ÌÇÐÄVlog

— What kind of society do digital technologies create? Which forms of public life, education, work, judgement, and institutional responsibility emerge—and which disappear—when algorithmic systems come to co-organisecommunication, knowledge, and decision-making? And how, as a result, do the conditions for a free and democratic society change—including the freedoms of expression, of science, and of the arts together with the fundamental values and freedoms on which it rests? These are the driving questions behind the ULIDE.   

As a transversal institute at the level of the Rectorate, ULIDE works across the faculties and interdisciplinary centres of the ÌÇÐÄVlog. From this position follows a twofold ambition: to argue with methodological rigour and to be consequential. For us, digital ethics is not a final commentary on completed technologies, but rather a reflection on the conditions, opportunities, and risks that influence the evolution of digital societies. 

ULIDE approaches digital technologies as sociotechnical systems: configurations in which code, institutions, law, economic incentives and social practices shape one another. From this perspective, ethical questions cannot be settled at the level of principles alone. They cut across the domains in which a free society organises itself â€” science, education, public discourse, work, administration, the arts — and therefore require an interdisciplinary form of analysis that follows them into each of these domains. And because they arise from the concrete operation of concrete systems, they have to be worked out in the design, deployment, and governance of those systems. Ethical reflection becomes binding only when it is translated into law, governance, technical architectures and processes of public deliberation — otherwise it risks becoming what scholarship has described as ethics washing: a vocabulary that accompanies technology rather than shaping it. 

ULIDE works along four interlocking axes: 

• We conduct interdisciplinary research at the intersection of philosophy, law, computer science, the social sciences, education and media studies. 

• We advise political, administrative, and institutional actors by providing empirically and normatively robust foundations for their decisions. 

• We contribute to the design and governance of digital technologies by embedding ethical and legal requirements in standards, procedures, and architectures rather than applying them after the fact. 

• And we take part in public debate, because a democratic society must be able to deliberate the conditions of its own technological transformation.