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Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled remote patient monitoring (RPM) is promoted as a solution to rising pressures in health care, including personnel shortages and the growing burden associated with population aging and chronic disease management. Yet, the ethical implications of deploying adaptive systems in routine care remain underexamined at the level of specific, situated use cases. This article examines the ethical risks of MonitAir, an AI-enabled RPM system for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in a Swedish health care setting. Drawing on the Three Domains, Six Levels (3D6L) framework, we identify epistemic, normative and traceability-related risks across six levels of abstraction. The article offers, to our knowledge, the first operationalization of the 3D6L as an analytic tool for screening ethical risks. We argue that screening AI-enabled health care technology with 3D6L clarifies how ethical risks manifest across levels, from individual patients and patient–clinician relationships to organizational and sectoral contexts. In addition, the framework’s minimal normativity allows alignment with context-sensitive principles and guidelines. Through this analysis, we identify ethical risks related to data bias, intelligibility of outputs, uneven access and blurred responsibility, including redistributive and role-shifting effects. While MonitAir may support earlier detection of exacerbations, its implementation in Swedish COPD care may also reproduce and amplify existing health disparities or overburden patients without sufficient support. We demonstrate how structured ethical screening makes visible concerns typically overlooked by the optimization discourse in digital health. Finally, we argue that open-ended evaluation of ethical risks of AI-enabled DHT provides a valuable early phase that complements ethical assessment, without collapsing into checklist compliance.

Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many agents commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations.

Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications.

Kan icke-mänskliga djur och artificiell intelligens (AI) tillskrivas moraliskt agens? Inom filosofin har den rådande uppfattningen varit att endast människor är moraliska agenter då de ensamma besitter fri vilja och förmåga till medveten reflektion. Denna uppfattning har resulterat i att endast människor anses vara moraliskt ansvariga för sina handlingar och därmed som föremål för moraliskt beröm och klander. Trots att djur och maskiner kan orsaka skada, har de därför hittills inte ansetts vara moraliskt ansvariga. Denna avhandling ifrågasätter den skarpa gränsdragningen mellan människor och icke- mänskliga varelser. Istället för det traditionella synsättet där moraliskt agens anses kräva särskilda inre individuella förmågor tillämpas ett alternativt förhållningssätt där moraliskt agens förstås som förmåga till deltagande i sociala ansvarspraktiker. Genom att skifta fokus från inre individuella egenskaper till en kontextuell och socialt avhängig färdighet verkar det praktik-fokuserade angreppssättet göra det mer rimligt att tala om moraliskt agens hos ickemänskliga djur och AI. Utifrån den nuvarande såväl som troliga framtida förekomsten av både ickemänskliga djur och AI i mänskliga sociala sammanhang så skulle en utvidgning av vem som är moralisk agent potentiellt kunna leda till en radikal förändring av våra sociala, moraliska och juridiska praktiker. Denna avhandling hävdar att de möjliga konsekvenserna av en sådan utvidgning är viktiga att beakta och föreslår att frågan om huruvida moraliskt agens kan tillskrivas djur eller maskiner därför borde angripas som en normativ, bör- fråga, istället för som en rent teoretisk, är-fråga.

Considerations of nonhuman animal moral agency typically base their reasoning and (very often negative) verdict on a capacity‐focused approach to moral agency. According to this approach, an entity is a moral agent if it has certain intrapersonal features or capacities, typically in terms of conscious reflection and deliberation. According to a practice‐focused notion of moral agency, however, an entity is a moral agent in virtue of being a participant of a moral responsibility practice (MRP). I argue that a practice‐focused approach to moral agency, combined with empirical evidence from research on canid social play and cognition, with support from The Function Argument, makes the notion of nonhuman animal moral agency more likely than usually indicated. However, the support is not absolute, as the practice‐focused approach itself may be put into question. I describe how this objection prompts us to critically assess any empirical, metaethical, or normative assumptions on these matters. These questions, in turn, raise a number of further questions of how we should conceive of, use, and evaluate whatever standards of moral agency we adopt.

This paper proposes a methodological redirection of the philosophical debate on artificial moral agency (AMA) in view of increasingly pressing practical needs due to technological development. This “normative approach” suggests abandoning theoretical discussions about what conditions may hold for moral agency and to what extent these may be met by artificial entities such as AI systems and robots. Instead, the debate should focus on how and to what extent such entities should be included in human practices normally assuming moral agency and responsibility of participants. The proposal is backed up by an analysis of the AMA debate, which is found to be overly caught in the opposition between so-called standard and functionalist conceptions of moral agency, conceptually confused and practically inert. Additionally, we outline some main themes of research in need of attention in light of the suggested normative approach to AMA.

The focus on animal welfare in society has increased during the last 50 years. Animal welfare legislation and private standards have developed, and today many farmers within animal production have both governmental legislation and private standards to comply with. In this paper intentions and values are described that were expressed in 14 animal welfare legislation and standards in four European countries; Sweden, United Kingdom, Germany and Spain. It is also discussed if the legislation and standards actually accomplish what they, in their overall description and ethics, claimed to do, i.e. if this is followed up by relevant paragraphs in the actual body of the text in the legislation and standards respectively. The method used was an on-line questionnaire from the EconWelfare research project and text analyses. This study shows that the ethical values within a set of legislation or private standards are not always consistently implemented, and it is not always possible to follow a thread between the intentions mentioned initially and the actual details of the legislation or standard. Since values will differ so will also the animal welfare levels and the implications of similar concepts in the regulations. In general, the regulations described were not based on animal welfare considerations only, but also other aspects, such as food safety, meat quality, environmental aspects and socio-economic aspects were taken into account. This is understandable, but creates a gap between explicit and implicit values, which we argue, can be overcome if such considerations are made more transparent to the citizens/consumers.

This report aims at identifying, analyzing and comparing both explicit and implicit values and definitions found within the animal welfare laws of the UK, Spain and Argentina. In the course of doing this, the animal welfare legislations of these countries are summarized and compared to EU legislation. While the legislation of Spain is nearly identical to that of the EU, the Argentinean is comparable to EU legislation and the one of the UK differs in certain regards. Regarding values, there are two main themes found in all three legislations. The first of these is the ethical concern to reduce the suffering of animals used for human ends. This ethical view was historically inspired by proponents of utilitarianism on the one hand and by new physiological and anatomical discoveries on the other. The other theme regarding ethical values, concerns the morale and character of people working with animals. This is a view that to a large extent can be identified as virtue ethics. In combination with a revalued Biblical view of man’s relation to the rest of creation, it may explain the very foundation of laws aimed at protecting animals as restrictions on the supposed inherent rights of humans to use other animals as means for our own ends. The definition of animal welfare found in the three legislations differs in some regards and is similar in others. British legislation is largely based on a view where the welfare needs of animals are divided into five so called ‘freedoms’. These are freedoms from undesirable states such as hunger, pain etc. As this definition of animal welfare has proved very influential, it has had a great impact on EU legislation and in turn on the definition of animal welfare in Spanish national legislation. Argentinean legislation, however, contains a somewhat different view of animal welfare where ‘coping’ is mentioned and where the needs of animals are divided into two subgroups, the need not to suffer from hunger or thirst and the need to live in a fitting environment.