Description
Invocations of ethics in legal, policy and academic discourses about the governance of digital technologies have proliferated in recent years. An example is the European Union’s strategy on Artificial Intelligence (AI), whose discourses draw or blur boundaries between law and ethics. Such demarcation through discursive practices recalls the traditional debates in legal philosophy about the relation between law and morality, including the classical stand-off between natural law and legal positivism.This research shows that new dynamics in this classic debate have been emerging today since ethics has acquired, throughout the second half of the 20th Century, an institutional dimension with dedicated advisory bodies, expert groups and committees. The institutionalization process allowed ethicists to raise and address the relation between law and morality not, like in the past, within the field of legal theory or jurisprudence, but from the perspective of this institutionalized ethics.
The goal of the presentation is to compare how the relations between law and morality/ethics are problematized in the older debates of legal philosophy and the current ones at the EU level in the field of AI. This comparison highlights some undesirable consequences emerging from the institutionalization process and discursive practices of digital ethics, including the delegitimization of citizens by expert-based initiatives and the lack of the checks and balances guarantees of traditional rulemaking. To justify why this is problematic, the presentation emphasizes the importance of institutional and procedural aspects of the rule of law.
| Periode | 10 feb 2023 |
|---|---|
| Evenementstitel | The Netherlands Association for Legal Philosophy (VWR) Winter Meeting – Law and Slavery |
| Evenementstype | Conference |
| Locatie | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Mate van erkenning | National |