Morality in a Technological World: Knowledge as Duty

The technological advances of contemporary society have outpaced our moral understanding of the problems that they create. How will we deal with profound ecological changes, human cloning, hybrid people, and eroding cyberprivacy, just to name a few issues? In this book, Lorenzo Magnani argues that existing moral constructs often can not be applied to new technology. He proposes an entirely new ethical approach, one that blends epistemology with cognitive science.

Lorenzo Magnani argues that existing moral constructs often can not be applied to new technology.

Lorenzo Magnani, philosopher and cognitive scientist, is a Professor at the University of Pavia, Italy, and the Director of its Computational Philosophy Laboratory. He has taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at the City University of New York and currently directs international research programs in the EU, USA, and China. His books Abduction, Reason, and Science (Plenum/Kluwer, New York, 2001) and Philosophy of Geometry (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2001) have become well-respected works in the field of human cognition and epistemology. In 1998, he started the series of International Conferences on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR). The last book Morality in a Technological World Knowledge as a Duty (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007) develops a philosophical and cognitive theory of the relationships between ethics and technology in a naturalistic perspective.