Philosophical Foundations of Digital Humanism
Julian Nida‐Rümelin, Klaus Staudacher
Abstract
Abstract Digital humanism is an ethics for the digital age that interprets and shapes the process of digital transformation in accordance with the core concepts of humanist philosophy and practice. The core idea of humanist philosophy is human authorship, which is closely linked to the practice of attributing responsibility and, therefore, also with the concepts of reason and freedom. Digital humanism has several different implications: From a theoretical point of view, it means rejecting both the mechanistic paradigm (“humans are machines”) and the animistic paradigm (“machines are (like) humans”); from a practical point of view, it especially requires us not to attribute responsibility to AI and not to let AI make ethical decisions.