Kobe Philosophy Seminar Series (5): Conditioned Responsibility and Consent in the Wake of New Technologies

Kobe Philosophy Seminar Series (5):

Conditioned Responsibility and Consent in the Wake of New Technologies
Prof.Chon Tejedor, Universitat de Valencia
Date: September 27, 2024

Time: 15:30 - 17:00
Location: 瀧川記念学術交流会館大会議室;Takigawa Memorial Hall, Kobe University

Contact: Snow Li (xue.li@unsw.edu.au)
Abstract: 
New technologies, in particular those associated with social media, pose a number of important challenges to standard moral theories concerning responsibility and consent. Part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that often, when we make use of such technologies, we find ourselves in what we have come to call "agency-stultifying situations". Situations of this type satisfy the following four criteria: a) The combined actions of a sufficiently large number of individuals cause significant cumulative harm. b) The actions of any one individual do not make any difference in bringing about or preventing this cumulative harm. c) Individuals do not intend the resulting cumulative harm, even though they expect it to result from the combination of such actions done by numerous individuals. d) Refraining from performing such actions involves a cost for the individual. Intuitively we think that ordinary individuals bear (some type of) ethical responsibility in situations meeting these four criteria. However, this individual responsibility cannot be cashed out in terms of the consequences brought about by the individual’s actions (pace b) or the individual’s intentions (pace c). This renders individual responsibility and associated notions of consent especially difficult to articulate. In this talk, we will explore together the problem and suggest a number of possible strategies for addressing it.