Selecting Options for Action
Last updated
Last updated
Once ethical risks have been identified, teams take time to consider ways forward. This involves asking what could have been done differently, what could be done to bring about positive change, and what would mitigate or remove the risks.
The type of reflection required to address ethical risks depends on the product development lifecycle. The closer a product team finds itself to the ideation phase, the more it will be able to intervene directly into the product design. The closer it finds itself towards shipping and maintaining the product, the more it will reflect on options like regulating access and usage.
This chapter reflects on two types mechanisms for addressing ethical risks:
Ethics by design. Ethics by design is especially helpful when the product is still close to the ideation stage. It enables the promotion of human values in technology design.
Impact assessment. Ethical impact assessment is particularly helpful when ethical risks are more tangible, closer towards shipping and maintenance of a product.
Ethics by design focuses on addressing ethical risks early on, between the ideation and design phases. It is known under different headings, such as value-sensitive design, design for values, or, more specifically, privacy by design. It focuses on ethical risks in general or on a particular ethical theme like privacy or inclusivity.
To engage in ethics by design, product teams take the following steps:
They establish ethical aims, which can be to design the product to address a social problem, promote a positive human value, or respond to a consumer demand in an ethically sensitive way. This might involve asking, "what problems should we try to solve?" or "what values should we try to promote?".
They consider potential design ideas for realizing their ethical aims. This might involve asking, "what viable products could we create to achieve our ethical aims?" or "what are the tradeoffs involved?".
They think of setting design requirements that help them achieve their aims. They might spell out technical requirements for privacy settings of the product.
One approach to ethics by design is value-sensitive design. In this approach, product teams first set themselves values that they want the product to promote. Then, for each value, they stipulate norms that make explicit what the product should or should not do. Finally, they come up with design requirements that implement these norms in the product design.
Impact assessment focuses on assessing different options for action to resolve ethical risks.
Ethical tradeoffs occur when alternative options for action are each supported by good reasons. For instance, to protect user data from being stolen, an IT services provider may rely on end-to-end encryption. Yet end-to-end encryption reduces opportunities for investigating cyber attacks on the system. Hence the team would faces a tradeoff between security and user privacy.
There are three primary strategies for making tradeoffs:
Analyse and compare the strength of competing interests.
Engage with stakeholders.
Adopt a fair process for decision-making.
Often, when interests conflict, it is possible to resolve conflicts by analyzing the strength of these competing interests using forms of cost-benefit reasoning, which applies the principle that a decision or action should provide a greater benefit than the cost required to implement the decision or action.
For example, if everything else is equal and you face a choice between benefiting two people with $1 each and benefiting a single person with $1, you ought to benefit the greater number of people. If you face a choice where one outcome would benefit one group by $5 and another choice would benefit a different group of similar people by $1, you ought generally to benefit the first group. Few real-life situations are as simple as these, though.
Often, the tradeoffs involved cannot be meaningfully reduced to money and the affected parties are heterogeneous in their characteristics. Nonetheless, you can often narrow down the options by breaking down complex scenarios into simpler comparisons.
Analyzing and comparing the strength of competing interests is often difficult though. Tough cases may call for employing the assistance of experts in applied ethics. Like medical ethicists in hospitals who advise doctors and families on difficult treatment choices, applied ethicists are trained in advanced methods for identifying and resolving conflicts of interests.
However, since people can reasonably disagree about values, certain conflicts cannot be adequately resolved by logic alone. This is so especially in cases where there are tradeoffs to be made between different values for the same group of people. Cases of disagreement call for methods of stakeholder engagement.
Stakeholder engagement can take different forms, such as surveys, workshops, or structured deliberative processes like the Delphi method, which uses iterative questionnaires to gain information from a panel of experts until a group decision or opinion is reached. Engaging stakeholders for making tradeoffs is an important complement to conducting an ethical analysis. Relying on ethical analysis alone risks ignoring how affected groups themselves view an option for action.
While preferences of stakeholders cannot determine the best option, stakeholder views provide an important input to decision-making. In particular, organizations should seek to identify a hidden consensus among stakeholders. When it comes to difficult decisions, debate between stakeholders can become divisive, hiding common ground. Yet certain options for action may be acceptable for a broad range of stakeholders whose interests or values are normally considered to clash.
Invite stakeholders to react to preferred options for action.
Ask: Do stakeholders perceive options in line with ethical analysis, or do they prefer different
options?
Ask: Is there a “hidden consensus” among stakeholders about the best way to resolve an ethical
issue?
Of course, consensus is not always possible on every issue. In some cases, the next-best alternative may be to favor the opinion of the majority.
