The initiative DIGHUM lectures started with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism. The bidt and the TU Wien are cooperation partners for DIGHUM lecture series.
Speaker: Wessel Reijers (Paderborn University, Germany)
Moderator: Erich Prem (eutema & TU Wien, Austria)
Today, a major technological trend is the increasing focus on the person: technical systems personalize, customize, and tailor to the person in both beneficial and troubling ways. This trend has moved beyond the realm of commerce and has become a matter of public governance, where systems for citizen risk scoring, predictive policing, and social credit scores proliferate. What these systems have in common is that they may target the person and her ethical and political dispositions, her virtues. Virtue ethics is the most appropriate approach for evaluating the impacts of these new systems, which has translated in a revival of talk about virtue in technology ethics. Yet, the focus on individual dispositions has rightly been criticized for lacking a concern with the political collective and institutional structures. In this talk, I advocate for a new direction of research into civic virtue, which is situated in between personal dispositions and structures of governance. First, I survey the discourse on virtue ethics of technology, emphasizing its neglect of the political dimension of impacts of emerging technologies. Second, I present a pluralist conception of civic virtue that enables us to scrutinize the impact of technology on civic virtue on three different levels of reciprocal reputation building, the cultivation of internal goods, and excellence in the public sphere. Third, I illustrate the benefits of this conception by discussing some paradigmatic examples of emerging technologies that aim to cultivate civic virtue.
About the Series
A roughly bi-weekly seminar offers presentations and panels from worldwide thought leaders. It is typically held on Tuesday afternoons at 17:00 CET.
The bidt and the TU Wien are cooperation partners for DIGHUM lecture series.
Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationship between man and machine. It acknowledges the potential of Informatics and IT. At the same time, it points to related apparent threats such as privacy violations, ethical concerns with AI, automation, and loss of jobs, and the ongoing monopolization on the Web.
For this reason, a new initiative — DIGHUM lectures — started with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism.
We will have one or more speakers on a specific topic followed by a discussion, or panel discussions, depending on topic and speakers. The exact dates will be announced at least two weeks before.
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Archive and Resources of Lecture Series