On and beyond artifacts in moral relations: accounting for power and violence in Coeckelbergh�s social relationism
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Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer
Abstract
The ubiquity of technology in our lives and its culmination in artifcial intelligence raises questions about its role in our moral
considerations. In this paper, we address a moral concern in relation to technological systems given their deep integration in
our lives. Coeckelbergh develops a social-relational account, suggesting that it can point us toward a dynamic, historicised
evaluation of moral concern. While agreeing with Coeckelbergh�s move away from grounding moral concern in the ontological properties of entities, we suggest that it problematically upholds moral relativism. We suggest that the role of power,
as described by Arendt and Foucault, is signifcant in social relations and as curating moral possibilities. This produces a
clearer picture of the relations at hand and opens up the possibility that relations may be deemed violent. Violence as such
gives us some way of evaluating the morality of a social relation, moving away from Coeckelbergh�s seeming relativism
while retaining his emphasis on social�historical moral precedent.
Description
Keywords
Moral status, Relational turn, Foucault, Power, Moral consideration
Citation
2021Fabio Tollon, Kiasha Naidoo10.1007/s00146-021-01303-zAI & SOCIETY