2023 – the year in papers

This was the year of co-authored articles. I wrote a lot in collaboration and solo, yet ost of what I worked on is still in the pipeline, stuck in review. Here are some highlights of what saw the light of publication this year.

• Voinea, Cristina, Lavinia Marin, and Constantin Vică. “The moral source of collective irrationality during COVID-19 vaccination campaigns.” Philosophical Psychology (2023): 1-20.
  • The year started with this one. I am very proud of it, it was a nice collaboration, and I enjoyed the writing process all the way. In it we argued that when people were seemingly irrational to refuse Covid-19 vaccinations – even if they believed that vaccines were effective – they were actually signalling their social cohesion to the groups of friends, family, co-workers. We argued that Collective irrationality arises from groups explicitly or implicitly endorsing values that ultimately harm both themselves and those around. The role of social media platforms in amplifying this polarization and contributing to the emergence of collective irrationality is also examined. This social signalling tendency went into overdrive due to the moralization of the public discourse around Covid-19 vaccinations, with all the sides taking a righteous stance.
• Bombaerts, Gunter, Joel Anderson, Matthew Dennis, Alessio Gerola, Lily Frank, Tom Hannes, Jeroen Hopster, Lavinia Marin, and Andreas Spahn. “Attention as Practice: Buddhist Ethics Responses to Persuasive Technologies” Global Philosophy 33, no. 2 (2023): 25.
  • My contribution to this one was modest, as the team was already formed when I joined the reading group. The ideas are highly original and innovative. Using a Buddhist ethical framework – which is similar in many places with a virtue ethical approach – we argue that attention is not just a capacity or a resource, but the very condition of possibility for an ethical life. Our approach is ecological and we see attention as a practice that grounds all the moral practices.
• van Grunsven, Janna, Taylor Stone, and Lavinia Marin. “Fostering responsible anticipation in engineering ethics education: how a multi-disciplinary enrichment of the responsible innovation framework can help.” European Journal of Engineering Education (2023): 1-16.
  • This was another paper that got held in peer reviews and revisions at another journal until we decided to go for EJEE and we didn’t go wrong with this one! The editorial process and the peer review were very swift and thorough, so finally, after 2 years in the waiting, this paper saw the light of day. In this paper, we argue that teaching responsible anticipation – i.e. how engineers should imagine responsibly new technologies – relies on teaching other competencies prior – namely the practices of anticipation, reflexivity, and inclusion, while also enriching them with insights from disability studies, STS, design theory, and philosophy. We present responsible anticipation as an activity of reflective problem framing grounded in epistemic humility. My contribution was the part on epistemic humility, which draws from prior insights from a paper published last year, in Social Epistemology: “Self-trust and critical thinking online: a relational account“