away from Coeckelbergh’s seeming relativism while retaining his emphasis on social–historical moral precedent.

From Conclusion and implications

The role of artificial intelligence or technology more broadly in our moral landscape depends upon how this landscape is conceived. The realist theory posited by Torrance which seeks to defend the view that moral concern is grounded objectively comes up short in its capacity to function as an explanatory framework which sufficiently accounts for changing moral sensibilities. On the other hand, Coeckelbergh offers a social-relational theory which, in contrast, argues that moral concern should not rest on the properties of individual entities but on the relations between them. While this view better allows for the consideration of social–historical information about relations, it seems to imply a sort of moral relativism and its focus on how things appear makes it blind to the reality of relations. Crucially, Coeckelbergh’s account cannot make sense of the role of power to the extent that it plays out in social relations and curates moral possibilities.

By drawing on an Arendtian and Foucauldian notion power as an attempt to control a situation and assessing the ways it may function in relation to moral situations, we understand how its presence makes relations morally interesting. Not only this, but a view of power also allows us to identify certain social-relational dynamics as violent. We have described violence as a restriction of potentiality, marking the end of a power relation. As we have discussed in relation to technology, this characterisation of social-relational dynamics gives us some basis to say of certain actions or relations that they are morally permissible or impermissible. This assessment retains Coeckelbergh’s emphasis on analysing social–historical relations, while allowing for some degree of moral judgement to be made.

The paper is here.

How Not to Be Alone

By Jonathan Safran Foer
The New York Times - Opinion
Originally published June 8, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Psychologists who study empathy and compassion are finding that unlike our almost instantaneous responses to physical pain, it takes time for the brain to comprehend the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth, the less likely and able we are to care.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up.

The entire story is here.

The Grounds of Moral Status

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
First published on March 14, 2013

An entity has moral status if and only if it or its interests morally matter to some degree for the entity's own sake, such that it can be wronged. For instance, an animal may be said to have moral status if its suffering is at least somewhat morally bad, on account of this animal itself and regardless of the consequences for other beings, and acting unjustifiably against its interests is not only wrong, but wrongs the animal. Others owe it to the animal to avoid acting in this way. Some philosophers think of moral status as coming in degrees, reserving the notion of full moral status (FMS) for the highest degree of status.

Sometimes the term “moral standing” rather than “moral status” is used, but typically these terms have the same meaning. Some philosophers employ the language of “moral considerability” but this term is extremely ambiguous. Some use it as an alternate expression for “moral status” which is understood to come in degrees. In other cases the phrase is used to mean FMS. Act Utilitarians employ yet a third notion of moral considerability, which is a matter of having one's interests (e.g., the intensity, duration, etc. of one's pleasure or pain) factored into the calculus to determine which action minimizes the bad and maximizes the good. To avoid these ambiguities, this entry will use the terminology of “moral status” and “FMS.” 

After reviewing which entities have been thought to have moral status and what is involved in having FMS, as opposed to a lesser degree of moral status, this article will survey different views of the grounds of moral status as well as the arguments for attributing a particular degree of moral status on the basis of those grounds.

The entire article is here.

The Boundaries of the Moral (and Legal) Community

By Brian Leiter
The Expanding Moral Community
Alabama Law Review, Vol. 64(3), 511-531.

Let me invite you to step back from the parochial political disputes that dominate public life in America and most other modern democracies, as well as from the internecine academic quarrels characteristic of so much professionalized scholarship in the modern academy, and reflect, instead, on the broader sweep of moral and political thought, in both the philosophical and practical realm, over the past two or three hundred years.  What must immediately strike any observer of this period is the remarkable expansion it has witnessed of what I will henceforth call “the moral community,” that is, the community of creatures that are thought entitled to equal moral consideration, whatever the precise details of what such consideration involves—that is, whether it is a matter of showing “respect,” recognizing the “dignity” of each, or “maximizing the utility or well-being” of each, or some other formulation.  I am speaking here about our official ideologies and discourse, not necessarily all our actual practices and laws, though they gradually follow suit over the course of a century or so. But at the level of ideology, reflected in both ordinary moral opinion and in the work of philosophers, we in the West—ignorance of the relevant philosophical and legal traditions requires me to remain agnostic on the proverbial “East,” though the trends seem to be similar—have largely abandoned the ideas that gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, and now even sexual orientation are morally relevant attributes in the sense that they are attributes that determine the basic moral consideration to which one is entitled. To be sure, in particular contexts, these characteristics may matter because of the context. So, for example, I take it most would still think it morally unproblematic to consider race in casting the lead role in Shakespeare’s Othello, and most of us would still think it morally unproblematic that a man contemplating marriage gives some consideration to the gender or religion of his potential mate. 

The entire article is here.