A. Pirni

The 'Robotic Divide' and the Framework of Recognition: Re-articulating the Question of Fair Access to Robotic Technologies

Robotic technologies offer many opportunities to improve work, healthcare, security and education. Assistive robotics technologies, for example, can provide a good level of autonomy for different types of subjects, such as chronically ill patients, disabled and elderly people. As history shows, opportunities go along with societal challenges: the increasing pervasiveness of robotic technologies in society is likely to raise the question of ‘fair access’ to these technologies. It is precisely this question that is the focus of this article. As we have learnt from the example of the internet, once a technology has become pervasive in society and has become ‘normal’, access to it is seen as an entitlement and its possible deprivation as an infringement of a right. The actual lack of access to digital technologies is considered to be problematic, because it creates a divide between the haves and the have-nots and contributes in this way to creating new or entrenching existing inequalities. This is often referred to as a ‘digital divide’. The research question of this paper originates from an attempt to draw a possible parallelism between the digital technologies and the robotic ones. In other words: Can we talk about a ‘robotic divide’ by

Connessioni di destino. Cura, interdipendenza, convivialismo

The essay focuses on the concept of interdependence. First, it frames the concept within the Convivialist Manifesto. It consequently explores the development of such a concept within the ethics of care perspective, to which the same Manifesto explicitly refers. The essay puts then in dialogue both theoretical contexts, by identifying a methodical approach towards some connections of destiny, namely towards unavoidable challenges of interdependence for the intercultural and global age.

The Place of Sociality: Models of Intersubjectivity According to Kant

The chapter attempts to clarify first the particular status that social rights possess and have possessed in the light of their intellectual genealogy and their intrinsically problematic content (§ 1). Next, it examines how Kant related to this broader picture in the text that deals with the question of rights most directly, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (§ 2). Thus, the chapter explores the foundation of social rights as understood by Kant (and hinted at in the Metaphysics of Morals), turning instead to the work which is more conceptually connected to the former: the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (§ 3). It is here, within the discourse related to the fundaments of the moral and juridical community, that certain traces can be found of a “latent foundation” for the social sphere and social rights (§ 4).

Ethical and Legal Aspects of Enhancing Human Capabilities through Robotics Preliminary Considerations

Our world is becoming increasingly complex. We can see rapid and significant changes in almost all fields of society, from the sphere of culture to production and work, from financial markets to politics, from healthcare to everyday life. Perhaps some of the most significant changes are occurring in the latter field, although we may not always be aware of the increasing complexity of everyday life. We seem to be able to adapt to using common but ever more sophisticated technological tools without always paying attention to the comprehensive challenges that new technologies may bring to the overall system of values and rights we have been developing over time. Illustrative of the changing environment of everyday life is the increasing pervasiveness of robotic applications in various spheres of life. Robotic technologies—constructed systems that interact with their environment in a way that displays some level of agency—are increasingly intertwined with human life and human bodies. Vacuum-cleaning robots, service robots, care robots, surgery robots, drones, software agents—the list of robotic applications surrounding us is varied and rapidly expanding. But robotic technologies do not only consist of devices and software around us: robotic applications on and in the body are also starting to become more (2013) 5(2) LIT 141–146 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5235/17579961.5.2.141

Sul fondamento, ovvero il non-luogo della comunità politica

The lecture intends to face the question about the ground of political community in Kant, discussing mainly the concept of place. In order to accomplish this task, we’ll cover synthetically the effective inquiry about this question in the kantian works’ corpus, namely, the place or the places of this research. Such a path intends to analyse the subject of the ground of political community, that is, of politics in a large sense, which has a paradigmatical context of development in the Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, which position inside the kantian “system” has often been misunderstood and undervalued. We’ll analyse in this work especially the concept of the kingdom of ends [Reich der Zwecke]. Through an analytical exam of the terminological and conceptual elements that make it up, we expect to frame this notion as an accomplished ground of political community, which goes beyond every physical place and simultaneously opens every possible moral field, as field of both ethical and juridical regulation, and grounds every possible political action that doesn’t try to escape of the pure practical reason’s imperative.

La dignità come fondamento per un discorso etico-giuridico interspecifico?

Dignity as the Foundation for an Ethical-Juridical Inter-specific Discourse? - The essay is inspired by a recent book on Kant’s philosophy of right. It deals firstly with the philosophical-juridical problem of punishment and the thematic of man’s duties towards nature. A central space is dedicated to the thematic of human dignity, whose bio-ethical and bio-juridical declination offers a starting point for a more extended discourse on that concept. The author aims at articulating a broader meaning of the concept of dignity that, in accordance with Kant, can be developed into an inter-specific perspective and as such become a guiding principle of (our) relationships with animals and nature as a whole.