In recent decades, distinct national approaches to engineering ethics have evolved, each tailored to its unique contextual factors. These contextual disparities make it unfeasible to transfer one country's engineering ethics approach directly into another. This calls for a compelling need to enhance our comprehension of engineering ethics within specific national contexts. This paper introduces a novel conceptual framework for national engineering ethics (NEE), inspired by Elinor Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The NEE framework categorises engineering ethics activities into three core pillars: research, education, and professional behaviour. This framework facilitates a comprehensive analysis of these activities across three levels—operational, organisational, and governmental. The proposed framework offers a valuable resource for scholars seeking a deeper understanding of engineering ethics within specific national boundaries, enabling structured reporting and analysis. It serves as a critical step towards achieving mutual understanding, allowing for cross-national comparisons and the exchange of best practices. Additionally, it provides a structured platform for policymakers and developers to devise strategies for implementing engineering ethics at the national level.

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This paper is the introduction to a topical collection on “Changing Values and Energy Systems” that consists of six contributions that examine instances of value change regarding the design, use and operation of energy systems. This introduction discusses the need to consider values in the energy transition. It examines conceptions of value and value change and how values can be addressed in the design of energy systems. Value change in the context of energy and energy systems is a topic that has recently gained traction. Current, and past, energy transitions often focus on a limited range of values, such as sustainability, while leaving other salient values, such as energy democracy, or energy justice, out of the picture. Furthermore, these values become entrenched in the design of these systems: it is hard for stakeholders to address new concerns and values in the use and operation of these systems, leading to further costly transitions and systems’ overhaul. To remedy this issue, value change in the context of energy systems needs to be better understood. We also need to think about further requirements for the governance, institutional and engineering design of energy systems to accommodate future value change. Openness, transparency, adaptiveness, flexibility and modularity emerge as new requirements within the current energy transition that need further exploration and scrutiny.@en

This editorial paper for the special section on “Modelling Values in Socio/Technical/Ecological Systems” introduces interdisciplinary perspectives on values and reflects on growing appeals for modelling values. In public and academic discourses, values typically relate to matters of importance (e.g., beliefs, priorities) and principles about what is considered to be good (e.g., moral values) and are often seen as shaping individual and collective behaviour. As shown by eight contributions to this special section, it is relevant for social simulation modelling to dive deeper into embedding values in models in order to explore behavioural change on different levels and across contexts. Our goal with this special section is to stimulate interest in developing various approaches that study and operationalise values in agent-based models to investigate the complex problems raised in social, socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. We conclude with a call for future research to be explicit in their modelling assumptions, thus fostering a vigorous foundation for scientific discourse. @en

Value and moral change have increasingly become topics of interest in the philosophical literature. Several theoretical accounts have been proposed. These are usually based on certain theoretical and conceptual assumptions. Their strengths and weaknesses are often difficult to determine and compare because they are based on limited empirical evidence. We propose agent-based modeling to build simulation models that can theoretically help us explore accounts of value change. We can investigate whether a simulation model based on a specific account of value change can reproduce relevant phenomena. To illustrate this approach, we build a model based on the pragmatist account of value change proposed by Van De Poel and Kudina (2022). We show that this model can reproduce four relevant phenomena, namely 1) the inevitability and stability of values, 2) societies differ in openness and resistance to change, 3) moral revolutions, and 4) lock-in. This makes this account promising, although more research is needed to see how well it can explain other relevant phenomena and compare its strengths and weaknesses to other accounts. On a more methodological level, our contribution suggests that simulation models might be useful to theoretically explore accounts of value change and make further progress in this area. @en

Digitalization and datafication of financial systems result in more efficiency, but might also result in the exclusions of certain groups. Governments are looking for ways to increase inclusions and leave no one behind. For this, they must govern an organizational ecosystem of public and private parties. We derive value-based requirements through a systematic research methodology and iteratively refine design principles for achieving inclusivity goals. This refinement process is enriched by interviews with field experts, leading to the formulation of key Design principles: the essential role of inclusive metrics, leveraging alternative data sources, ensuring transparency in loan processes and the ability for decision contestation, providing tailored credit solutions, and maintaining long-term system sustainability. The government's role is to ensure a level playing field where all parties have equal access to the data. Following the principles ensures that exclusion and discrimination become visible and can be avoided. This study underscores the necessity for system-level transformations, inclusion-by-design, and advocacy for a new system design complemented by regulatory updates, new data integration, inclusive AI, and organizational collaborative shifts. These principles can also be used in different data-driven governance situations.

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Our democratic systems have been challenged by the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) and its pervasive usage in our society. For instance, by analyzing individuals’ social media data, AI algorithms may develop detailed user profiles that capture individuals’ specific interests and susceptibilities. These profiles are leveraged to derive personalized propaganda, with the aim of influencing individuals toward specific political opinions. To address this challenge, the value of privacy can serve as a bridge, as having a sense of privacy can create space for people to reflect on their own political stance prior to making critical decisions, such as voting for an election. In this paper, we explore a novel approach by harnessing the potential of AI to enhance the privacy of social-media data. By leveraging adversarial machine learning, i.e., “AI versus AI,” we aim to fool AI-generated user profiles to help users hold a stake in resisting political profiling and preserve the deliberative nature of their political choices. More specifically, our approach probes the conceptual possibility of infusing people’s social media data with minor alterations that can disturb user profiling, thereby reducing the efficacy of the personalized influences generated by political actors. Our study delineates the boundary of ethical and practical implications associated with this ‘AI versus AI’ approach, highlighting the factors for the AI and ethics community to consider in facilitating deliberative decision-making toward democratic elections.@en

This white paper aims to provide an introduction to the topic of Design for Justice for a wide audience. It demonstrates ongoing research on this topic by the TU Delft community and contributes to the exchange of relevant knowledge and expertise, as one of the outcomes of the activities organised for the Delft Design for Values Institute’s annual theme ‘Design for Justice’. This document includes recommendations on how to foster Design for Justice, which are not just relevant for designers, engineers, and academic researchers, but also for educators and policy makers.@en

Design for Values is an approach that aims at integrating moral values pro-actively in the design of new technology. While this approach originates from outside the field of Technology Assessment (TA), it may now be seen as part of it. This handbook contribution first discusses the emergence, history and some of the theoretical backgrounds of Design for Values. It then describes in more detail how a typical Design for Values process would look like paying attention to: 1) stakeholder analysis and value identification; 2) conceptualizing and specifying values, 3) identifying and dealing with value conflicts, 4) prototyping and testing to validate whether the design indeed embodies the relevant values and 5) ongoing-monitoring for unexpected side-effects and value change, possibly leading to adaptations in the design. Attention is also paid to methods for, and applications of Design for Values, and some of the main limitations and criticism of the approach.

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The present study utilizes a value sensitive design (VSD) inspired approach to contribute to the design and implementation of CO₂ electrolysis (CO₂E) within the framework of carbon capture and utilization (CCU) technologies, which convert CO₂ into valuable products. The focus of this study is on a low technology readiness level (TRL) technology, yet likely relevant to reach climate neutrality by 2050. We examine the perspectives of stakeholders along the supply chain and proactively identify relevant sustainability-related values and potential conflicts among them. Thus the current work highlights the importance of considering a broad range of stakeholders and their values in the early stages of technological design. The research approach is consisting of various steps inspired by value sensitive design (VSD): identifying relevant values and norms associated with CO2 electrolysis through literature analysis, conducting qualitative interviews with relevant stakeholders to triangulate the results. Subsequently, a value-based alignment network analysis was employed to examine shared values that are central for the design of the technology. The findings indicate that sustainability-related values such as concern for nature, climate change mitigation, the use of renewable energy, critical raw materials, cost, and return on investment, albeit with potential differences in interpretation, are increasingly becoming central considerations in the decision-making processes of individuals, businesses, and governments alike. Based on these findings, specific aspects of technology design, namely scale, location, integration, and synthesized product, that can impact a wide range of identified values, are discussed.

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Due to their self-learning and evolutionary character, AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems are more prone to unintended consequences and more difficult to control than traditional sociotechnical systems. To deal with this, machine ethicists have proposed to build moral (reasoning) capacities into AI systems by designing artificial moral agents. I argue that this may well lead to more, rather than less, unintended consequences and may decrease, rather than increase, human control over such systems. Instead, I suggest, we should bring AI systems under meaningful human control by formulating a number of meta-values for their evolution. Amongst others, this requires responsible experimentation with AI systems, which may neither guarantee full control nor the prevention of all undesirable consequences, but nevertheless ensures that AI systems, and their evolution, do not get out of control.@en

Technologies have all kinds of impacts on the environment, on human behavior, on our society and on what we believe and value. But some technologies are not just impactful, they are also socially disruptive: they challenge existing institutions, social practices, beliefs and conceptual categories. Here we are particularly interested in technologies that disrupt existing concepts, for example because they lead to profound uncertainty about how to classify matters. Is a humanoid robot - which looks and even acts like a human - to be classified as a person or is it just an inert machine? Conceptual disruption occurs when the meaning of concepts is challenged, and such challenges may potentially lead to a revision of concepts. We illustrate how technologies can be conceptually disruptive through a range of examples, and we argue for an intercultural outlook in studying these socially disruptive technologies and conceptual disruption. Such an outlook is needed to avoid a Western bias in labeling technologies socially or conceptually disruptive, as this outlook takes inspiration from a broad range of philosophical traditions.

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Hybrid potato breeding is an emerging technology that can have a strong impact on the potato sector by replacing seed potatoes with true seeds. The Netherlands is a world leader in certified seed potatoes and a number of Dutch companies play a pivotal role in the development of this technology. This implies a certain responsibility for the consequences and conditions of its implementation and we therefore explored how Dutch potato breeding companies see their role and responsibility especially in low- and middle-income countries in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). From interviews, it appears that most potato breeding companies emphasise the promising role of hybrid potato breeding in achieving SDGs. They also stress that their core business is at the heart of corporate social responsibility as it contributes to the SDGs. We also observed that for the introduction of new varieties they often rely on trickle-down mechanisms, where local farmers are rather passive recipients, rather than being actively involved in strategic choices of innovation. It may explain why the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI), which emphasises the active involvement of society and affected stakeholders, is relatively unknown in the sector. The main approach in the sector may be labelled as a ‘solution strategy’ where dominant actors rely on their expertise to solve problems. However, the attainment of SDGs should rather be considered as a wicked problem, characterised by complexity, uncertainty and multiple actor’s perspectives. A ‘negotiation strategy’, which is more inclusive and stresses the need of negotiation between different perspectives and interests, may fit better. From the perspective of RRI it is argued that insights from participatory breeding and farmer variety selection traditions and the concept of benefit sharing may be considered as promising negotiation strategies that can contribute to potato breeding practices for the attainment of SDGs.@en

Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.

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We examine whether Thomsonian constitutivism, a metaethical view that analyses value in terms of ‘goodness-fixing kinds,’ i.e. kinds that themselves set the standards for being a good instance of the respective kind, offers a satisfactory explanation of value change and disagreement. While value disagreement has long been considered an important explanandum, we introduce value change as a closely related but distinct phenomenon of metaethical interest. We argue that constitutivism fails to explain both phenomena because of its commitment to goodness-fixing kinds. Constitutivism explains away disagreement and at best explains the emergence of new values, not genuine change. Therefore, Thomsonian constitutivism is not a good fix for realist problems with explaining value disagreement, and value change.@en

The European Union strives to align research and innovation to the values, needs and expectations of society to address societal challenges. To support this alignment the European Union endeavours to make Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) part of the governmental policies on science and technology of its member states. If the European Union is effective in this endeavour, then principles that are common in the field of RRI should play a significant role in the perspectives that belong to the member states’ policy officers for research and innovation. In this paper we empirically check this by conducting a Q-method study on Dutch policy officers working on quantum technology-related policies. In this study we found four perspectives on innovation among these policy officers. In all these perspectives some of the RRI principles are present in merely a weak manner, or even absent, casting substantial doubts on whether RRI has become part of the EU member state governmental policies on science and technology.@en

We propose a pragmatist account of value change that helps to understand how and why values sometimes change due to technological developments. Inspired by John Dewey’s writings on value, we propose to understand values as evaluative devices that carry over from earlier experiences and that are to some extent shared in society. We discuss the various functions that values fulfil in moral inquiry and propose a conceptual framework that helps to understand value change as the interaction between three manifestations of value distinguished by Dewey, i.e., “immediate value,” “values as the result of inquiry” and “generalized values.” We show how this framework helps to distinguish three types of value change: value dynamism, value adaptation, and value emergence, and we illustrate these with examples from the domain of technology. We argue that our account helps to better understand how technology may induce value change, namely through the creation of what Dewey calls indeterminate situations, and we show how our account can integrate several insights on (techno)moral change offered by other authors.@en

The possibility of value change has implications for how to responsibly develop and deploy new technologies. If values can, and do, change after technologies have been developed and designed, this would seem to have major ramifications for approaches such as value-sensitive design and responsible innovation. This contribution explores descriptive as well as normative accounts of value change. It suggests three methodological principles that descriptive accounts of value change should meet. Normative accounts are relatively independent of descriptive accounts and raise the important question of whether normative or moral values themselves can also change. Through the example of the birth control pill and its (alleged) effect on sexual morality, the article illustrates what descriptive and normative accounts might look like in a concrete case. It closes with a discussion of implications for responsibly developing new technologies and draws some conclusions for more theoretical work on value change.@en