people
Zhang Wei is a pre-doctoral visiting scholar from Dalian University of Technology in China. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Physics from Central China Normal University. He was once rewarded the Best Paper of the Second National Philosophy of Science & Technology and Interdisciplinary Graduate Forum (2008) by the Chinese Society for Philosophy of Nature, Science & Technology. He also received Excellent Graduate Scholarship (2010) and Outstanding Graduate student (2010) awards from Central China Normal University.
Wei is interested in engineering design ethics and environmental ethics, especially on the “internalist approach” in the ethics of technology. The traditional ethics of technology usually takes critical reflections on the ethical consequences of technology from outside of the technological world, while the internalist approach focuses on the technological process itself and investigates how to integrate moralities into design. By “softly” influencing people's behaviors in their uses of artifacts in these flexible ways, the internalist approach is able to meet the moral ends in the broader social contexts. In environmental protection, it can help us to shape sustainable behaviors or even sustainable lifestyles for our own and for the environment's future.