Utopia(s) Conversations on Meaningful Technologies

13 August 2026, 10:00 CEST
Hybrid
4lthangrund 1200, Romanogasse 28, 1200 Vienna
&
Zoom link
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84370123846?pwd=maWlcJx6LTFQDqxQ6Nz1eZB1vfM1eC.1
Meeting chat link
https://us06web.zoom.us/launch/jc/84370123846
Meeting ID: 843 7012 3846
Passcode: 598702

Lecture:
Liang Wang (Associate Professor, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China)
Discussants:
Robert K. Logan (Professor Emeritus Physics, University of Toronto, Canada)
Tomáš Sigmund (Assistant Professor, Prague University of Economics and Business, Czech Republic)
Hosts:
Irena Mostowicz & Renate C.-Z.-Quehenberger

Abstract

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and robotics has generated significant ethical challenges, including concerns about autonomous decision-making, responsibility, and the transformation of human agency. While contemporary AI ethics is largely shaped by deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics, each framework has important limitations. Deontology emphasizes universal rules but often neglects the complexity of human relationships; utilitarianism prioritizes aggregate welfare at the expense of relational values; and virtue ethics faces conceptual difficulties when applied to artificial agents that cannot genuinely possess moral character.

This presentation proposes a Confucian alternative grounded in relational ethics. Rather than treating morality as a matter of rules, consequences, or artificial virtues, Confucian ethics understands the good as emerging from altruistic and harmonious human relationships. Building on the Confucian shift from the harmony between Heaven and humanity to an ethics centered on human relations, this perspective evaluates robots not by their intelligence or efficiency, but by their capacity to strengthen trust, reciprocity, and social harmony.

The goal of AI ethics, therefore, is not simply to build machines that are more capable or less error-prone, but to cultivate a human–robot symbiosis that enriches and sustains meaningful human relationships.

Liang Wang is currently Visiting Scholar at our Institute. Bob Logan and Tomáš Sigmund are invited in-person. All of them have been working with “digital humanism”. They are Members of GSIS.