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Current approaches to dealing with the climate and environmental crisis aim to motivate action by teaching skills for sustainability. This study asks whether the associated programmatic approach meets the ethical requirement for religious education to be a place for reflection on the understanding of reality. In particular it describes the relationship between the self-design of young people, the normative implications of the climate discourse, including a possible orientation towards external norms of behaviour and the reference to nature in religion. If sustainability is seen as an interpretation of our technically determined way of life and the shaping of the nature-culture process, then possibilities of self-positioning beyond heteronomous orientations open up for young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work analyses Content Moderation, focusing on ethical concerns and cognitive effects. Starting from a general description and history of the moderation process, it stresses some ethical problems: quality of moderation, transparency, and the working conditions of human moderators. Using some of Facebook leaked slides offering examples of moderation, we define some controversial rules and principles for Commercial Content Moderation. These examples highlight a general lack of coherency and transparency, which has the potential to affect users’ cognitive attitudes, their perception of reality, and their freedom of speech. Such effects are studied in comparison to other well-known online cognitive phenomena (bubbles and echo chambers) and in relation to the most recent dedicated legislation in EU countries. The current Content Moderation scheme leaves users at risk of specific cognitive distortions, highlighting the urgent need for greater transparency throughout the moderation process and better working conditions for moderators.

Der Beitrag lotet aus, inwiefern über den Begriff „Technikvertrauen“ komplementär zu den in der Technikfolgenabschätzung bereits etablierten Begriffen „Akzeptanz“ und „Akzeptabilität“ ein konzeptueller Beitrag für eine ethische Technikbewertung geleistet werden kann. Es wird gezeigt, dass gerade für Digitaltechniken Aspekte der Angriffssicherheit besser adressiert werden können, weil hier an die Begrifflichkeiten der IT-Sicherheitsforschung angeschlossen werden kann. Zudem erlaubt „vertrauenswürdige Technik“ eine bessere Einbeziehung von Laienperspektiven, da ein rational begründetes Vertrauen im Sinne von Risikoerwartungen interpersonell durch Expertisen vermittelt werden kann. Insbesondere für die Bewertung von Digitaltechniken kann „Technikvertrauen“ somit eine Lücke zwischen Akzeptanz und Akzeptabilität schließen.

1) The goal of modern science, to which also today's medicine is obliged, is the unlimited advance of knowledge and ability. It objectifies, neutralises and levels all of its objects to parameters which can be analysed, calculated, manipulated and performed; it abstracts from all personal mentality, experience and achievements in our surroundings and from all goals and personal daily appraisals of ourselves and the world around us. 2) The goal of scientific knowledge, its progress and its translation into technology is in today s understanding the abolition of distress, disease and suffering as well as the increase of ways and means to make human existence more endurable, comfortable, richer in experience and longer. As such a functionally defined good, science is bound to the laws and dynamics of the (national and global) market. 3) The term 'human dignity' as it is used in article 1 of the German constitution is based on the idea of self-purpose, respectively self-worth, which a human has a right to for his own sake, irrespective of other goods or purposes. This term finds its binding interpretation in the system of basic rights (R. Zippelius). Here, an elemental legal right of the individual is addressed, which cannot be put to disposition for any benefit or damage to the state or the society, one last taboo which protects every individual 'without consideration of the person' from interference and complete instrumentation by others. 4) Man as an object of modern, scientific research is 'objectified' like any other object. The drive to knowledge is limitless. The general and scientific relations between the progress of knowledge and ability and the goods and market values mentioned above offer no protection of man as a person from complete objectification and instrumentation. In the context of a society-dominated naturalistic concept of man, in which man is considered no more than a complex system of needs and interests, human dignity does in fact seem to be endangered. Some see a prime example of the conflict on the limits of man s self-instrumentation in the current discussion on the ethical limitations of stem cell research.