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1. Artificial Intelligence in International Development: Avoiding Ethical Pitfalls

Author:
Lindsey Andersen
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Woodrow Wilson School Journal of Public and International Affairs
Institution:
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be at the center of the international development field. Amidst this transformation, there is insufficient consideration from the international development sector and the growing AI and ethics field of the unique ethical issues AI initiatives face in the development context. This paper argues that the multiple stakeholder layers in international development projects, as well as the role of third-party AI vendors, results in particular ethical concerns related to fairness and inclusion, transparency, explainability and accountability, data limitations, and privacy and security. It concludes with a series of principles that build on the information communication technology for development (ICT4D) community’s Principles for Digital Development to guide international development funders and implementers in the responsible, ethical implementation of AI initiatives.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Ethics, International Development, and Artificial Intelligence
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. Military Operations Planning and Goal-management: A Philosophical Perspective, Thoughts on how decision theory and ethics can help improve military goal-management

Author:
Robert Frisk and Linda Johansson
Publication Date:
05-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Institution:
Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
This paper discusses and reviews some previous research concerning what we denote as ‘goal-management’, in other words how to set, apply and evaluate goals when conducting military operations planning. We aim to explain and answer the following question: In what way could a review of previous philosophical thoughts on goal-management, decision theory and ethics improve contemporary military operations planning concerning goal-management? We suggest a guideline (a planning tool) for how to conduct goal-management when planning military operations and exemplify our guideline with two fictive examples concerning the development of an Operational advice and Appreciation of Rules of Engagement. The paper concludes that the application of decision theory and ethics, i.e. important parts of philosophy, can contribute to military operations planning by focusing on three perspectives: an axiomatic, an ethical and a deliberative perspective.
Topic:
Military Affairs, Ethics, and Crisis Management
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3. Union Cold Storage and the Birth of Multinational Tax Planning, 1897-1922

Author:
James Hollis and Christopher McKenna
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Oxford Centre for Global History
Abstract:
Today’s corporate managers know that while tax planning may improve the bottom line, it also carries a downside in terms of reputational risk. The past decade has seen the rise of a phenomenon dubbed “tax shaming,” with legislators, activists and the popular press condemning multinationals for participating in “aggressive” or “unethical” tax avoidance. This campaign has occasionally been associated with dramatic changes in corporate policy. In 2012, for example, the global coffee chain Starbucks announced that it was voluntarily increasing its tax payments in the United Kingdom. And the following year, one of Britain’s leading banks, Barclays, closed down its profitable tax structuring division, citing the hostile political climate. Advocates of corporate social responsibility (CSR) promote the idea of a moral dimension to tax compliance, although it remains to be seen whether firms that consciously adopt an ethical approach to tax obligations will outperform their rivals. Some skeptics dismiss the CSR agenda as a public relations exercise; others regard it as a potential threat to legal certainty or economic competitiveness. A few practitioners even claim that “tax shaming” is a dangerous step towards “taxation by mob rule.”
Topic:
History, Capitalism, Ethics, Business, Multinational Corporations, and Risk
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. The Impact of Sustainability Codes of Conduct in the Financial Sector

Publication Date:
02-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Governance Innovation
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the impact of four major financial sector sustainability codes of conduct, the UN Environmental Programme Finance Initiative, the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, the Equator Principles and the Global Alliance for Banking on Values with regard to their impact on the sustainability of their members. The codes of conduct focus on the integration of environmental, social and governance criteria into financial decision making in lending, investment, asset management and project finance. corporate sustainability voluntary codes of conduct have a positive impact on their members. The effectiveness, however, depends on the quality and content of a code, as well as on implementation and compliance mechanisms.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, United Nations, and Ethics
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Many Worlds, Many Theories, Many Rules: Formulating an Ethical System for the World to Come

Author:
Nicholas Onuf
Publication Date:
12-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (RBPI)
Institution:
Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI)
Abstract:
There are many ways to speak about the modern world, and many theories setting it apart. I focus on a world facing economic decline and a return to the status-ordering of traditional societies. With republican theory as a backdrop, I show that an updated virtue ethics constitutes an ethical system uniquely suiting any society that is significantly status-ordered.
Topic:
International Relations, Ethics, and International Relations Theory
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Morals in International Politics

Author:
A. Orlov
Publication Date:
03-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
The world is changing fast; it is changing by leaps and bounds which makes it next to impossible to explain what is going on and to foresee possible repercussions.1 An unsophisticated observer in the West and elsewhere in the world where Western propaganda is heard and believed might imagine that the forces of freedom and democracy are waging an uncompromising struggle against despotism and tyranny (in the widest sense of the terms). It is implied that the United States and the rest of the civilized West are on the side of the forces of good confronted by an obscure conglomerate of the forces of evil, of which Russia is part if according to President Obama and certain other Western leaders. Former President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has written in his memoirs that according to this interpretation the forces of good insist on democratic elections, human rights, and freedom of trade; America does not hesitate to use its might to defend good and oppose the forces of evil interfering with the fulfillment of these ideals.
Topic:
Democratization, Politics, International Affairs, Elections, and Ethics
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

7. The Temporal Experience of Chinese Students Abroad and the Present Human Condition

Author:
Anders Sybrandt Hansen
Publication Date:
09-2015
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
This article examines the experiences of Chinese elite uni- versity students abroad through the lens of temporality. In the strug- gle to get ahead, elite students are expected to carefully deploy their time. Studying abroad, it is argued, has become one more step in a culturally idealised temporal arrangement of how one is expected to go about advancing. The downside to this ethics of striving is shown to be a pervasive sense of restlessness (, fuzao). The article shows how relocating to a different life environment allowed a group of elite students to respond to their temporal predicament in existentially creative ways that registered socially as personal maturation. It is argued that these responses were set in motion by the students’ in- habiting an expanse of not-yet-purposeful time. Treating the tem- poral experience of Chinese elite students as a pronounced inflection of an increasingly global temporal mode of striving, the article en- quires into the temporality of the present human condition.
Topic:
Education, Globalization, Ethics, and Students
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Global Focus