Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: "𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗴𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀: 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀"

Giovanni Spitale (ITE Lab, IBME, University of Zurich) and Federico Germani (ITE Lab, IBME, University of Zurich; Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Boğaziçi University) have published a new paper in Ethics and Information Technology addressing the ethical governance of AI-mediated digital afterlife technologies, i.e. systems that simulate the communicative presence of deceased individuals, commonly referred to as "deadbots," "griefbots," or "posthumous avatars."

The rapid proliferation of these technologies, from chatbots trained on personal messages to voice clones and video avatars, has generated substantial ethical debate. Yet despite growing consensus on the moral risks involved (privacy violations, threats to dignity and autonomy, psychological harms to the bereaved), existing frameworks have not translated ethical principles into operational design requirements.

The paper addresses this gap by introducing a nine-dimensional taxonomy of digital afterlife systems, mapping the morally salient design features that determine their ethical profile: timing of creation, consent, data sources, interaction modality, fidelity and disclosure, purpose, audience and access, governance and ownership, and autonomy/behavioral agency.

Building on this taxonomy, the authors derive a two-tier structure of design constraints. Three threshold conditions — consent, fidelity/disclosure, and purpose — function as near-absolute requirements for permissibility. Six further contextual dimensions modulate the ethical risk profile without individually determining it. A system that fails any single Tier 1 constraint is impermissible regardless of how well it performs on the remaining dimensions.

The framework is explicitly designed to be auditable and actionable. By locating normative assessment at the level of design configuration rather than stated intent alone, the paper offers a concrete bridge between ethical consensus and the governance of AI-mediated digital afterlives, one that regulators, platform designers, professional bodies, and legislators can draw on directly.

The paper is published open access.

Spitale, G., & Germani, F. (2026). The making of digital ghosts: designing ethical AI afterlives. Ethics and Information Technology, 28, 34.

The making of digital ghosts: designing ethical AI afterlives - Ethics and Information Technology The rapid proliferation of AI-mediated digital afterlife technologies, from chatbots trained on personal data to voice clones and posthumous avatars, has generated a substantial body of ethical literature identifying the moral risks of posthumous simulation. Yet this growing consensus has not been m...

𝗨𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗲𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗿𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹.

EGE member Nikola Biller-Andorno contributed to a critical discussion at the Green Transition Forum.

Speaking in the panel "The EU Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Chapter – Resilience by Design, Local Action and Just Investment", moderated by Svetlana Zhekova, Nikola presented insights from the newly released opinion:

"Valuing Nature: Implications for EU Governance" https://ethicsadvice.eu/advice/valuing-nature/

A key takeaway:
Climate and environmental policy will be more durable if justice, participation, ecological limits, and the plural ways of valuing nature are treated as design conditions.

As Nikola put it:
"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘪𝘵. 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘣𝘺 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺, 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵."

Valuing nature – Ethics Advice Mechanism Understanding how nature is valued and how this shapes governance becomes crucial. This matters because how nature is valued influences what becomes visible in policymaking, which harms are treated as acceptable, which protections are considered justified, and whose interests are effectively represe...

New Publication: "It’s time to take the antinatalist variable seriously: new perspectives from procreation ethics and moral judgments" Affiliate Researcher and Former Stehr-Boldt Fellow Diego Borbón has published a new open access paper in the journal Biodemography and Social Biology:

Borbón argues that demography has overlooked a critical dimension: a growing share of individuals choose childlessness on explicitly moral grounds — concerns over climate change, social deterioration, or the perceived harmfulness of bringing new life into existence — that fall outside traditional cost-benefit frameworks, or solely by economic or structural factors. His article makes the case for incorporating antinatalism as an empirically measurable variable within fertility research, as a necessary component of a more complete account of contemporary demographic decline.

It’s time to take the antinatalist variable seriously: new perspectives from procreation ethics and moral judgments Declining birth rates and rising childlessness are commonly attributed to structural and life-course drivers, including economic insecurity, the direct and opportunity costs of childrearing, labor ...

Analyzing freedom: NLP study explores Swiss narratives

A new study by Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani, Frank Fritschi, Sonja Merten, and IBME director Nikola Biller-Andorno examines how the moral key term “freedom” was used in Swiss public communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic was not only a public health crisis. It was also a crisis of public discourse. Terms such as , , and became central to political debate, media coverage, and everyday communication. Yet these terms were not always used in the same way across different public arenas.

In the study “Analyzing freedom: Understanding Swiss COVID-19 narratives through NLP analysis,” Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani, Franc Fritschi, Sonja Merten, and Nikola Biller-Andorno analyzed how the concept of freedom was framed in during the pandemic. The study is part of the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds SNF NRP80 project “Boosting Public Discourse,” which investigates how public debate can be strengthened in times of societal crisis.

Using a natural language processing pipeline, the authors examined three datasets: official press releases from the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, newspaper articles from major Swiss media outlets retrieved via Factiva, and social media posts collected through CrowdTangle. The analysis combined lemmatization, co-occurrence analysis, and semantic network mapping to identify how “freedom” appeared in different communicative contexts.

The findings show substantial differences across these arenas. Official communication tended to frame freedom in relation to public health responsibilities and personal autonomy. Newspaper coverage emphasized tensions between restrictions and civil liberties. Social media discourse, by contrast, was more polarized, with recurring themes of activism, distrust in authorities, and conflicts between individual and collective understandings of freedom.

The study suggests that different framings of key moral terms may contribute to discursive fragmentation, especially when they interact with pre-existing tensions around institutional trust. At the same time, these framings also reflect broader democratic struggles over how societies should balance individual rights and collective responsibilities during crises.

By mapping how freedom was used across public communication, the study highlights the importance of conceptual clarity in crisis communication. A shared understanding of moral and political key terms can help policymakers, media actors, and public institutions support more informed dialogue, reduce polarization, and strengthen democratic processes.

The paper contributes to the broader goals of NRP80 by showing how computational methods can help identify patterns in public discourse and support more reflective, transparent, and democratic crisis communication.

Redirecting

Federico Germani has been appointed Associate Professor at Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, within the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in Istanbul, Türkiye.

In this role, he will teach courses on AI and Information Ethics as well as the Ethics and Governance of AI, further strengthening his engagement in a field of growing societal relevance.

He will retain his position as Co-Director of the ITE Lab at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine (IBME), University of Zurich. This dual appointment expands opportunities for research and collaboration across Switzerland and Türkiye on topics including misinformation ethics, AI-driven information ecosystems, and the development of AI and information literacy to support more autonomous and resilient societies.

The affiliation is expected to foster closer links between institutions and to further reinforce IBME’s international and interdisciplinary profile.

New publication on moral language in Swiss COVID-19 discourse

A new article by Frank Fritschi, Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani, Nikola Biller-Andorno and Sonja Merten, published in Critical Public Health, examines how moral language shaped Swiss public discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study, titled “Moral contentions in the COVID-19 discourses: a qualitative content analysis of Moral Key Terms in Swiss public discourses,” analyses newspaper articles, social media posts, and responses collected through the online platform PubliCo. Using a theory-driven qualitative content analysis, the authors show how Moral Key Terms were used to challenge or support pandemic management efforts.

The article identifies four central areas of moral contention: how democratic decisions are legitimately formed, how safety and freedom should be balanced, how dialogue can be fostered, and how social justice can be achieved during a pandemic. These different uses of moral terms reflect the life worlds, perspectives, and interests of different social groups.

The publication is part of the SNSF NRP80 project “Boosting public discourse: Public communication as a tool to deal with communicative inequalities during health crises.”

Read the article:

Moral contentions in the COVID-19 discourses: a qualitative content analysis of Moral Key Terms in Swiss public discourses Moral Key Terms (MKTs) have been used in public discourses to challenge or support efforts to manage COVID-19. We developed four themes that illustrate this through a theory-driven qualitative cont...

Nikola Biller-Andorno, member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE), contributed to discussions within the Ethics Advice Mechanism (EthAM) initiative, a European platform fostering exchange on ethics advisory structures and practices.

Ethics Advice brings together experts, institutions, and policymakers to strengthen ethical guidance across Europe, supporting collaboration and the sharing of best practices in areas such as science, technology, and public policy. Through events and ongoing activities, the initiative aims to enhance the role and impact of ethics advisory bodies at both national and European levels.

Nikola Biller-Andorno’s participation highlights the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue and international cooperation in addressing emerging ethical challenges in research, innovation, and governance.

Ethics Advice Mechanism (EthAM) | LinkedIn Ethics Advice Mechanism (EthAM) | 61 followers on LinkedIn. The Ethics Advice Mechanism (EthAM) provides independent ethical advice and policy recommendations to EU institutions. | The Ethics Advice Mechanism (EthAM) provides independent ethical advice and policy recommendations to the European inst...

A new study authored by Drewniak D., Dr. Petra Thorn P. and Tanja Krones. published recently in SSM - Qualitative Research in Health finds that many adults conceived via anonymous s***m donation learn about their origins late in life and must actively integrate this information into their sense of identity over time. Based on interviews with 20 participants, the authors found that experiences vary widely—from acceptance to ambivalence—but are shaped by when and how individuals discover their conception, as well as family communication and opportunities to connect with donors or genetic relatives. The study proposes a framework describing identity development as an evolving, lifelong process rather than a single moment of discovery.

Read the article here:

Redirecting

A new paper by Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani, and Nikola Biller-Andorno, published in Accountability in Research, introduces and systematically analyses a novel research integrity risk enabled by Open Access publishing agreements.

Building on a short correspondence published in Nature earlier this year, the paper provides a full conceptual and normative account of what the authors call value extraction in Open Access: the use of institutional APC (Article Processing Charge) coverage as leverage to obtain authorship — or corresponding authorship — without proportional intellectual contribution.

As transformative OA agreements have shifted publication costs from individual researchers to institutions, access to OA publishing has become an institutional asset, unevenly distributed across institutions, countries, and career stages. The paper argues that this structural shift creates a mechanism of authorship abuse distinct from previously described forms (gift authorship, coercive authorship): in value extraction, what is leveraged is not hierarchy or prestige, but control over publishing infrastructure.

The paper identifies three structural drivers — centralized APC management, metric-driven evaluation systems that reward publication output and corresponding authorship positions, and integrity frameworks that treat publishing infrastructure as an ethically neutral background condition — and documents the distributional consequences: early-career researchers, scholars at less-resourced institutions, and colleagues in the Global South face heightened vulnerability.

Proposed safeguards operate at institutional level (procedural firewalls between APC approval and authorship documentation; early CRediT-based contribution recording), publisher level (monitoring of authorship patterns linked to OA agreements), and systemic level (reform of evaluation frameworks to decouple infrastructural access from academic credit).

The phenomenon of ‘value extraction’ in Open Access Open Access (OA) agreements were introduced to remove financial barriers to scientific dissemination and promote equity in knowledge access. As Article Processing Charges (APCs) have shifted from i...

New publication: conspiracy theories and religious biopolitics
Kiarash Aramesh (PennWest University, former Stehr-Boldt Fellow at the IBME), Federico Germani, and Giovanni Spitale have published "Conspiracy theory as a component of religious biopolitics" in Social Theory & Health (2026, 24:6).
The paper examines how identity-centered religious movements — Christian nationalism in the United States, Hindu nationalism in India, and political Islam in Iran — systematically deploy conspiracy theories and health pseudoscience as instruments of biopolitical control. Drawing on the institute's ongoing work on infodemic management ethics, the paper argues that bioethical institutions have a specific and underexplored role in addressing health disinformation when its sources are structural rather than incidental.
The publication follows Spitale et al.'s 2025 paper "On Religious Influence in Bioethics: The Limits of Pluriversalism," extending that line of inquiry from normative critique to empirical analysis of specific movements.

Conspiracy theory as a component of religious biopolitics - Social Theory & Health The biopolitics of identity-centered religious movements has been a primary source of conspiracy theories in recent decades. This paper explores the shared