Search

Similar to the early days of the Internet, today, the effectiveness and applicability of legal regulations are being challenged by the advent of blockchain technology. Yet, unlike the Internet, which has evolved into an increasingly centralized system that was largely brought within the reach of the law, blockchain technology still resists regulation and is thus described by some as being “alegal”, i.e., situated beyond the boundaries of existing legal orders and, therefore, challenging them. This article investigates whether blockchain technology can indeed be qualified as alegal and the extent to which such technology can be brought back within the boundaries of a legal order by means of targeted policies. First, the article explores the features of blockchain-based systems, which make them hard to regulate, mainly due to their approach to disintermediation. Second, drawing from the notion of alegality in legal philosophy, the article analyzes how blockchain technology enables acts that transgress the temporal, spatial, material, and subjective boundaries of the law, thereby introducing the notion of “alegality by design”—as the design of a technological artifact can provide affordances for alegality. Third, the article discusses how the law could respond to the alegality of blockchain technology through innovative policies encouraging the use of regulatory sandboxes to test for the “functional equivalence” and “regulatory equivalence” of the practices and processes implemented by blockchain initiatives.

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the theoretical foundations of the concepts of trust and confidence and their correlation to the notions of risk, agency and legitimacy. These theoretical underpinnings are thereafter applied to permissionless blockchains, in order to identify how the foundational nature of the technology lends itself to bridging traditional paradigms in generating greater trust and confidence amongst users. We first review the literature which distinguishes the concept of trust from confidence before turning to major scholarly contributions on interpersonal trust, system trust and trust in technology. This literature has been examined through the lens of a multi-disciplinary reading group, which subsequently brings to bear practical and philosophical considerations in the use of blockchain technology in the modern world. The report concludes by providing the key areas in which trust can be reinforced, identifies the limitations of traditional factors as a measure for building trust with a decentralised and pseudonymous environment and clearly defines the differing levels of trust and confidence which are required within an on-chain and off-chain governance structure and its nexus to engendering legitimacy.

This chapter investigates what the use of digital technologies, in particular social networking sites, means for the notion of the self. Even thought there are considerable differences between narrative and digital identity, the continuity between the two should not be ignored. However, whereas narrative identity implies expression of the self, digital identity aims at self-exposure.

The Covid19 crisis has triggered a new wave of digitalization of the lives of citizens. To counter the devastating effects of the virus, states and corporations are experimenting with systems that trace citizens as an integral part of public life. In China, a comprehensive sociotechnical system of citizenship governance has already in force with the implementation of the Social Credit System—a technology-driven project that aims to assess, evaluate, and steer the behavior of Chinese citizens. After presenting social credit systems in China’s public and private sectors (Part I), the article provides normative standards to distinguish the Chinese system from comparable Western systems (Part II). It then shows the manner in which civic virtue is instrumentalized in China, both in content (“what” it is) and in form (“how” to cultivate it) (Part III), and claims that social credit systems represent a new form of citizenship governance, “cybernetic citizenship,” which implements different conceptions of state power, civic virtue, and human rights (Part V). On the whole, the article demonstrates how the Chinese Social Credit System redefines the institution of citizenship and warns against similar patterns that are mushrooming in the West. The article makes three contributions: empirically, it presents China’s Social Credit Systems and reveals their data sources, criteria used, rating methods, and attached sanctions and rewards. Comparatively, it shows that, paradoxically, China’s Social Credit System is not fundamentally different than credit systems in Western societies, yet indicates four points of divergence: scope, authority, regulation, and regime. Normatively, it claims that China’s Social Credit System creates a form of cybernetic citizenship governance, which redefines the essence of citizenship.

Published online August 13, 2020 Recent developments in responsible innovation have focused on the governance of innovation processes. The dimension of virtue in innovation processes has thereby been largely overlooked, and more significantly the constitutive relation between virtue and governance that enables responsible innovation. To understand responsible innovation in terms of this relation, this paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s ontology of the Vita Activa. First, it problematises responsible innovation in Arendt’s work, but then points at a hitherto undiscussed possibility of responsible innovation as ‘work in the mode of action’. Second, it explores this possibility as it arises out of nine modes for human activity in Arendt’s work, arguing that it constitutes a hybrid activity between world and plurality, durability and fragility, and the firm and the public sphere. Third, it explains how the ‘web of stories’ links virtuous action and governance, which points at a novel understanding of the role of narrative for responsible innovation. This research is partly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [Grant Agreement No 716350].This research is partly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [Grant Agreement No 716350].

Verfassungsblog: On Matters Constitutional

This dissertation develops a novel approach for practising ethics in research and innovation, called narrative virtue ethics of technology. The increasing speed of technological developments in fields such as AI, robotics, biomedicine, and nanotechnologies, calls for proactive ethical reflection on the impacts of technologies. As a response, myriad methods for practising ethics in research and innovation have been developed. The first part of this research reviews existing methods and analyses how they deal with the anticipation of ethical issues of emerging technologies, the shaping of ethical design practices, and the evaluation of ethical impacts of existing technologies. This is followed by a critical discussion of the existing methods, outlining their shortcomings and offering recommendations for improvements. Subsequently, a novel philosophical approach is developed that offers responses to the recommendations. This approach synthesises insights from work on virtue ethics by MacIntyre and Vallor with Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s narrative theory is used to construct an account of how technologies mediate people’s experience and understanding of the social world, centring on the hermeneutic concepts of textuality, literacy, temporality, and distancing. Accordingly, virtue ethics and the approach of narrative technologies are integrated into an account of technical practice that is linked with Ricoeur’s notion of the ethical aim as the good life, with and for others, in just institutions. Finally, the philosophical approach is translated into a concrete method consisting of three phases that offer ways for analysing technical practices, evaluating them, and developing a broad set of prescriptions, including the use of an ethical oath, civic education and democratic decision-making in research and innovation practices. To demonstrate how this method could be practically used, a concrete tool is developed and evaluated in practice: the Ethics Canvas. This is a collaborative tool that enables researchers to discuss the ethical impacts of their work.

Discussing the role of ethics in Research & Innovation is an important aspect of the technological progress we make today, and therefore contributes to the sustainable development goal on industry and innovation. In this context, the task of structuring such discussions of ethics with the business processes they relate to is difficult due to alack of methodologies and existing use-cases. The Ethics Canvas offers a tool that uses a model based on the Business Model Canvas to structure discussions around ethical implications. We present a way to relate such ethical considerations with their business process using the semantic web. This will allow an investigation of how business models and ethics affect each other, and to structure discussions around this relation. The approach also allows discovering related ethical implications through the Ethics Canvas tool for a richer discussion surrounding ethics.