Birgit Beck – författare

“With great power comes great responsibility.” In today’s world, with our growing technological power and the knowledge about its impact, we are considered to be responsible for many instances that not long ago would have been deemed a matter of fate.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” In today’s world, with our growing technological power and the knowledge about its impact, we are considered to be responsible for many instances that not long ago would have been deemed a matter of fate. At the same time, the looming options of, e.g., genome editing or neuroprosthetics, threaten traditional notions of responsibility if no longer the person but the technology involved is deemed to be responsible for a specific behaviour. The growing ethical debate on the expansion of human responsibility, e.g. when it comes to human-machine-interaction, ambient intelligence, or reproductive technologies, thus intertwines with the challenge to formulate an appropriate understanding of the concept of personal responsibility and our respective anthropological self-understanding in today’s technological world. The volume brings together both perspectives and aims at illuminating crucial dimensions of responsibility in light of technological innovation and our self-understanding as responsible beings.

The volume focusses on the ethical dimensions of the technological scaffold embedding human thought and action, which has been brought to attention of the cognitive sciences by situated cognition theories. There is a broad spectrum of technologies co-realising or enabling and enhancing human cognition and action, which vary in the degree of bodily integration, interactivity, adaptation processes, of reliance and indispensability etc. This technological scaffold of human cognition and action evolves rapidly. Some changes are continuous, some are eruptive. Technologies that use machine learning e.g. could represent a qualitative leap in the technological scaffolding of human cognition and actions. The ethical consequences of applying situated cognition theories to practical cases had yet to find adequate attention and are elucidated in this volume.

Der Band vereint innovative Beiträge, die den Zusammenhang von Ethik und Literatur aus philosophischer und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive ausloten. Die einzelnen Analysen ermitteln die Rolle literarischer Werke für die Ethik-Ästhetik-Debatte, soziale Epistemologie, Politische Philosophie, Angewandte Ethik und philosophische Anthropologie. Die Beiträge werden dabei geleitet von metaethischen sowie technik- und tierethischen Fragestellungen. Eine Besonderheit des interdisziplinären Bandes besteht in der studentischen Sektion, die die Originalartikel philosophischer und literaturwissenschaftlicher Forschender fruchtbar ergänzt.