In this chapter, Mathias Paul explores the topic of AI systems in the financial industry. After outlining different areas of application of AI in the financial sector and different regulatory regimes relevant to robo-finance, the author analyses the risks emerging from AI applications in the financial industry. He argues that AI systems applied in this sector usually do not create new risks. Instead, existing risks can actually be mitigated through AI applications. The author then analyses personal responsibility frameworks that have been suggested by scholars in the field of robo-finance, and shows why they are not a sufficient approach for regulation. He concludes by discussing the Draft AI Act proposed by the European Commission as a suitable regulatory approach based on the risks linked to specific AI systems and AI based practices.

In this chapter, the ethics and international law scholar Silja Voeneky and the mathematician Thorsten Schmidt propose a new adaptive regulation scheme for AI-driven products and services. To this end, the authors examine different regulatory regimes, including the European Medical Devices Regulation (MDR), and the proposed AI Act by the European Commission and analyse the advantages and drawbacks. They conclude that regulatory approaches in general and with regard to AI driven high risk products and services have structural and specific deficits. Hence, a new regulatory approach is suggested by the authors, which avoids these shortcomings. At its core, the proposed adaptive regulation requires that private actors, as companies developing and selling high risk AI driven products and services, pay a proportionate amount of money as a financial guarantee into a fund before the product or service enters the market. The authors lay down what amount of regulatory capital can be seen as proportionate and the accompanying rules and norms to implement adaptive regulation.

This chapter by the philosopher Johanna Thoma focuses on the ‘moral proxy problem’, which arises when an autonomous artificial agent makes a decision as a proxy for a human agent, without it being clear for whom specifically it does so. Thoma recognises that, in general, there are broadly two categories of agents an artificial agent can be a proxy for: low-level agents (individual users or the kinds of human agents artificial agents are usually replacing) and high-level agents (designers, distributors, or regulators). She argues that we do not get the same recommendations under different agential frames: whilst the former suggests the agents be programmed without risk neutrality, which is common in choices made by humans, the latter suggests the contrary, since the choices are considered part of an aggregate of many similar choices. The author argues that the largely unquestioned implementation of risk neutrality in the design of artificial agents deserves critical scrutiny. Such scrutiny should reveal that the treatment of risk is intimately connected with our answer to the questions about agential perspective and responsibility.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is often considered to be a part of the “natural law” tradition. This might mean that, whoever drafted the text, they were inspired by the natural law that resides in all of us. Such a claim is not falsifiable using historical methods, and will not be addressed here. It might mean, though, that thinkers and politicians who were demonstrably part of the natural law tradition played a large role in the drafting of the UDHR. This position, which will be contested in this essay, has been defended by numerous historians, most notably Mary Ann Glendon. The evidence shows that the natural law tradition, as it existed between the 1890s and the 1950s, was somewhere between skeptical and antagonistic towards human rights claims. The evidence also shows that natural law thinkers who were in the orbit of the UDHR, most notably Jacques Maritain, were not as influential as Glendon and others have claimed. As a historical matter, therefore, the UDHR is not in any substantive way a part of the natural law tradition. At most, natural law was one among a number of competing traditions that all played a role.

This chapter focuses on Maritain’s analysis of the ontological and epistemological foundations of human rights, and his wider hope for ‘practical agreement’ on the content of those rights. On the ontological front, I argue that such agreement is not forthcoming on the basis of natural teleology or eternal law. Neither of these secures assent across the world’s major religious or philosophical traditions. On the epistemological front, neither rationalism nor naturalism holds great promise. While Maritain upholds the naturalist alternative, his efforts devolve into a performative contradiction. For he hopes to rest agreement about human rights on ‘natural inclinations’, which, at the same time, he confines to the realm of the non-conceptual, non-rational and pre-conscious. This constitutes a markedly weak, even incoherent basis for agreement. The stage is set, therefore, for ‘new’ natural law theory, which proposes a non-ontological, purely rationalist foundation. I conclude that this too is an unpromising basis for agreement on rights. Instead, we need a new approach, one that privileges the deliverances of the social sciences and does not strive for universal consensus.

In this chapter, Thomas Burri, an international lawyer, examines how general ethical norms on AI diffuse into domestic law directly, without engaging international law. The chapter discusses various ethical AI frameworks and shows how they influenced the European Union Commission’s proposal for an AI Act. It reveals the origins of the EU proposal and explains the substance of the future EU AI regulation. The chapter concludes that, overall, international law has played a marginal role in this process; it was largely sidelined.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed as a ‘common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’ and rests on the claim that persons are ‘endowed with reason and conscience’. The drafters were thus aligned with the claims of the natural law tradition that there are timeless principles of morality – true for all people in all places – and that these principles serve as a guide for lawmakers and a standard to evaluate positive law. Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain argued that the drafters did not need to agree on the philosophical or metaphysical foundations of morality in order to agree on formulations of practical principles in the language of universal rights. This key insight helped to overcome obstacles to the UDHR and to guide key drafters including Charles Malik. Maritain’s account of natural law in The Rights of Man and Natural Law highlights the notion of jus gentium: commonly agreed principles that are intermediate between the first principles of natural law and positive law. The UDHR can be understood as a successful attempt to formulate jus gentium principles in the aftermath of a war that had seen them disregarded and violated.

This chapter examines Maritain’s notion of practical consensus amongst diverse views and backgrounds. For the Universal Declaration, this was built around a specific text setting forth rights dishonoured during war. Post-war conditions provided a stimulus for agreement amongst States. The chapter considers the prospects for consensus when moving beyond the mere enumeration of human rights, to their application in contemporary times, confronted with diverse philosophical views about their foundations. Reflecting on Maritain’s economic thought, I argue that those prospects are hampered given economic instrumentalisation and injustice from global capitalist structures. Moreover, efforts to reach political consensus on a regular basis are confronted with power in politics, which tempts some actors to go for broke, gain full control, and avoid compromise. Maritain realised that progress in protecting human rights would be replete with backward steps and new starts. Nevertheless, his hope was that the practically-embodied consensus embodied in the Universal Declaration would develop through progress in a common ethical life, despite divergence in theoretical explanations of that life.

This chapter argues that there are two key errors in the classical natural law tradition: first, that the ultimate end of all human actions is happiness instead of doing justice and loving the intrinsic good for its own sake; second, that our relationship to the good consists above all in desiring it, instead of giving goods an adequate response of will and heart. Grounding natural law on natural inclinations in this way commits the naturalistic fallacy: the moral ought is derived from facts about human desires. Drawing on realist phenomenology, the chapter secures natural law and human rights with an account of intrinsic objective values perceived by human reason. The intrinsic and objective value, or dignity, of human persons grounds a strict ethical obligation (natural law) to respect that dignity, and act with an appropriate value response. The appropriate value response is the object of a person’s fundamental human rights. The scope and hierarchy of human rights proceeds from this ethical obligation to respect human dignity in its various manifestations: ontological dignity, the dignity of conscious and rational persons, acquired dignity and bestowed dignity.

In this chapter, the philosopher Mathias Risse reflects on the medium and long-term prospects and challenges democracy faces from AI. Comparing the political nature of AI systems with traffic infrastructure, the author points out AI’s potential to greatly strengthen democracy, but only with the right efforts. The chapter starts with a critical examination of the relation between democracy and technology with a historical perspective before outlining the techno skepticism prevalent in several grand narratives of AI. Finally, the author explores the possibilities and challenges that AI may lead to in the present digital age. He argues that technology critically bears on what forms of human life get realised or imagined, as it changes the materiality of democracy (by altering how collective decision making unfolds) and what its human participants are like. In conclusion, Mathias Risse argues that both technologists and citizens need to engage with ethics and political thoughts generally to have the spirit and dedication to build and maintain a democracy-enhancing AI infrastructure.

In this chapter, Philipp Kellmeyer discusses how to protect mental privacy and mental integrity in the interaction of AI-based neurotechnology from the perspective of philosophy, ethics, neuroscience, and psychology. The author argues that mental privacy and integrity are important anthropological goods that need to be protected from unjustified interferences. He then outlines the current scholarly discussion and policy initiatives about neurorights and takes the position that while existing human rights provide sufficient legal instruments, an approach is required that makes these rights actionable and justiciable to protect mental privacy and mental integrity, for example, by connecting fundamental rights to specific applied laws.

This chapter examines the earliest natural rights theories in order to analyse philosophical connections between natural and human rights, concerning: scepticism, metaphysical dualism, and the authority of rights. First, the chapter studies Albert the Great’s principles of right and how he understood nature to be reason. Next, analysis of the main tenets of Henry of Ghent’s metaphysics, and his exposition of the soul’s property over one’s body, show that Neoplatonist dualism was fundamental in the development of the first natural rights theories. The philosophical solution to the poverty controversy, of human beings’ natural rights to use material goods, that Hervaeus Natalis proposed became the law of the Church when the Pope incorporate it in the bull, Cum inter nonnullos (1323). Hervaeus continued the metaphysical dualism of Henry and argued that natural rights endowed reality with normativity and hence authority. The chapter concludes by relating this intellectual history to contemporary rights theories. Natural and human rights are identified as a form of public reason that sometimes assists, other times substitutes for, individual right reason and judgement about morality.

The author spells out the different key features of AI systems, introducing inter alia the notions of machine learning and deep learning as well as the use of AI systems as part of robotics.