What if we would see human rights as something we do rather than a legal concept?

I am more than happy to announce the publication of Applied Human Rights (Wageningen Academic Publishers). The chapters are written by an international group of 27 leading experts in a wide range of disciplines and themes, including technology development, social studies, pedagogy, business strategy, public governance, the arts, philosophy and law. I had the honour to work with Bernd Van der Meulen, Purabi Bose, Maike Kooijmans, Jeroen Pouw MSc, Dana Feringa, Manon van Hoeckel, Daniëlle Arets, Kornelia Dimitrova, Roberta Vaznyte, Melchior van Velzen, Isa Dantuma, Wouter Sluis-Thiescheffer, Frederick Bruneault, Andréane Sabourin Laflamme, Marieke van Vliet – van der Graaff, Jo-An Kamp, Devid Ilievski, Serkan Emeni, Michael Mulvey, Brishna Nader, Margot Cooijmans, Dilana Schaafsma, PhD, Emile Kolthoff, Janine Janssen, Sylvia Sanders and Eveline van Zeeland (Dr.). Thank you Mike Jacobs and marijn van der gaag for the excellent publishing work! 

The book is available open access through this link: Applied human rights (wageningenacademic.com)

The Rathenau Institute has established the biennial Melanie Peters Prize in honor of Melanie Peters (1965-2021). She was director of the Rathenau Institute from 2015 until her death on August 11, 2021.

Maria Henneman, chairman of the board: “We established the prize because Melanie Peters was uniquely able to put the impact of science, technology and innovation on our lives on the agenda. She strengthened the dialogue in society on this subject, paying attention to shared public values. Bart Wernaart’s work makes a very valuable contribution to this dialogue.”

Drones

Wernaart receives the prize for his project Moral Data City Hunt. This is a new method of involving residents in ethical decisions about concrete technological applications in their city, such as the use of drones.

“The project provides insight into which values ​​are important to residents, and where those values ​​may conflict with each other,” says jury chairman and philosopher Daan Roovers. “The project is interactive and accessible, and ensures that citizens can have a say about the use of technology in everyday life. We see a lot of potential in further expansion of this project.”

Citizen participation in technology development

“I feel very honored with this award,” says Bart Wernaart. “I am very pleased that the prize goes to applied science. At HBO we have one foot in the clay, and the other foot in science. I am grateful for the recognition of our Moral Data City Huntmethod, with which we want to give direction to citizen participation in technology development.”

The jury

The Rathenau Institute received thirty nominations for this first Melanie Peters Prize. The jury consisted of: Daan Roovers (philosopher, former Denker des Vaderlands), Peter-Paul Verbeek (Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Science and Technology, and Rector Magnificus of the University of Amsterdam) and Eva Meijer (daughter of Melanie Peters and third-year student History).

More than happy to announce our latest multi-authored book ‘Moral Design and Technology’ (Wageningen Academic Publishers). In this book we reflect on how to use moral design as a bottom-up approach to internalize public values in the creation of new technologies. We tried to build bridges between science and applied science. This book will be launched during my Inaugural Lecture, 20th January 2022, and can be pre-ordered at Wageningen Academic Publishers. I am extremely grateful to my co-authors, who shared their views on moral design from their own disciplines or practices: Sil Aarts, Nadisha-Marie Aliman, Daniëlle Arets, David Bamps, Ruben Bastiaanse, Rens Brankaert, Frédérick Bruneault, Colette Cuijpers, Jessy de Cooker, Mark de Graaf, Veronique De Roeck, Anne Giessen, Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Jo-An Kamp, Leon Kester, Andréane Sabourin Laflamme, Gerard Schouten, Hasib Shirbaz, Ans Tummers-Heemels, Jeroen van de Nieuwenhof, Rens van der Vorst, Maarten van Veen, Lize Verbeke and Piek Visser-Knijff.

When should a surveillance system that is used in preventive policing sacrifice the privacy of citizens to prevent criminality? What should be the impact of individual moral expectations when a social media platform designs an algorithm? To what degree can we use technology-driven deception in dementia care practices? And can we create a moral compass for a dashboard society? Over the last decade, the impact of technological innovation has been unprecedented. It has profoundly changed the way we participate and interact in society. It has also led to new moral challenges. Not only because of the technology itself, but also because this technology is used in the context of a globalised world with a more prominent role for the private sector. This can result in moral confusion: individuals who alternately assume the role of citizen and consumer feel unable to influence the design of technology that has a strong impact on their core values. Sustaining this moral confusion is in nobody’s long-term interest. In this book, we propose to overcome this moral confusion by using a bottom-up design approach that incubates ethics when constructing new technologies. This book is composed of four parts. In the first part we focus on how to integrate moral decisions and morality in the design process of new technology. In the second part we assess how moral design relates to related discourse, including business ethics, law and policy. In the third part of this book various case studies are highlighted that focus on particular moral design issues at the crossroads of technological innovation in the public and private sector. In the last part we look ahead and discuss what the future might look like if we use moral design as a central approach in creating new technology. This book is relevant for IT and engineering professionals, business leaders and policymakers with innovation in their portfolios, and students of (applied) science who are interested in the moral design of technology. The chapters are written by experts and leading researchers in an attractive, accessible and practical writing style. Each chapter offers colourful examples and challenges the reader to critically think through moral decision-making and the design of innovation.

Technology always has an ethical connotation. This can sometimes have far-reaching consequences for consumers, citizens or organisations. For this reason, a new research group: Moral Design Strategy, led by Bart Wernaart, will start on 1 June. In years to come, Fontys University of Applied Sciences wants to invest heavily in practice-based research in this field.

Social issues
Our society has been transformed from an information society to a smart society. In a Smart Society, people and technology always interact with each other. We are increasingly entrusting part of our ethical decision-making to smart technology. This leads to all kinds of social issues and challenges. How sure does an algorithm have to be to accuse a citizen of fraud? And when should a security camera call the police when it thinks it can predict a fight? To what extent should a chat-bot giving financial advice be putting a customer at risk? And what data should an HRM bot prioritise in making a perfect match between an applicant and a job profile? Who gets to decide how an algorithm on a social media platform deals with disinformation? The research group will work on tackling these kinds of social issues.

Technology design
“It’s about more than just gaining knowledge about ethical issues,” says professor Bart Wernaart. “We want to ‘capture’ the morality of the individual and use it for the design process of products and services in both the private and public sector. The next step is translating this into strategy. What does this mean for the mission and vision of organisations? Or how does it relate to decentralised government policy? And how can an organisation ultimately determine in a transparent manner that moral design actually does what was originally intended? Technological design leads to important challenges in the field of moral authority, ethical decision-making and moral strategy formation. Through thorough research, we want to identify these issues and use them as input for future technology design.”

Socially innovative learning process
Bart Wernaart LLM, PhD, will be appointed as professor of the new research group Moral Design Strategy. Wernaart received his Master’s degree from Tilburg University (International Law) in 2005, and his PhD from Wageningen University in 2013. In recent years, he worked as a lawyer and teacher-researcher of law and ethics at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Economics and Communication.

He sees the new research group as a way to bring education and research closer together, where students have an active participatory role in doing meaningful research. “On the one hand, we want to be hands-on and, for example, take mobile moral labs into neighbourhoods to find out about the moral expectations of citizens regarding a predictive algorithm used by the government. Think of preventive policing, or an algorithm that would have to detect risks of fraud. On the other hand, we want to participate at a high scientific level, and arrive at new models and approaches based on our practical expertise.”

Future
“A lot is happening at the intersection of technology, ethics and society. Think of the increasing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI). At the same time, we sometimes ignore its ethical aspects too quickly. By connecting researchers, entrepreneurs, education and governments and conducting thorough research, we want to gain more insight into this. The starting point is individual morality as input for design, making morality a more explicit input at the drawing table of new technology. This is the true added value of the research group,” says Wernaart.

The fact that the subject is a hot topic is evidenced by the partnerships that have already been formed, even before the research group has started. For example, research projects will be started with the universities of Quebec and Ottawa, the University of Leuven and various commercial parties. Multiple publications have already been realised at home and abroad in this field. Wernaart: “The theme is truly thriving, just look at the developments in the past year: discussions about deep fake, the benefits scandal, surveillance systems and the corona app are all essentially centred around (a lack of) moral design. It is of vital importance that we deal with this properly in order to increase confidence in a bright future with technology.”

More information
More information on the Moral Design Strategy research group at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences can be found here.

I am happy to annouce the upcoming international publication of Ethics and Business, a global introduction by Roudlegde publishers (27 May 2021). The English version of ‘ethiek en economie’ was published by Noordhoff in the Netherlands in 2018. Now, also elsewhere in the world this handbook on ethics and business will be distributed. For more info, please visit: Ethics and Business | Taylor & Francis Group.