About
4TU.Ethics center is a world leader in the ethics and philosophies of technology research and practices. For more than twenty years, members of the center have been conducting cutting-edge research and are committed to holding technological developments and the commonly held assumptions that surround them up to critical scrutiny. There remains, however, a gap between the conviction behind this commitment and the researchers’ ability to disseminate the products of their critical attitude throughout society. We see the role of philosophers and ethicists of technology as extending beyond academic publishing. Our writing and communication skills can be directed towards reaching out to broader publics by translating theoretically, conceptually and/or normatively identified socio-technological challenges into concise problems and disentangling their complexity.
4TU.Ethics Independent Blog serves as a platform for addressing such ethical and societal technology-related questions to a wider audience using accessible, inclusive, and creative language. The main goal is to provide a platform enabling all 4TU.Ethics members to generate and increase visibility around their research and the research of the 4TU.Ethics centre and engage with an audience generally interested in the centre’s research.
This expands the focus beyond an inner circle of researchers within the field to include, for example, journalists, scholars, entrepreneurs, policy-makers and practitioners lacking a background in ethics of technology. The blog functions as a platform for exchanging different points of view and is open to blog posts about 4TU.Ethics members’ research, opinion pieces, quick reactions, or thoughts on current developments and topics at the heart of the public discussion. These thought-provoking discussions enable the center and its members to engage in the public dissemination of knowledge by covering interesting and societally relevant debates.
Contributing
If you like to contribute to this blog, then send an email to
You can find guidelines for writing a blog post here.
The Editorial Team
Anna Melnyk
Anna Melnyk is a Ph.D. candidate in the Ethics & Philosophy of Technology section at TU Delft, the Netherlands. Her current research is a part of the ERC Advanced Grant research project “Design for Changing Values in Socio-Technical Systems,” where she explores changing values in the course of the transition to community energy systems. Anna’s role in the editorial team is to initiate collaboration with other 4TU projects and teaching efforts as well as to organise blog post series.
Cindy Friedman
Cindy is a PhD Candidate at Utrecht University. Her project is on the ethics of humanoid robots, and is a part of the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies Research Programme. As a member of both the 4TU PhD council and blog editorial board, she acts as the liaison between the council and the board.
Anne Marte Gardenier
Anne Marte is a PhD candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology where she works on cyber resilience and technological citizenship. As a member of the 4TU Blog editorial board, she makes sure each blog is accompanied with great images.
Leon Rossmaier
Leon is a third-year PhD student at the University of Twente where he studies the interaction of technology and public health. He supports the blog by organizing blog post series, scheduling meetings, and taking over other administrational tasks to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Steven Kraaijeveld
Steven is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Wageningen writing a dissertation on the ethics of vaccination, and an associate fellow at the Research Consortium on the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (www.esdit.nl). His research interests are broad and include: philosophy and ethics of technology (especially experimental philosophy of technology); bioethics; public health ethics; moral psychology; metaethics. He supports the editorial team throughout the editing and publication process.
Tom Coggins
Tom Coggins is a PhD candidate at TU Delft working on the research line ‘Design for value change in robot systems and artificial intelligence’ within the project ‘Designing for Value Change’. For his PhD research, Tom is investigating the impact self-driving cars and socially adaptive electronic partners have on normative value systems. Tom supports the blog by editing the blog posts.