Description

Efforts to change people's behaviour raise many ethical concerns, even when the aims are beneficial and are methods are endorsed by the targeted individuals. The increasing use of technology to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of behaviour change approaches both amplifies familiar issues and introduces some new ethical challenges. In the domain of health promotion, examples of behaviour change technologies (BCTs) - devices or technological systems intended to induce a behaviour change in the user - include fitness trackers, e-coaching applications, treatment adherence monitors, and approaches that harness peer pressure via social media.

There are real (and even underappreciated) concerns about the BCTs' potential for exacerbating privacy violations and manipulation, as well as the unequal distribution of benefits and troubling shifts in who gets blamed for bad health. At the same time, the lack of a clear understanding of the potential ethical dangers can also create situations in which enormously beneficial approaches are rejected on the basis of fears of brainwashing puppetmasters and a nanny state. Hence the need for an examination of central ethical challenges being raised by the expansion of behaviour change technologies. That is the focus of this discussion.

In this workshop we will focus on several issues and concepts that are particularly pressing and/or in special need of clarification. These issues are first, conceptual clarification of health and its value; second, how considerations of social justice can be included in the design of BCTs; third, how BCTs transform medical care and the doctor-patient relationship, and fourth, how to operationalize the concept of autonomous and use it to assess BCTs.

Speaker(s)

Lily Frank, Department of Philosophy and Ethics, Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands, Senior Researcher, 4TU Centre for Ethics and Technology

Location

Farm, High Tech Campus 61,

5656 Eindhoven

Organiser

Young KIVI Engineers

Name and contact details for information

Dylan Prins

d.m.prins@student.tue.nl