Abstract
While their focus is on guiding and assessing human behaviour, traditional ethical frameworks remain entrenched in the absolutist and deterministic Newtonian worldview. On the other hand, the more recent theories of relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos have inspired relativist or nihilistic perspectives that merely highlight uncertainty; as a result, ethics struggles when dealing with complex contemporary issues such as transhumanism, ecology and the rise of technodiversity. Ethics still awaits its Copernican revolution that would allow it to deal with the interactions between diverse moral agents, including humans, animals, artificial intelligent agents, robots and organisations of all sizes. Starting from a complexity worldview, we point out the limitations of traditional ethical frameworks: deontology, theology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, evolutionary ethics and pragmatism.
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Clément Vidal thanks Ben Sweeting for insightful conversations.
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Vidal, C., Heylighen, F. (2022). Ethics and Complexity: Why Standard Ethical Frameworks Cannot Cope with Socio-Technological Change. In: Jorion, P. (eds) Humanism and its Discontents. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67004-7_12
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