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13 January 2022
The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Technology Ethics in Practice
Ben Green1(
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)
Keywords:
technology ethics, AI ethics, ethics-washing, Science, Technology, and Society (STS), sociotechnical systems
Cite this article:
Green B.
The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Technology Ethics in Practice.
Journal of Social Computing,
2021, 2(3): 209-225.
https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2021.0018
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This article introduces the special issue “Technology Ethics in Action: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”. In response to recent controversies about the harms of digital technology, discourses and practices of “tech ethics” have proliferated across the tech industry, academia, civil society, and government. Yet despite the seeming promise of ethics, tech ethics in practice suffers from several significant limitations: tech ethics is vague and toothless, has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design, and is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives. These limitations suggest that tech ethics enables corporate “ethics-washing”: embracing the language of ethics to defuse criticism and resist government regulation, without committing to ethical behavior. Given these dynamics, I describe tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central debate is not whether ethics is desirable, but what “ethics” entails and who gets to define it. Current approaches to tech ethics are poised to enable technologists and technology companies to label themselves as “ethical” without substantively altering their practices. Thus, those striving for structural improvements in digital technologies must be mindful of the gap between ethics as a mode of normative inquiry and ethics as a practical endeavor. In order to better evaluate the opportunities and limits of tech ethics, I propose a sociotechnical approach that analyzes tech ethics in light of who defines it and what impacts it generates in practice.
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About this article
The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Technology Ethics in Practice
Ben Green1(
)
)
Abstract
This article introduces the special issue “Technology Ethics in Action: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”. In response to recent controversies about the harms of digital technology, discourses and practices of “tech ethics” have proliferated across the tech industry, academia, civil society, and government. Yet despite the seeming promise of ethics, tech ethics in practice suffers from several significant limitations: tech ethics is vague and toothless, has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design, and is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives. These limitations suggest that tech ethics enables corporate “ethics-washing”: embracing the language of ethics to defuse criticism and resist government regulation, without committing to ethical behavior. Given these dynamics, I describe tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central debate is not whether ethics is desirable, but what “ethics” entails and who gets to define it. Current approaches to tech ethics are poised to enable technologists and technology companies to label themselves as “ethical” without substantively altering their practices. Thus, those striving for structural improvements in digital technologies must be mindful of the gap between ethics as a mode of normative inquiry and ethics as a practical endeavor. In order to better evaluate the opportunities and limits of tech ethics, I propose a sociotechnical approach that analyzes tech ethics in light of who defines it and what impacts it generates in practice.
Keywords:
technology ethics, AI ethics, ethics-washing, Science, Technology, and Society (STS), sociotechnical systems
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Publication history
Received: 20 May 2021
Accepted: 20 October 2021
Published:
13 January 2022
Issue date: September 2021
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© The author(s) 2021
Acknowledgements
B. Green thanks Elettra Bietti, Anna Lauren Hoffmann, Jenny Korn, Kathy Pham, and Luke Stark for their comments on this article. B. Green also thanks the Harvard STS community, particularly Sam Weiss Evans, for feedback on an earlier iteration of this article.
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The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
