Catriona McKinnon, University of Exeter

Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on climate justice and ethics with a particular focus on what we owe to future people. Most recently, she has focused on ethical questions raised by the governance of solar radiation management. She is a co-author of the report Governing Solar Radiation Management.

Geoengineering: Fantasies of Control

Abstract:
Many advocates of research into solar radiation management (SRM) have unwarranted confidence that research programmes can be controlled in ways that minimise the risks of unacceptable damage as a result of SRM deployment. In this talk, I will explore two 'fantasies of control' indulged in by the geoclique. The first fantasy involves ignoring the ways in which SRM research programmes can lock-in to deployment, or to ethically unpalatable versions of SRM. The second fantasy involves heroically optimistic assumptions about how some of the worst risks can be minimised in a deployment scenario. 

Tamar Sharon, Radboud University Nijmegen

Tamar Sharon is an Associate Professor in philosophy of technology and co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Hub for Security, Privacy and Data Governance (iHub) at Radboud University. She studies the ethical and societal challenges posed by new and emerging technologies, in particular in the health and medical context. Tamar has published on human enhancement, self-tracking for health, privacy, citizen science and the political economy of personal health data. She is PI of the ERC-funded project “Digital Good”, which looks at the increasing role large consumer tech companies, like Google and Apple, are beginning to play in health research, and what this means for the common good. She is a member of the WHO European Advisory Committee on Health Research.

The Googlization of health: An empirical-philosophical inquiry into the plurality of common goods

Abstract:
As we move into the digital era, companies like Google, Apple and Amazon are increasingly becoming important facilitators of medical research and healthcare provision. This “Googlization of health” may advance personalized medicine in unprecedented ways, but it is also an encroachment of digital capitalism into the sphere of health and medicine, importing all the risks we know from the online world into the world of digital health and medicine. What is at stake in this phenomenon, more than privacy, is no less than the common good. But securing the common good, I argue in this talk, requires first moving beyond a simple dichotomy of markets vs. morals, to identify a plurality of spheres and orders of worth – each with their own conception of the common good – that are at work in this phenomenon. This is paramount in order to better understand the many risks involved in the Googlization of health, in addition to commodification, and further, to determine which conception of the common good should be the dominant one for digital health and medicine in the future.

Ingrid Robeyns, Utrecht University

Ingrid Robeyns holds the Chair Ethics of Institutions at Utrecht University where she works at the intersection of political philosophy, applied ethics, and the social sciences. She is interested in questions about ‘the good life’ and ‘the just society’, and how chances in society (technological or otherwise) affect both. She is one of the most influential scholars of ‘the capability approach’ - a normative framework that is used across the disciplines to analyze questions of the good life and the just society. She has written on the capability approach from the perspective of particular philosophical questions and concerns, such as theories of social justice, accounts of wellbeing, or how to account for human diversity in social philosophy. She has also advanced, often in collaboration with economists and other social scientists, conceptual work that provides the foundation for empirical research, for example on the question how to select dimensions in the capability approach for the measurement of the quality of life.

The promises and limits of the capability approach for the ethics of technology 

Abstract:
In the last two decades, the capability approach has become a widely used normative approach in a wide range of disciplines. Yet until recently, the capability approach was often reduced to the work by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and there was a poor understanding of how one could think of the capability approach in more general terms. In order to address this issue, I developed a modular account of the capability approach, which aims at describing the capability approach in its most general terms. In my talk, I will present the modular account, show how it can be applied to the ethics of technology, discuss the strengths of this approach, as well as highlight its limits. The bottom line is that the capability approach has some distinct contributions to make to the ethics of technology, but given its modular structure it generally needs to be supplemented with other theories or claims before it can live up to its potential.