Morality | EPFL Graph Search

Morality () is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness". Moral philosophy includes meta-ethics, which studies abstract issues such as moral ontology and moral epistemology, and normative ethics, which studies more concrete systems of moral decision-making such as deontological ethics and consequentialism. An example of normative ethical philosophy is the Golden Rule, which states: "One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself." Immorality is the active opposition to morality (i.e. opposition to that which is good or right), while amorality is variously defined as an unawarene

Moral, Ethics and Geography: An Empirical Perspective on Political, Economical and Sociability Behaviors

Shin Alexandre Koseki

Ethics and morality as objects of research remain important blind spots of geography. Despite their recent attempts to reconcile the discipline’s take on ethics, geographers hardly ever investigate the individual and social production of moral and ethical systems and practices. Instead, they engage in research work in which they use shared ethical beliefs to frame spaces of injustice, practices of care, and environmental hazards. Following Durkheim’s normative stance on the social sciences, Western human geographers have reduced their research scope to comply with the moral and ethical beliefs of their scientific community. Morality is however not only limited to questions of justice/injustice and care/harm. Recent research developments in psychology and anthropology shows human morality as set of adaptive mechanisms to be much broader than the academic “Rawls vs Gilligan”—justice vs care—and to span across other normative categories. In this paper, I expose recent developments on the study of morality and ethics in psychology and anthropology, following primarily two evolutionary research strands: Moral Foundation Theory and Evolutionary Values Theory. I then describe three studies in which I begin to question both social and individual production of normative and moral systems, and their spatial correlates, using methods from political, cultural and urban geography. I finish on a theoretical opening linking contemporary French geography to John Silk’ original preoccupation on “caring at a distance,” and describe how care, but also justice, authority, in-group and purity can be part on a novel geographical inquiry on ethics.

2016

Globalizing the digital: A cross-cultural framework for the ethics of operationalizing Big Data

Shin Alexandre Koseki

Concerns over the ever-increasing production, availability and use of multilayered individual data in social research, business and the everyday life calls for the development of ethical and legal guidelines. In parallel to civic and governmental initiatives, Critical Data Studies offers a transdisciplinary academic platform to define a common ethical framework for computational research. Essays recently published under this label argue for lines of conduct guided by principles such as fairness and justice. Cultural and evolutionary anthropology, as well as political psychology show, however, those principles are mostly common to Northern liberal cultures. For example, Moral Foundation Theory identifies five cross-cultural grounds to ethical reasoning—Fairness, Care, Authority, In-group and Purity—the first two being associated with progressive views, and the three others with traditionalist views. In the current development of Critical Data Studies, the framing of research ethics by fairness and justice therefore risks to maintain, if not increase, the hegemony of Northern researchers on scientific productivity in Big Data research. In this poster, I present a novel framing of Big Data ethics, one that considers the cross-cultural diversity of human morality. My objective is to lay out a shared ground to an urging global approach to knowledge production. First, I review existing ethical framework of Big Data research and classify each proposal according to the Moral Foundation Theory. Second, I identify commonalities and gaps of proposed framework and articulate possible extension of each framework using the missing moral foundations as guiding principles. Finally, I propose a synthetic framework of Big Data ethics. The poster highlights the unbalance of ethical considerations in Big Data research, and in scientific production in general. The proposed framework points at ethical stances that could become major concerns in future research using Big Data for social research: Political or economic definition of scientific objectives, applications and limitations (authority); Exclusion of individuals, groups and communities in the production, publication and application of research findings (in-group); Constrains on inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations, research topics, methods of analysis, epistemic positioning and ontological grounds (purity).

2018

A heterogeneous evolutionary stable population under assortative matching: Exploring the diversity of preferences

Charles Chadi Ayoubi, Boris Thurm

Recent studies have shown that a population acting not only upon self-interest but also exhibiting some morality preference has an evolutionary advantage. Specifically, in the setting of a symmetric fitness game, a resident population is evolutionary stable against all types of mutants if it has the utility function of Homo-moralis, with a morality equal to the assortativity. In this paper, we extend the scope of analysis allowing for the presence of a diversity of preferences in the population. Establishing a Payoff Equality condition, we prove the possibility of co-existence of two residents in the population. We then introduce a tripartite assortment function and study the conditions for the evolutionary stability of this diverse population. In the case of a constant assortment function, we show the existence of an evolutionary stable and heterogeneous resident population.

2017

Globalizing the digital: A cross-cultural framework for the ethics of operationalizing Big Data

Shin Alexandre Koseki

2018