Salzburg Ethics Group

– Responsibility –

The Sense of Responsibility Worth Worrying About

At the heart of  the project is a thesis called responsibility skepticism. It holds that there is good reason to doubt that in our world people are morally responsible for their actions. This position is taken to support the normative position that certain aspects of our blame practices are unjust. The goal of the project is to clarify what the discussion of responsibility skepticism should be about: What should skeptics mean when they speak of responsibility or unjust blame? And how should one understand the property of being morally responsible when trying to refute skeptical arguments? The central hypothesis of the project is that the notion of moral claim forfeiture should play an important role in the discussion of responsibility skepticism: skeptics should be understood as saying that, according to them, no person in our world forfeits moral claims simply because he or she willfully and knowingly commits an offense. Defenders of moral responsibility should deny exactly this position––this is the proposal to be elaborated in the project.

– Privacy –

The Source View on the Right to Privacy

In the last decade, some of the most widely discussed events concerned how states, institutions, or companies dealt with people’s data. Here are some examples: the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that British and US secret services had ready access to millions of emails and other sources of potentially personal information from many people around the world. In the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, a private company used personal data of about 87 million Facebook users, most of whom did not give consent, to develop, among other things, election campaigns. The Chinese Social Credit System aims at providing a record that enables the government to evaluate the trustworthiness of businesses, institutions, and individuals. It works in part by employing the mass surveillance system Skynet, which includes cameras, surveillance drones, facial recognition systems, and various mobile phone apps and internet devices. Besides these issues, which have caused a public outcry in many societies, there are countless more small-scale incidents people worry about that involve, for example, smart TVs that record conversations in living rooms, facial recognition systems that uncover protesters or sex workers, or hacked smart speakers. These are some paradigm examples of many similar events and developments that have at least one thing in common: many think that the involved people’s right to informational privacy is endangered or even violated. In order to find out whether this is so and, if yes, how bad it is, we need a good understanding of what the right to privacy is and how important it is. The overall goal of this research project is to provide such an understanding.