Abstract
It is the purpose of this paper to address ethical issues concerning the development and application of Assistive Technology at Workplaces (ATW). We shall give a concrete technical concept how such technology might be constructed and propose eight technical functions it should adopt in order to serve its purpose. Then, we discuss the normative questions why one should use ATW, and by what means. We argue that ATW is good to the extent that it ensures social inclusion and consider four normative domains in which its worth might consists in. In addition, we insist that ATW must satisfy two requirements of good workplaces, which we specify as (a) an exploitation restraint and (b) a duty of care.
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Notes
- 1.
It is believed, more generally, that the human brain develops in a way that can be described by a so-called “use-it-or-lose-it”-principle according to which synapses are formed or recede dependent on the usage (cf. e.g. Blakemore and Choudhury 2006).
- 2.
Cf. the instructive distinction between labor and work made by Arendt (1998). We do not, however, make this distinction in the following since we are not interested in a comprehensive anthropological analysis of work as an activity, but rather examine normative implications of the narrow institutional concept of gainful work as originally proposed by Kambartel (1993).
- 3.
The applied concepts of claim-, and freedom-rights are explained in Wenar (2005).
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Behrendt, H., Funk, M., Korn, O. (2015). Ethical Implications Regarding Assistive Technology at Workplaces. In: Misselhorn, C. (eds) Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15515-9_6
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