Keynote 1 - ICEDEG 2026

Positioning AI Ethics within Applied Ethics: Borrowed Questions, Novel Challenges

Abstract

AI ethics is often portrayed either as a new field confronting unprecedented problems or as the simple application of established ethical principles to emerging technologies. This talk describes how both views are incomplete. Many of the core concerns of AI ethics—fairness, accountability, privacy, agency, and justice—have deep roots in bioethics, business ethics, research ethics, and, more broadly, moral and political philosophy. Questions raised by algorithmic decision-making, data governance, and automated systems frequently revisit debates that these fields have explored for millennia. At the same time, AI introduces challenges that test existing ethical frameworks and practices. The scale, speed, opacity, and complexity of AI systems complicate familiar concepts such as responsibility, consent, and accountability. They also create a need for new approaches to the practice of applied ethics while raising novel questions about moral status, moral obligations, agency, and human judgment. Correctly positioning AI ethics within the broader landscape of applied ethics can help us draw on established insights while using AI’s novel challenges to reflect on the adequacy of existing frameworks. The relationship is therefore reciprocal: the long tradition of applied ethics provides AI ethics with conceptual foundations, while AI creates opportunities to reconsider, refine, and sometimes rethink longstanding ethical questions. Examining this intersection reveals how emerging technologies can both inherit and transform the broader landscape of applied ethics.

Keynote Speaker

 

 

 

 

 Cansu is the Director of Responsible AI Practice at the Institute for Experiential AI and a Research Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religion. She is affiliated with the Ethics Institute in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and the DATA Initiative at the D'Amore-McKim School of Business. Cansu has a doctorate in philosophy, specializing in applied ethics. She is the founder and director of AI Ethics Lab, one of the first initiatives focusing exclusively on advising practitioners and conducting multidisciplinary research on the ethics of artificial intelligence. She developed and implemented the Puzzle-solving in Ethics (PiE) Model, a dynamic and collaborative model for integrating ethics into AI innovation, which now forms the basis of EAI’s Responsible AI framework. She also works with the United Nations Centre for AI & Robotics and INTERPOL as an AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant, building guidelines and tools for Responsible AI in law enforcement. Cansu serves as an ethics expert on various ethics, advisory, and editorial boards. She serves as a member of the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance working groups, ethics advisor to Fortune 500 companies, founding editor for the international peer-reviewed journal AI & Ethics (Springer Nature), ethics expert for EU- and NIH-funded research projects focusing on the ethics of AI, robotics, and human enhancement, and chairs the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) AI Experts Network Criteria Committee. Before her work in technology, Cansu spent more than a decade working in population-level bioethics on a range of topics, including resource allocation and human subject research. She was on the full-time faculty at the University of Hong Kong Medical School and an ethics researcher at Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization. Frequently invited to speak to leaders in industry and academia, Cansu has given over 100 talks on AI ethics, including keynotes at Harvard Business School, the U.S. Department of Justice, her TEDxCambridge talk How to Solve AI’s Ethical Puzzles, and several others. She received Mozilla's Rise25 Change Agent award, was recognized among the 30 Influential Women Advancing AI in Boston and the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics, and was nominated for VentureBeat's Women in AI Award and AIMed's AI Champions in Healthcare Award.

 

 

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ICEDEG 2026
8 - 10 July 2026
Lisbon, Portugal

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