Defining Terminology

The ability to apply ethical reasoning to technical projects requires a firm understanding of some basic concepts about both ethics and technology. This chapter introduces these concepts.

What is Ethics?

Ethics is concerned with the question: "What is the right thing to do?"

When justifying our opinions, decisions, and actions, we typically appeal to values like respect, wellbeing, or autonomy. Moral values determine how we think we should live, and how we relate to others. They’re also at the heart of what we judge to be acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible, and forgivable or unforgiveable.

You may have noticed that talk of ethics and morality often go together. In fact, many people use these terms interchangeably.

What moral values are and where they come from are difficult questions. Different kinds of communities—social, cultural, political, and professional—establish conventions about how to act well. These conventions include laws, standards set by professional associations (like the International Organisation for Standardization and the American Bar Association), codes of conduct in organizations (like the Twitter Rules), informal norms (like tipping in restaurants), and commandments drawn from religious traditions (such as “love thy neighbor as thyself”).

While these sources often provide helpful guidance for how to act, they are not the same as ethics. Following social conventions isn’t automatically “doing the right thing,” because conventions may be incomplete, inconsistent, or mistaken.

Determining the right thing to do in any given case requires that we engage in ethical reasoning. Ethical reasoning involves assessing considerations that speak in favor and against different courses of action, and weighing these considerations to form a judgment about what to do. These considerations are what we typically call reasons, and they are the building blocks of ethical decision-making and justification.

For example, the fact that a certain course of action would advance someone’s well-being might supply one reason for acting in that way. The fact that the same course of action would violate a policy might supply a reason not to act in this way. A well-reasoned decision would weigh these and other relevant considerations to form a judgment about what to do in this situation.

What is an Ethical Risk?

Risk is a broad concept that refers to the likelihood of experiencing any negative outcome. An ethical risk is a risk of doing wrong, harming others, or failing to live up to certain values. One special ethical risk involves failing to take ethics into account at all.

As you have seen already, some of these negative impacts that result from ethical risks are headline-grabbing, including exacerbating racial inequalities and inciting violence. But it is important not to overlook the ethical dimension in day-to-day decisions. For instance, designing a software application in such a way that it uses energy inefficiently might have a negative impact on the climate.

One major source of ethical risk is that a decision may harm people, or that it might benefit some people at the expense of others. Thinking about these kinds of risks is complicated by the possibility that some harms might be more or less severe, or that some decisions might affect smaller or larger numbers of people.

This was the case for Predpol, the software program predicting crime rates across the United States. The program disproportionately prosecuted petty crimes in predominantly Black and poor neighborhoods. By doing so it risked imposing further harms on these individuals by exacerbating racial inequalities already present.

What Are Emerging Technologies

Technology refers to skills, tools, and processes that assist in accomplishing objectives. Emerging technologies are recent innovations with the potential to transform how we live and interact. Many of today’s emerging technologies are data-driven. They include, for example, big data, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cloud computing, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality, and gene editing. Emerging technologies raise important questions about fundamental ideas like autonomy, moral agency, personhood, and moral psychology.

The current generation of emerging technologies are sometimes credited with bringing about a Fourth Industrial Revolution. On this view, the First Industrial Revolution turned on mechanization, the Second on electricity, the Third on computing and communications technology, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will turn on the integration of digital and physical systems.

One significant feature of the current generation of emerging technologies is that they are mutually reinforcing. For example, big data helps to power AI, which in turn can be used to expand data collection and analysis. The impact of emerging technologies can also grow exponentially, radically transforming economic and social life.