Can Technology Save the Planet? Connecting Environmental Ethics with Technology Ethics

Organized by the The Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague, Institute of Philosophy, CAS

Further information

Invitation pdf

Keynote speakers: 

Vincent Blok (Wageningen University) and Leonie Bossert (University of Tübingen)

Usually, technology ethics is not informed by environmental ethics and vice versa. But many ethical reflections on climate change, sustainability, Anthropocene, AI, or robotics could be enriched if these fields considered each other’s work. To do this is especially important today, when urgent global issues crystallize around these topics and all intellectual resources are needed to tackle them. The one-day workshop, situated on the nexus environmental ethics and technology ethics, aims to bring together philosophers from both fields to think about technology and climate change and related topics on these interesting crossroads, borders, and bridges. 

TENTATIVE PROGRAMME

09:00 – 10:15 Vincent Blok (Wageningen University), “Technology, Mimesis, and the Human Condition in the Anthropocene”

Response: Martin Ritter (CETE-P, Czech Academy of Sciences)

10:15 – 10:30 Coffee Break

10:30 – 11:00 Paulan Korenhof (Wageningen University), “DestinE as Destiny? A Critical Inquiry into Europe’s Planetary Digital Twin for Environmental Governance”

11:00 – 11:30 Tomasz Hollanek (University of Cambridge), “The Ethico-Politics of Design Toolkits: Towards Social Justice and Environmental Sustainability of AI Development”

11:30 – 12:00 Erik Laes (Eindhoven University of Technology), “Towards a Conceptualization of Politics and the Political in the Anthropocene Based on Latour and Foucault”

12:00 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 14:45 Leonie Bossert (University of Tübingen), “AI, Animals and Archae: AI’s Impact on the Nonhuman World in the Context of Sustainable AI“

Response: Petr Urban (CETE-P, Czech Academy of Sciences)

14:45 – 15:15 Koen Kramer (Utrecht University), “Prospects and Challenges for a Technological Mediation Approach to Human-Animal Relations”

15:15 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 16:30 Lisa Roux & Timothé Vieillescazes (Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour), “Frugal Science: Rethinking our Scientific Practices to Put Them at the Service of a Social Project of Sufficiency and Fairness”

16:30 – 17:00 Daniel Zimmer (Stanford University), “The Swords of Damocles: Nuclear Weapons, Geoengineering, and the Politics of Placing Human Survival in Jeopardy for Economic Expediency”