Measuring moral acceptability in e-deliberation: a practical application of ethics by participation

摘要

With the increasing ubiquity of the Internet comes the application of this technology to a wide variety of fields, including moral philosophy and political theory. The authors are particularly focused on deliberative democracy, that is, harnessing technology to facilitate online deliberation at scale. While there are a lot of pointers to other works in the references, the overall impression of the paper as a whole is that it lacks coherence. It is divided into six sections, which range from discussions of various ethical approaches, to the application of ethics to autonomous agents and artificial intelligence (AI), to suggestions for the implementation of a massively open online deliberation (MOOD) platform. While this content is interesting on its own, some of the fundamental questions implied in the title are never directly addressed. For example, what is "morality"? The first definition doesn't show up until halfway through the paper, after a great deal of time has been spent talking about the distinction between social acceptability and morality, without distinguishing clearly between the two. While the authors acknowledge that "social acceptance ... often differs from moral acceptability," they do not clearly delineate these differences. This is a fundamental flaw in a paper that purports to measure moral acceptability, even though there are elements of their approach that are unique and promising.