Ideas and Ideals

The article raises the question of the relationship between the practice of artificial intelligence and universal ethics. The topic is fundamentally important, since a person and society that have lost their ethical foundations are deprived of their humanity. The ethics of scientists, designers, high-level managers play a decisive role in modern processes of development and application of artificial intelligence. In their activities, an ethic of responsibility develops, originating from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, published in 1955 in the conditions of a nuclear standoff during the Cold War. The article shows the modern indescribably rapid growth and development of artificial intelligence applications in the practical life of people. Attention is drawn to the fact of the presence of uncertainty in situations of practical application of artificial intelligence, the presence of unforeseen consequences in addition to the expected consequences, who is responsible for those consequences (individuals, corporations, governments). The responsibility lies with the one who decides on the action: the actor. The actor is in a situation of ethical risk. It is shown that the risk increases due to a number of circumstances: 1) a variety of applications; 2) uncontrolled rampant growth; 3) difficulties in tracking the empirical situation of application; 4) difficulties in theoretical analysis of the situation of action. The article focuses on the risks of the practice of peaceful use of remotely piloted aircraft, as well as their military use and automated weapons without operator confirmation. The sharp, apparently exponential growth of information technology, the practical implementation of artificial intelligence, puts people in a difficult situation, an ethical situation: what to choose ‘to have or to be’.  Or is there a third choice?

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought digital ethics to the public’s attention and are the driving force behind many discussions on ethical issues related to digital technologies. This article analyzes the arguments of supporters and opponents of artificial intelligence, various approaches to the development of AI systems, ethical issues associated with the use of AI technologies, including the problem of managing artificial intelligence and the idea of active responsibility for the development of AI technologies, general principles for the development of AI systems formulated in the founding documents. The methodological basis of this work was the dialectical method; in the process of research the author used the comparative method and the method of document analysis. The sources were the studies by domestic and foreign authors on various ethical issues of artificial intelligence, the European “Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI” and the Russian “AI Ethics Code”. The author demonstrates the importance of the moralization of artificial intelligence technologies, that is, the conscious development of technologies for the formation of moral actions and decision-making. One of the clear problems is finding a democratic way to moralize technology, since technology differs from laws in that it can restrict human freedom without being the result of a democratic process. It is argued that it is necessary to create an independent international scientific organization to develop a clear scientific view of artificial intelligence, as well as an independent international body for the regulation of artificial intelligence, which would unite approaches to understanding this phenomenon from different points of view (states, private companies and academia).

Modernity has presented a new challenge to capitalism, the answer to which may be the emergence of ‘moral capital’. Since the end of the 20th century, corporations have become convinced of the importance of a strong ideology and the need for developed meaningful corporate ethics based on values understood and accepted by all members of the company. The exaggerated importance of personal gain in Western philosophy since the time of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham has led to the formation of an ‘economic man’ who views the world around him through the prism of individual material interest. The life credo of such a person is “I feel good, so everyone feels good.” has become a real threat to society, making it impossible for adequate forms of collectives to exist. In this article we study large corporations as they are the most visible as representatives of modern capitalist society. An analysis of the activities of corporations and their reactions to crises has shown that companies that have managed to survive a critical situation, as a rule, make changes to corporate ethics 2-3 years later, having undergone some reflection. The competitive environment, the requirements of society, the state and international organizations contribute to the manifestation of greater social responsibility to comprehend and fix these changes. All types of capitalism, as Max Weber saw them: ‘predatory’, ‘adventurous’ and ‘rational’ simultaneously coexist in the present time. Time will tell whether capitalism is able to transform into its more moral form or whether we observe the emergence of a new social order. If multinational corporations manage to overcome their natural thirst for profit and transform it into a desire to ‘bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people’, expanding this ‘greatest number’ to a planetary scale, the answer will be positive. The way some of these companies are overcoming their own crises is encouraging. The time of change is wonderful because everyone can contribute to the current changes by acting in accordance with human standards of morality.

The criticism of epistemology undertaken by R. Rorty in the book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” is based on the concept of knowledge by J. Dewey of ‘research’ as an evolutionary change of beliefs. Rorty identifies two components of this process: the description of the transition from the old belief system to the new, and the development of a new system. The first is closely related to the problems of Kuhn’s paradigm shift, and the second to Gadamer’s hermeneutic tools. Both of these are intertwined in Rorty’s subsequent philosophy, undergoing changes under the influence of a pragmatic critique of the dualisms of Western philosophy. But since hermeneutics is only one of the means of mastering new beliefs, Rorty introduces a more general concept of ‘recontextualization’. This step requires a revision of the place of Kuhn and Gadamer in late Rorty’s philosophy. In relation to Kuhn, this was expressed in the rejection of Kuhn’s privilege of the natural sciences, while the role of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as an interpretation has suffered more damage. Rorty denies the universality of hermeneutics, addressing a rebuke to those philosophers whose interpretation comes to the fore, or in Rorty’s words, ‘is inscribed on the banners of the philosophical movement’ - Dilthey, Gadamer and Taylor. Recontextualization instead of hermeneutics is implemented by Rorty in the form of a translation concept. Rorty does not accept Quine’s concept of radical translation as an expression of extreme skepticism in understanding someone else’s linguistic framework, and accepts Davidson’s Principle of Charity, which emphasizes interpretation with the achievement of ‘maximizing’ meaning and ‘optimizing’ communication. As a consequence, Rorty uses the possibility of completely abandoning ontology as a tool for describing the world and teeters on the verge of adopting a purely ‘linguistic’ vision of reality.

Two widely discussed books on violence by Steven Pinker offer a grand metanarrative about the movement of humanity towards reason, progress, and humanism. The article briefly generalizes the main author’s methodological predispositions. The article also deals with the conceptual analysis of the theory. The scholar’s theory is based on several key ideas: the state, gentle commerce, the taming of manners, and the Enlightenment. The main point is that society, passing successively through such stages-ideas, moves in the direction of greater progress and limitation of violence. As for the criticisms, we illustrate the limitations of the method chosen and the inadequacy of its objectives. First, the author uses the criminological method of counting the number of murders per hundred thousand in a population, which can only characterize one segment of violence. Secondly, the measured violence does not always correlate with other violent crimes. We also point out objective difficulties in working with the available statistics. In particular, we are confronted with fragmented data and incomparable methodology of data collection from predecessors. In addition, we reveal many mistakes, inaccuracies, and in many cases even deliberate discrepancies within representative data. Steven Pinker often resorts to overly sweeping generalizations and comparisons of difficult-to-compare cases. Many scholars have also noted the author’s use of unprofessional literature. In terms of conceptual ideas, critics note the author’s ignorance of contemporary debates and disregard for differences in the works of those classics used in the work. We should also note the rather unfriendly tone of the discussion on the part of all the participants, since the dispute is about big ideas, which often leads to direct insults and labeling. In conclusion, we praise the communicative gesture of challenging the scientific community, but it seems clear that the main goal to give proof towards violence decline is inconclusive.

The interview discusses a number of critical issues related to those social and technological transformations that are radically changing the way people think about their place within the state and amongst other people, and that have created the need for such a line of thought and action as bioethics. The discussion begins with the problem of just access to medical care, which turns out to be tied to the position that the individual occupied during the Soviet era, when in fact his physical body belonged to the State, when his subjectivity also belonged to the State, and his values and interests were represented by the doctor. The moral formula for the patient's actions was medical paternalism, represented by the doctrine of medical deontology. The task of the present time is the formation of autonomy of personality, the ability to realize oneself, where subjectivity is formed as a response to the demands imposed by various biomedical and bioethical practices. The core of this subjectivity is encapsulated in the concept of autonomy, and the rule of free and informed consent is its practical implementation. These questions are rooted in the problem of dignity, which, in turn, is deeply connected to the familiar model of the “other,” in which the doctor, when prescribing treatment, prescribes it not to this particular person, but to a generalized person. The task of philosophical criticism is discussed, which consists in diagnosing the zones of the most glaring discrepancy between our knowledge, skills, moral and legal norms, and philosophical understandings of the new reality. This diagnosis influences the formation of philosophical anthropology of B.G. Yudin, which interprets the borders of the human in human being’ consciousness as “zones of phase transitions”. The idea of transition from a dialogue to a conversation is discussed. Unlike dialogue, conversation is originally multipolar, intermittent and nonlinear, and problemocentric. Ultimately, this leads to the question of the meaningfulness of life in general, which, according to Aristotle, is the highest form of human existence.

The article is devoted to the analysis of ethical theories that were formulated in a neo-pragmatic discourse, in particular to the study of preconditions for an imaginative transition.  Since forming a new image of ethics is done by supporters of pragmatism by criticizing the rationalistic tradition, the categories that have traditionally been associated with the sphere of irrational come first, related to sensuality and aesthetics. Therefore, the effectiveness of solving moral issues in pragmatic ethics directly depends on the extent to which the resources of imagination are actively used. The author of the article offers to use the new term “imaginative transition” to fix the specifics of those ethical theories. There is a historical and comparative review in order to trace the transformation of the idea of the imagination. The author indicates the conceptual foundations of universalist ethical theory, where imagination belonged to the sphere of sensuality and had no privileged status. In formulating ethical concepts, the rationalistic tradition, which dates back to early Greek philosophy, was primarily based on gnoseology, and the main virtue was wisdom that was associated with an enlightened mind. Followers of Plato’s fundamentalism and Descartes’ objectivism treated the imagination as a derivative of blind feelings. The article has shown that the main actor in the transition from the rationalistic tradition to the romantic one, in which imagination will be interpreted as the highest form of spirit activity, was Immanuel Kant.  Based on the hermeneutic analysis of the philosopher’s texts, it has been discovered that the ability to imagine is crucial to the thinking process for Kant, and knowledge is interpreted as a synthesis of sensuality and reasoning in the activities of the imagination. The author shows that Kant’s aesthetics is the result of the problem of coordinating the pure and practical mind. The author comes to the conclusion, that the adherents of pragmatism, considering the ability of imagination as having moral force, develop an idea which was first clearly formulated by Kant.

The purpose of the study is to identify and compare the revealed theoretical approaches to the moral economy in order to substantiate the fundamental foundations of the integrative anthroposocial approach. Closely interrelated moral anthropic origin and moral social order are given as such foundations. The subject of the study is the existing approaches to the moral economy. The study is a theoretical analysis of the approaches to the moral economy, united by the author in two aggregated schools– anthropic-moral and socio-economic. The research methodology is the integrated approach for a comprehensive examination of the subject; general scientific principles of complementarity, diversity and unity. The results of the study, which constitute the scientific novelty: 1) it is revealed that there are the corresponding concepts of a moral person – Homo moralis – in all approaches reviewed, and it allows to establish the moral anthropic origin as the first foundation of the moral economy; 2) in the analyzed approaches, the main forms of sociality are revealed and characterized, functioning as “village community”, “religious community”, “Orthodox labour brotherhood”, “social institution”, which allow to define moral social order as the second foundation of the moral economy. The theoretical and practical significance of the study is that by identifying and comparing the existing approaches to the moral economy, its anthroposocial nature is defined 1) as the effective economic activity of a new person of high moral character; 2) as a set of intersubject economic relations based on the ideas of moral humanism. As a result, it becomes possible to compare existing approaches to the moral economy, when there is a person in its centre who respects humanistic morality in interpersonal relations of the economy of the society.

The article states the problem of protecting individuals from discrimination when using neuropsychological methods in the penitentiary system. In the field of ethical reflection in neuroethics, the authors propose to consider not only new opportunities to influence human consciousness and mental health, which are used in modern neuroscience, but also to include methods that have a rather long history. The penitentiary system was chosen as an object of study, which makes it possible to weigh the regulatory capabilities of neuroethics in the special conditions of a priori coercion and involuntary position. The paper considers the action of principles of respect for the dignity of the individual, voluntariness in the expression of consent to participate in psychodiagnostic and psycho-correction activities. The question of expressing informed consent for neuropsychic effects is by analogy considered with biomedical intervention. The authors describe the experience of applying neuropsychological methods on the examples of using a polygraph (a lie detector) and neuro-linguistic programming. The study shows that the polygraph is widely used not only in investigative and judicial practice, but also in diagnostics when people are applying for a job, moving to a higher (or different) position at work, entering educational institutions of the penal service. The authors highlight the idea that in the situation where the client is dependent on a psychologist, in order to undergo the procedure the problem of the voluntary expression of consent should be solved in accordance with the principle of vulnerability. It is stressed, that for the members of vulnerable groups, it is obligatory to use the rules, which take into account the specifics of their situation. Despite the improvement of the process of lie detection using a polygraph, there is no confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the data obtained. However, the results can be interpreted to the detriment of the individual, like the results of other methods of psychodiagnostic research, in the absence of proper ethical principles. Neuro-linguistic programming allows collecting of data on subconscious motives and having a targeted impact on a person. When using this method, there is also the problem of expressing informed consent, taking into account the specifics of the penitentiary institutions. A person may not fully realize the results of neuro-linguistic programming. The general trend in Russia is expanding the use of NLP and polygraph methods, which indicates a desire to acquire neuropsychological tools that will quickly achieve a visible result, without much concern about the ethics of getting the information, its reliability, and long duration. The authors have come to the conclusion that the focus on humanization of the penitentiary system in Russia with the help of the psychological service gives positive results. However, there is a danger of using methods of psychodiagnostics and psychocorrection for manipulative and ethically questionable purposes, which leads to a loss of confidence in them.

The paper presents an overview of the international scientific conference “Living in the World of Neurotechnologies: Social and Ethical Problems”. This is one of the first interdisciplinary forums where the issues arising in the context of the development of neuroscience were discussed by philosophers, ethics and medical specialists. The conference opened a research area for humanitarian studies. Conference participants often recalled the name of B. G. Yudin, because his ideas have been recently in great demand in developing new approaches. B.G. Yudin is considered to be one of the founders of bioethics in Russia. This conference laid the foundation for the study of ethical, anthropological and social problems in neuroscience and neurotechnology - an area that goes beyond biomedicine and declares itself as the most current trend of modern research. The tasks of neuroethics include defining, assessing and managing the social and humanitarian risks of various scientific fields with the prefix of neuro- arising in the light of the latest brain research. Neuroethics has already established the status of an interdisciplinary direction abroad, but in our country it is taking the first steps. The international scientific conference held in Moscow was one of the first significant events in its formation. The author presents the main theses of the most significant speeches of the participants of this conference.