Browsing by Author "Burbidge, Dominic"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Citizenship in a Networked Age
    (2021) Burbidge, Dominic
    The research project seeks to protect and promote the place of moral reasoning in the midst of the “networked age” of increased interconnectivity and increased reliance on digital technologies. The approach is to employ virtue ethics for navigating current challenges to moral decision-making and moral reasoning, in order to restore access to a sense of what is naturally good for human beings. I implicitly appeal to “first mover” justifications for the existence of God to dispute and reject the increasingly common assumption that technologies will at some point become self-directional—a big obstacle in people’s current regard for the permanent place of human moral reasoning. I argue that moral reasoning will endure despite all technological change by pointing out that, ultimately, these developments are guided by what we as a community hold to be goods in common, and that our search for deeper things such as goodness and happiness in the midst of the limitations imposed by our mortality will forever make us specialists in moral reasoning compared to artificial intelligence.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    A theoretical consideration of trust as the basis to social inquiry
    (2019) Burbidge, Dominic
    Through recent developments in the study of trust and social capital, social science methods are frequently breaking with previous homo economicus persuasions and assumptions. The paper theoretically considers this by exploring how social science methodology can be reoriented in its fundamentals in order to appreciate the change. In terms of the philosophical currents underlying the social sciences, there is ongoing divide between, on the one hand, individualistic and analytical approaches to interpreting social phenomena and, on the other, approaches that take more holistic and organic views of society. It is suggested that the study of trust as interpersonal, habitual and exhibited in human networks steps between these views, offering a new and refreshing basis to social inquirí.