Biometric facial recognition is an artificial intelligence technology involving the automated comparison of facial features, used by law enforcement to identify unknown suspects from photographs and ...closed circuit television. Its capability is expanding rapidly in association with artificial intelligence and has great potential to solve crime. However, it also carries significant privacy and other ethical implications that require law and regulation. This article examines the rise of biometric facial recognition, current applications and legal developments, and conducts an ethical analysis of the issues that arise. Ethical principles are applied to mediate the potential conflicts in relation to this information technology that arise between security, on the one hand, and individual privacy and autonomy, and democratic accountability, on the other. These can be used to support appropriate law and regulation for the technology as it continues to develop.
There is a need to provide an appropriate normative conception of the modern university: a conception which identifies its unifying purposes and values and, thereby, gives direction to institutional ...role occupants, governments, public policymakers and other would-be institutional designers. Such a conception could admit differences between modern universities; differences, for example, between so-called universities of technology and other universities. Indeed, it is preferable to frame the issue at the level of higher education or university systems rather than at the level of individual universities. According to the teleological normative theory of social institutions, social institutions are organizations or systems of organizations that provide collective goods by means of joint activity; universities are no exception. So what are the fundamental collective good(s) that universities of technology, or the larger systems of which they are a part, ought to be providing and how are they travelling in this regard? This is the question addressed in this paper.
This volume examines the ethical issues that arise as a result of national security intelligence collection and analysis. Powerful new technologies enable the collection, communication, and analysis ...of national security data on an unprecedented scale. Data collection now plays a central role in intelligence practice, yet this development raises a host of ethical and national security problems, such as: privacy; autonomy; threats to national security and democracy by foreign states; and accountability for liberal democracies. This volume provides a comprehensive set of in-depth ethical analyses of these problems by combining contributions from both ethics scholars and intelligence practitioners. It provides the reader with a practical understanding of relevant operations, the issues that they raise, and analysis of how responses to these issues can be informed by a commitment to liberal democratic values. This combination of perspectives is crucial in providing an informed appreciation of ethical challenges that is also grounded in the realities of the practice of intelligence. This book will be of great interest to all students of intelligence studies, ethics, security studies, foreign policy, and International Relations.
In this paper we focus on an important specific issue which has not received serious attention in the scholarly literature on euthanasia, namely, that of the coercive imposition (by way of ...sanction-backed regulations) of the practice of voluntary active euthanasia (in particular) on faith-based, aged-care organizations. In Section 1 we outline the relevant conceptual background drawing on existing literature. In Section 2, we consider two conflicting ethical standpoints on voluntary active euthanasia. In Section 3 we outline the nature and extent of the push to impose the practice of voluntary active euthanasia on Catholic-run aged-care organizations. In Section 4 we argue that the argument for coercively imposing the practice of voluntary active euthanasia on faith-based, aged-care organizations, is not well-made, especially in the context of liberal democracies committed to pluralism.
This book is open access. This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ...ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and DNA identification– as well the integration of biometric data with other forms of personal data, analyses key ethical concepts in play, including privacy, individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and joint ownership rights, and proposes a raft of principles to guide the regulation of biometrics in liberal democracies. Biometric identification technology is developing rapidly and being implemented more widely, along with other forms of information technology. As products, services and communication moves online, digital identity and security is becoming more important. Biometric identification facilitates this transition. Citizens now use biometrics to access a smartphone or obtain a passport; law enforcement agencies use biometrics in association with CCTV to identify a terrorist in a crowd, or identify a suspect via their fingerprints or DNA; and companies use biometrics to identify their customers and employees. In some cases the use of biometrics is governed by law, in others the technology has developed and been implemented so quickly that, perhaps because it has been viewed as a valuable security enhancement, laws regulating its use have often not been updated to reflect new applications. However, the technology associated with biometrics raises significant ethical problems, including in relation to individual privacy, ownership of biometric data, dual use and, more generally, as is illustrated by the increasing use of biometrics in authoritarian states such as China, the potential for unregulated biometrics to undermine fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Resolving these ethical problems is a vital step towards more effective regulation.
This book explores the ethics of national security intelligence institutions operating in contemporary liberal democracies. Intelligence collection by agencies such as the CIA, MI6, and Mossad ...involves practices that are apparently inconsistent with the principles of ordinary morality – practices such as lying, spying, manipulation, and covert action. However, in the defence of national security, such practices may not only be morally permissible, but may also under some circumstances be morally obligatory. One approach to the ethics of national security intelligence activity has been to draw from the just war tradition (so-called ‘just intelligence theory’). This book identifies significant limitations of this approach and offers a new, institutionally based, teleological normative framework. In doing so, it revises some familiar principles designed for application to kinetic wars, such as necessity and proportionality, and invokes some additional ones, such as reciprocity and trust. It goes on to explore the applications of this framework and a revised set of principles for national security intelligence institutions and practices in contemporary and emerging political and technological settings. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, ethics, security studies and International Relations.
In this book, Seumas Miller examines the moral foundations of contemporary social institutions. Offering an original general theory of social institutions, he posits that all social institutions ...exist to realize various collective ends, indeed, to produce collective goods. He analyses key concepts such as collective responsibility and institutional corruption. Miller also provides distinctive special theories of particular institutions, including governments, welfare agencies, universities, police organizations, business corporations, and communications and information technology entities. These theories are philosophical and, thus, foundational and synoptic in character. They are normative accounts of a sampling of contemporary social institutions, not descriptive accounts of all social institutions, both past and present. Miller also addresses various ethical challenges confronting contemporary institutional designers and policymakers, including the renovation of the international financial system, the 'dumbing down' of the media, the challenge of world poverty, and human rights infringements by security agencies combating global terrorism.
Police Studies constitute an important area of academic inquiry and policing raises a large number of ethical questions, yet to date there has been a paucity of research on the subject. This ...significant volume provides an integrated mix of ethico-philosophical analysis combined with practitioner knowledge and experience to examine and address the large number of difficult ethical questions involved in modern-day policing. Key features: ¢ Outlines a distinctive philosophical theory of policing which promotes the human rights dimension of police work. ¢ Analyzes the phenomenon of noble cause corruption and ways to combat it. ¢ Examines the role of restorative justice. ¢ Discusses the related notions of police authority and police discretion. ¢ Assesses the use of coercive and deadly force. ¢ Provides a detailed discussion of recent issues such as privacy and confidentiality in the context of new communication and information technologies, and entrapment. Philosophical in approach and written in an accessible style, the book will be a valuable guide for all those with an interest or involvement in Police Studies, Criminology, Philosophy and Ethics.
Seumas Miller is Professor of Philosophy at Charles Sturt University and the Australian National University (joint position) and Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (an Australian Research Council funded Special Research Centre). John Blackler is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (an Australian Research Council funded Special Research Centre) and a former New South Wales Police Officer.
Contents: Introduction; A theory of policing: the enforcement of moral rights; Authority and discretion in policing; The moral justification for police use of deadly force; Privacy, confidentiality and security in policing; Corruption and anti-corruption in policing; Restorative justice in policing; Bibliography; Index.
This article characterises the nature of cognitive warfare and its use of disinformation and computational propaganda and its political and military purposes in war and in conflict short of war. It ...discusses both defensive and offensive measures to counter cognitive warfare and, in particular, measures that comply with relevant moral principles.
In this paper it is argued that: (1) political rights and obligations are a species of institutional (moral) right and. obligation (respectively) and are not, therefore, natural rights and. ...obligation; (2) political rights and obligations in a given polity are not simply aggregates of individual rights and. obligations rather they are joint political rights and obligations; (3) the exercise of these joint rights, and. the concomitant discharging of these joint obligations, is (i) a collective good in itself; (ii) productive of the collective good of legitimate government, and. (iii) productive of the collective good of the coordination and. regulation of other social institutions (government is a meta-institution), and. (4) the procedure of voting in a democratic polity is a joint institutional mechanism--understood, as a particular construction out of the notion of a joint action--and a specific expression of the joint right and. obligation to engage in political participation. keywords joint action, joint rights, joint obligations, political rights, political obligations
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