Filosofia Morale/Moral Philosophy

Editoriale

Anna Donise — 2024-11-12

“Dependency worker”: ruolo e valore di una nozione a partire da Eva Feder Kittay

Marco Damonte — 2024-11-12

“Dependency worker”: role and value of a notion starting
with Eva Feder Kittay
More than twenty-five years after the publication of Kittay’s Love’s Labor. Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, it is desirable to reread this text through the notion of dependency worker. With reference to this concept, it is possible to grasp some original aspects of Kittay’s reflection neglected by secondary literature that go beyond the classic setting of an ethic of care, but which prove to be useful in providing a contribution both to feminist philosophy and to disability studies. After an adequate contextualization of Kittay’s book and some clarifications on the style in which the arguments are presented, I will identify the starting point of Kittay’s reflections in the anthropological notion of vulnerability, understood in an ontological dimension. Precisely because of the vulnerability that constitutes human beings, each person must be considered “some mother’s child” and treated accordingly. Thanks to the notion of vulnerability, the dependency work assumes a particular importance which I will highlight by providing an adequate definition, a basic classification and indicating its main characteristics. Considering the current conceptions of justice and equality inadequate to the needs of dependency work, Kittay proposes to abandon the current welfare model and move to a model based on “doulia”. I will conclude by suggesting the usefulness of Kittay’s reflection on dependency work to appreciate and enhance the legislative proposal for the protection of the “family caregiver” currently under discussion in the Italian parliament.

Per una rinascita spirituale dell’uomo. Karl Jaspers, la svolta assiale e il progetto della Weltphilosophie

Maria Teresa Pacilè — 2024-11-12

For a spiritual rebirth of man.
Karl Jaspers, the Axial Age and the project of the Weltphilosophie
This paper aims to explore Jaspersian notion of “axial revolution”, interpreted as a fundamental turning point in universal human history. In the light of the current debate on the Axial Age and the critical interpretations offered by the comparative sociology (Eisenstadt) and the contemporary historiography (Assman and Bellah), it may be interesting to read the Jaspers’ thesis of axiality as constant spiritual rebirth within the project of a history of world philosophy (Weltphilosophie).

Antinomies of Progress. Notes on Adorno’s Critical Theory and the Concept of Progress in Our Time

Lars Rensmann — 2024-11-12

Today, the idea of progress is confronted with four distinct but interrelated challenges: global authoritarian regressions and democratic backsliding; the looming climate catastrophe; the partial dissolution of recognizable boundaries between human agency and artificial intelligence; and omnipresent forms of digital reproduction through which seemingly every human interaction is identified, measured, counted, objectified, and valorized. Turning especially to Adorno’s essay on “Progress,” I address these four steep challenges facing contemporary society and their meaning for (moral) progress from the perspective of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Rather than resigning to a negative telos and the realistic threat of disaster, I propose a critical and dialectical notion of (both moral and social) progress that takes inspiration from Adorno’s work. It contains and upholds the possibility of genuine betterment, of averting catastrophe, and of redemption while critically reflecting on the conditions and societal trends towards destruction and what I call hyperreification. I argue that Adorno’s idea of progress continues to shed light on problems and antinomies in the contemporary age of unreason, recognizing both its entanglement in society and its critical qualities.

From the Anthropological Machine to the Animal Crisis

Michele Vadilonga Gattermayer — 2024-11-12

In this essay, I will reconstruct the biopolitical framework regarding human-animal relations, through the device of boundary production Agamben called the “anthropological machine”. I will argue that the effects of the machine can be more extensively grasped on the constitutive outside of the human, namely animals and that the current status of institutionalised relationships with animals, gathered under the name of “animal crisis”, can be framed as a direct effect of the separation.

The Problem of Musical Creativity and its Relevance for Ethical and Legal Decisions towards Musical AI

Ivano Zanzarella — 2024-11-12

Today, AI and technology are no longer simple tools in music production, but active collaborators of human musicians. This raises complex questions about the nature of artificial musical creativity and its ethical and legal implications. This paper addresses such questions by considering a study case, the problem of artificial music authorship. It is argued that attributions of a moral and legal status to Musical AI technologies are closely tied to the theoretical understanding of musical creativity implicitly or explicitly presupposed, and that such attributions are necessary and desirable in present-day society because of pragmatic reasons.

Intelligenza artificiale, sicurezza nazionale e capitalismo politico. La crisi della riflessività democratica e la necessità di un’etica strategica

Giuseppe De Ruvo — 2024-11-12

Artificial intelligence, national security and political capitalism. The crisis of democratic reflexivity and the need for strategic ethics
Focusing on the U.S. case and drawing on the notion of political capitalism, the article thematizes the relationship between AI governance and the concept of national security, often invoked to protect the American tech ecosystem from China’s technological rise. We will therefore analyze the relationship between national security apparatuses, the market, and public deliberative practices. We argue that the difficulties in implementing AI governance depend not only on the reluctance of Big Tech, but also – and more importantly – on their ties to defense bureaucracies. The article claims that a critical theory of AI cannot be limited to diagnosing and mitigating particular problems emerging from its implementation. Rather, it must deeply thematize the changing relationship between the state and the market, also considering the geopolitical and geoeconomic issues that characterize the political economy of AI. In conclusion, we argue that, for Western countries, taking into account the ethical issues posed by new technologies may also be considered a strategic operation.

AI as epistemic media and the future of subjectivity

Eran Fisher — 2024-11-12

For scholars of the social sciences and humanities, the most pressing question concerning AI is its ramifications for human beings: what would it mean to be human in a world increasingly populated by AI? This, I suggest, requires us to divert from the ontological question of “what is AI?” and seek a more human-centric mode of inquiry. In this essay I would like to lay out one such possible route for inquiry. I begin by identifying the shortcomings of the common historiography of AI, which narrates a progressive development of an autonomous thinking machine from its roots in mythology up to innovations in digital technology. Instead of such history, which harks back hardly a century and culminates in the development of deep learning, I suggest thinking of AI in the context of a much longer, non-digital history of epistemic media. Epistemic media extend the cognitive abilities of human users. They facilitate the creation of new forms of knowledge about the world and about the self. For centuries now, epistemic media have offered devices for creating subjectivity by allowing reflexivity, which grew out of a dialogue between the machines and its human users. But they were not autonomous thinking machines. By thinking about AI as part of that family of media devices we can start to outline a few key axes along which questions concerning the ramifications of AI to what it means to be human can be posed.

Autonomia, automazione, mediazione. Alcune note critiche sull’etica dei veicoli a guida autonoma

Fabio Fossa — 2024-11-12

Autonomy, automation, mediation. Some critical notes on the ethics of self-driving cars
This paper discusses how automated vehicles ambiguously mediate the ethical value of human autonomy. By offering a criticism of the hype surrounding the issue, it suggests that different forms of driving automation mediate different aspects of human autonomy differently. Its promotion and protection can only be incompletely achieved through a narrow focus on the design and deployment of automated vehicles. Therefore, a broader focus on transportation ethics is required.

Design for action: sviluppo tecnologico e metamorfosi delle categorie etiche

Pasquale Grieco — 2024-11-12

Design for action: technological development and metamorphosis of ethical categories
This paper explores key conceptual intersections between subjectivity, technological mediation, and agency, focusing on the influence of information technologies, artificial intelligence, and digital systems on these foundational philosophical and ethical categories. The objective is to offer critical insights for rethinking these concepts in the context of the digital revolution. In light of the design turn, the study emphasizes the growing importance of embedding ethical values into artifacts and design processes, highlighting their implications for political and legislative decision-making at both national and supranational levels.

RoboCare. Anziani più indipendenti o più invisibili?

Giorgia Redi — 2024-11-12

RoboCare. More independent or more invisible elders?
In recent decades, the use of robots has increased dramatically, and it is easily foreseeable that they will become even more a part of our lives in the coming years. In this paper, we will turn our attention to the role of Socially Assistive Robots (SAR), designed to alleviate loneliness and provide a valuable aid in the activities of caring and caring for the elderly for both caregivers and their “users”. Living in a country characterized by an increasingly low birth rate and an increasingly ageing society, there will be in the future fewer and fewer young people willing to care full-time for sick, elderly or disabled people. In view of such predictions, we consider it necessary to reflect critically about the use of robots in the care sector, which are built to become good caregivers.
Conceived to coexist with humans and to perform functions traditionally attributed to human beings, social robots induce us to rethink our way of conceiving and living a relationship, finding ourselves before an Other who is not classically a “body” placed before us. Finally, we will be forced to rethink the impact of a human-machine relationship, which will become a caring relationship, where the caregiver is a so-called “substitute” and the care recipient a flesh-and-blood human being, more fragile and vulnerable. This reflection will also be an opportunity to question the need to sustain an “exploratory” moral practice, given the heterogeneity of the agents – human and robotic – involved, soon to change the future of medicine, the social-health sector and the more traditional care relationships.

Artificial Intelligence and Moral Progress: A Missing Debate

Simona Tiribelli — 2024-11-12

This article addresses an underexplored topic in the field of ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), that is, the impact of AI technology on moral progress at the collective level, and shows that such an inquiry is not only ethically relevant but necessary for the design of AI systems able to protect our moral gains and sustain the possibility of further societal moral progress in our contemporary information societies increasingly shaped if not yet governed by AI technology.

Ortensio Zecchino, Perché non possiamo non dirci “cristiani”. Letture e dispute sul celebre saggio di Benedetto Croce, Rubbettino Editore, Saveria Mannelli 2024, pp. 254

Michele Farisco — 2024-11-12

Nunzio Bombaci, La persona, il prossimo, l’amico. Le figure dell’altro in Pedro Laín Entralgo, ETS, Pisa 2023, pp. 296

Bryan Jesus Irias Alfaro — 2024-11-12

Francesco Paolo Adorno, The Transhumanist Movement, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham 2021, pp. 233

Roberto Di Ceglie — 2024-11-12

Roberto Mordacci, Critica e Utopia. Da Kant a Francoforte, Castelvecchi, Roma 2023, pp. 185

Adriano Lotito — 2024-11-12

Simona Tiribelli, Identità personale e algoritmi. Una questione di filosofia morale, Carocci, Roma 2023, pp. 131

Angelo Tumminelli — 2024-11-12