Responsibility is a relatively new concept that emerges with increasing complexity in societies. As a normative and organizing concept, responsibility becomes more difficult to ascribe and allocate in the context modernity with technological innovations, socially disruptive technologies, and wicked problems. In this course, we introduce participants to main ideas and literature on responsibility as an individual and collective concept, on innovation as a social construct, and finally we explore how empirical ethics allow expanding the understanding of responsibility in practice with a link to policy.  

Technology shapes how we live, work, and relate to one another. It can contribute to human care and help humans care for others, the environment and the future. However, technology can also undermine care practices or take over care tasks in undesirable ways.  

The Fall Writing Retreat is scheduled for 23-27 November 2026. Location TBD

This seminar will take place over the course of 5 days (2-4 November in Eindhoven and 9-10 November online).

The joint 4TU.Ethics & ESDiT international conference on "Technology Ethics in Turbulent Times. Expanding the Moral Agenda for Transformation" will take place from November 4th to November 6th 2026 at the Wageningen University in the Netherlands. 

This course focuses on philosophical and ethical issues pertaining to Artificial Intelligence. The course consists of 12 sessions (±150mins) distributed over six days (3 online / weekend / 3 at UT). The first set of sessions will concern technical aspects and operational principles of AI systems. These sessions will be led by experts in the field of computer science, communication studies, and informatics. The second set of sessions concern the large variety of philosophical and ethical issues related to AI. Topics include epistemological issues related to transparency, explainability, and knowledge production; political issues related to (data) ownership, responsibility, and social implications; ecological issues related to energy use and sustainability; and ethical issues related to bias, privacy and value change. Lecturers are experts in the field of philosophy of technology and ethics of AI. 

Elisa Paiusco will defend her dissertation called Towards a Just Implementation of Carbon Dioxide Removal: A Capabilities Approach at 18 September 2026 12:30-14:00 at Waaier, 4 at the University of Twente. 

More details and the link to the livestream can be found here. 

Description
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) comprises an array of techniques that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and durably store it. Despite widespread consensus on the need for CDR to achieve the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement, important questions remain regarding the ethical permissibility of deploying these techniques at scale. How should climate justice be conceptualised in the governance and implementation of CDR? This dissertation examines the potential injustices associated with the prospective deployment of CDR techniques. Particular attention is given to three interconnected concerns: the intergenerational imposition of risk, the displacement of unjust harms onto economically developing nations, and the moral significance of nonhuman nature in CDR governance. This dissertation argues that climate justice must be understood as multi-dimensional, both in terms of the dimensions of well-being it recognises and the dimensions of justice it incorporates–namely, distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice. Conceptualising climate justice in this way allows for a more adequate account of the complex ethical landscape within which CDR is likely to operate. Building on this premise, the dissertation develops a contextual procedural capabilities approach to evaluate the ethical permissibility of CDR deployment. This framework provides a normative basis for assessing the fair implementation of CDR under conditions of value pluralism and uncertainty. The analysis demonstrates that CDR cannot be assessed in isolation from broader questions of justice, including who counts as a subject of justice and how processes of contextual deliberation should be structured. The dissertation argues that legitimate governance of CDR depends on participatory and deliberative processes through which relevant capabilities can be identified contextually and evaluated in relation to broader goals of sustainable development. 

At September 14th, Mariska Bosschaert will defend her dissertation Digitalization and Societal Change: A Method for the Philosophy and Ethics of Technology for Understanding Technologies within Structural Contexts.

Empirical philosophy represents an ambition to make conceptual, rationalistic research more “lived,” corresponding with the messy complexity of sociotechnical lives. Through a variety of quantitative and qualitative ways of interpreting reality, empirical philosophy gives the theoretical constructs a reality check, maintaining space for conceptual flexibility and innovation. 

The aim of this course is to introduce students to classic themes, concepts and authors in ethics and philosophy of technology via a selection of key academic articles, while also looking at some more recent work from the 4TU.Ethics community. The course runs across five days and covers different dimension of philosophy of technology: metaphysics, (meta)ethics, politics, design, education. The course is designed as a mix of lectures and interactive exercises or workshops run by researchers in the 4TU.Ethics network.

This is the second PhD school organised by the “Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies” (ESDiT) consortium, in collaboration with 4TUethics and the OZSW. The course engages with debates about conceptual engineering in the context of socially disruptive technologies, analysing ways in which socio-technical change can disrupt conceptual schemes. We will look at theoretical debates as well as concrete case-studies. Various senior researchers from the ESDiT consortium will participate as instructors.

This course focuses on present-day and particularly continental philosophical approaches to technology and science. The course consists of 12 sessions (±150mins), with sessions centering around authors (e.g. Heidegger, Simondon, Stiegler), and other sessions being more thematic (e.g. Synthetic Cell, AI, Anthropocene). Confirmed lecturers are: