1215
Views
887
Downloads
26
Crossref
N/A
WoS
27
Scopus
N/A
CSCD
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.
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.
L. Suchman, J. Blomberg, J. E. Orr, and R. Trigg, Reconstructing technologies as social practice, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 392–408, 1999.
B. J. Grosz, D. G. Grant, K. Vredenburgh, J. Behrends, L. Hu, A. Simmons, and J. Waldo, Embedded EthiCS: Integrating ethics broadly across computer science education, Communications of the ACM, vol. 62, no. 8, pp. 54–61, 2019.
A. Jobin, M. Ienca, and E. Vayena, The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines, Nature Machine Intelligence, vol. 1, no. 9, pp. 389–399, 2019.
B. Mittelstadt, Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI, Nature Machine Intelligence, vol. 1, no. 11, pp. 501–507, 2019.
J. Metcalf, E. Moss, and D. Boyd, Owning ethics: Corporate logics, Silicon Valley, and the institutionalization of ethics, Social Research, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 449–476, 2019.
S. Viljoen, A relational theory of data governance, Yale Law Journal, vol. 131, no. 2, pp. 573–654, 2021.
L. M. Khan, Amazon’s antitrust paradox, The Yale Law Journal, vol. 126, no. 3, pp. 564–907, 2017.
P. Nemitz, Constitutional democracy and technology in the age of artificial intelligence, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A:Mathematical,Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 376, no. 2133, p. 20180089, 2018.
T. F. Gieryn, Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists, American Sociological Review, vol. 48, no. 6, pp. 781–795, 1983.
D. Haraway, Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, Feminist studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575–599, 1988.
S. Wright, Legitimating genetic engineering, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 235–247, 2001.
A. Abbott, Professional ethics, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 88, no. 5, pp. 855–885, 1983.
G. Wood and M. Rimmer, Codes of ethics: What are they really and what should they be? International Journal of Value-Based Management, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 181–195, 2003.
D. R. Cressey and C. A. Moore, Managerial values and corporate codes of ethics, California Management Review, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 53–77, 1983.
E. Oz, Ethical standards for information systems professionals: A case for a unified code, MIS quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 423–433, 1992.
P. Selznick, Foundations of the theory of organization, American Sociological Review, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 25–35, 1948.
A. J. Trumpy, Subject to negotiation: The mechanisms behind co-optation and corporate reform, Social Problems, vol. 55, no. 4, pp. 480–500, 2014.
L. King and J. Busa, When corporate actors take over the game: the corporatization of organic, recycling and breast cancer activism, Social Movement Studies, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 549–563, 2017.
S. P. Gangadharan and J. Niklas, Decentering technology in discourse on discrimination, Information,Communication&Society, vol. 22, no. 7, pp. 882–899, 2019.
A. Dafoe, On technological determinism: A typology, scope conditions, and a mechanism, Science,Technology,&Human Values, vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 1047–1076, 2015.
A. L. Hoffmann, Where fairness fails: Data, algorithms, and the limits of antidiscrimination discourse, Information,Communication&Society, vol. 22, no. 7, pp. 900–915, 2019.
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.
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/).