Introduction

Technology professionals face growing demands to identify and mitigate risks to human rights and the environment, as well as to navigate tradeoffs between values such as privacy and safety, fairness and utility, and speed and accountability. This e-book provides the tools to identify and manage ethical risks in the development of data-driven technologies in organizational settings. It distills ethical theory, public regulations, and industry best practices into concrete skills and guidelines needed for the responsible development of digital products and services. The book is aimed at decision makers, technology leaders, project managers, and anyone else seeking enhanced understanding of ethics in data-driven technologies.

The book is split into three parts:

• In the first part, we discuss ethical decision making, with a focus on issues related to data-driven technologies. We explore the causes of ethical failures, the process of identifying and anticipating ethical risks, and the basis of ethical reasoning.

• In the second part, we consider what it means for an organization to be ethical. We explore topics such as organizational culture and purpose, as well as ethical awareness and leadership.

• The third part is a knowledge bank diving deeply into five areas of ethical risk: security, privacy, fairness, transparency, and accountability. We discuss how to identify risks in each areas, the tradeoffs you may encounter, and mitigation tools and mechanisms.

This book is the result of a collaboration between Principia Advisory and Logical Operations, who originally partnered to create a preparation course for the CertNexus Certified Ethical Emerging Technologist certification. This book seeks to make the core ideas from the course freely available. We hope that this e-book will provide a way for anyone to learn about the ethics skills required of today's technology leaders.

The authors

Marco Meyer leads a research group on organizational ethics at the University of Hamburg. His research draws on organizational psychology, philosophy, and data science to help organizations avoid misconduct and contribute to society. Marco holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Groningen. At Principia, Marco leads the firm’s Innovation and Research.

Theodore Lechterman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at IE University, where he researches and teaches topics in AI ethics, business ethics, and democratic theory. Ted trained at Harvard and Princeton and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford, Goethe, Hertie, and Oxford. His work with Principia draws on expertise in political philosophy and applied ethics to help leading organizations navigate complex ethical challenges.

Wessel Reijers is a Research Associate at the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute in Florence. His research focuses on the impacts of emerging technologies on citizenship, examining cases such as the Chinese Social Credit System. His work with Principia is driven by questions on how to live well with technology, questions that are increasingly pressing in a world saturated with smart devices, AI, and systems for automated decision-making.

Linda Eggert is a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a joint Fellow-in-Residence at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Linda carried out her doctoral work in political theory at the University of Oxford. Her research is in moral, political, and legal philosophy. At Principia, Linda’s work on normative ethics, human rights, and questions of justice helps guide leading technology companies and nongovernmental organizations through complex ethical terrain.

Thanks to the Logical Operations instructional design team, Pamela J. Taylor and Nancy Curtis, for their development support of the course material on which this book is based.

Emily Elstub has turned the selected parts of the instruction material into the present book. She is a Research Associate at Principia and holds an BA in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Oxford and recently graduated cum laude from Utrecht University with an MA in Applied Ethics.

We wish to thank Sarah Gold, Christine Jacobson, Benjamin Lange, Elisabeth Ling, Roderick Noordhoek, Geoffrey M. Schaefer, Robbie Stamp, Kate Vredenburgh, and Pak-Hang Wong for their feedback and expertise in developing this material.

How to cite: Marco Meyer, Theodore Lechterman, Wessel Reijers, Linda Eggert. (2022). Digital Ethics for Tech Professionals. GitBook. https://www.ethics-for-tech.org.