Ethics Frameworks

CSCI 3921w Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues in Computing
Adriana Picoral

(Some) Ethics Frameworks

Ethic Frameworks are used in analyzing ethical situations or making decisions. They help us focus our analysis.

  • Virtue ethics - Focus on character. What virtues should a good person have? What kind of practitioner does building this make me?
  • Consequentialist/utilitarianism - Focus is on effects: what will produce the greatest good, for the most people? How is “good” counted?
  • Deontology - Focus on rules (duty and rights). What duties and obligations are involved? What do we owe people regardless of the payoff?

(Some) Ethics Frameworks

Ethic Frameworks are used in analyzing ethical situations or making decisions. They help us focus our analysis.

  • Contractualism - Focus on justice as fairness. How to ensure everyone is treated in a way that respects their rights, and is just and fair. Could this be justified to everyone it affects, including the people it affects worst?
  • Care ethics - Focus on who is dependent on whom, and who is attending to them

(More) Ethics Frameworks

(More) Ethics Frameworks

  • Indigenous data governance - Focus on the ability of a nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data
  • Confucian ethics - Focus on how the technology promotes social harmony, relational obligations, and moral self-cultivation

Ethics Frameworks

  • Frameworks generate reasoning, they don’t output verdicts.
  • None of these (and other) frameworks is perfect, each has advantages and disadvantages.
  • Beware of framework shopping: when a framework is selected to yield the conclusion already held. (confirmation bias)

Group Activity

Each group will get a different instrument to analyze the same technology.

In your group, answer the questions under your assigned framework. Be prepared to share your analysis with the class.

Technology: ONLINE LEARNING WITH FACIAL EMOTION ANALYSIS

In-class exercise

Which ethical framework mentioned previously is best reflected in each of the following arguments?

  • Companies developing generative AI have a responsibility to create products with appropriate safeguards.
  • Although generative AI will have some benefits, the probable negative effects are too large, and therefore generative AI development and use should be greatly restricted.
  • Voice cloning should require the speaker’s ongoing permission, revocable at any time, because a voice belongs to the person it came from.

In-class exercise

Which ethical framework mentioned previously is best reflected in each of the following arguments?

  • Companies developing generative AI have a responsibility to create products with appropriate safeguards. Deontology since it focuses on duties and obligations (i.e., responsibility).
  • Although generative AI will have some benefits, the probable negative effects are too large, and therefore generative AI development and use should be greatly restricted. Utilitarianism since it focuses on effects.
  • Voice cloning should require the speaker’s ongoing permission, revocable at any time, because a voice belongs to the person it came from. Deontology

In-class exercise

Which ethical framework mentioned previously is best reflected in each of the following arguments?

  • An elder-care robot may keep someone safe and still fail them, if it replaces the visits of people who knew them.
  • Predictive policing software fails differently for Black people than for other communities.

In-class exercise

Which ethical framework mentioned previously is best reflected in each of the following arguments?

  • An elder-care robot may keep someone safe and still fail them, if it replaces the visits of people who knew them. Care ethics
  • Predictive policing software fails differently for Black people than for other communities. Intersectionality

Take the canvas quiz (multiple attempts are allowed)

Moral Decisions

Different people make moral decisions in different ways and based on different values.

This means that if you want to convince people a certain moral decision is appropriate, you need to justify it not only based on your own values and how you make moral decisions, but also on others’ values and how they make moral decision.

Group Discussion

“We can acknowledge the difference in values among people and among cultures and still engage in rational discussions about the best policies for using computer technology.” – James H. Moor

  • Who’s to say what’s ethical/moral?
  • Who decides ethical norms in a profession?
  • Who decides what’s ethical in a company?
  • Who decides what’s ethical in a country?

Who decides what’s moral?

Murder is wrong because …

  • Moral subjectivism: … I disapprove of it (individual, each person decides for themself what is right)
  • Cultural relativism: … my society disapproves of it (society, each culture decides for itself what is right.)

Moral Relativism

Most often moral relativism… is associated with an empirical thesis that there are deep and widespread moral disagreements and … that the truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to the moral standard of some person or group of persons. – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Moral Relativism

Elder-care robot scenario: * The care-ethics objection: being cared about matters intrinsically * A relativist would have to say that holds only in cultures that happen to value it

Moral disagreement becomes impossible

Many philosophers – especially those involved in computing and ethics – find subjectivism and relativism problematic. For example, if each person or culture can decide what is morally acceptable, how can we ever agree at all on norms, policies, and appropriate behavior?

Moral disagreement becomes impossible

If I say “abortion is wrong” (= I disapprove) and you say “abortion is permissible” (= I don’t disapprove), we’ve both spoken truly and we aren’t actually contradicting each other. We’re doing the equivalent of me saying “I like cilantro” and you saying “I don’t.” That’s not a disagreementm it’s a pair of biographical reports.

Not a matter of taste or opinion

  1. If the culture’s code defines what is right, then abolitionists in 1830s America, suffragists, and dissidents in any repressive regime were wrong at the time
  2. Cultures aren’t discrete. Who counts as “the culture”? A country, a religion, a generation, a subreddit? Everyone belongs to many overlapping groups with conflicting norms.

Moral objectivism

  • There are values that hold regardless of individual beliefs
  • Objectivism doesn’t require absolutism (the view that rules hold without exception).

An objectivist can say “the right action depends on context”

Other positions

  • Nihilism: nothing is morally right or wrong, full stop.
  • Pluralism: there are multiple irreducible, objectively valid values (liberty, welfare, fairness, dignity) that can conflict without one always trumping the others.
  • Universalism: ACM and IEEE codes are explicitly universalist — they assert obligations that hold regardless of local norms or employer expectations

Journal Question

Go back to the question you discussed in groups, and answer it individually in your journal: Who’s to say what’s ethical/moral?

Group Discussion

EU’s General Data Protection Regulation treats privacy as a fundamental right, yet the US lacks a single equivalent federal law

  • How do we weigh values such as privacy, ownership and property, informed consent, confidentiality and security when developing new technologies?

Group Discussion

How do we weigh values such as privacy, ownership and property, informed consent, confidentiality and security when developing new technologies?

Things to consider:

Policy Vacuum

From James Moor’s “What Is Computer Ethics?” (1985) — one of the founding papers of the field

  • When a new technology makes an action possible, but we have no policy governing it
  • Policy can be understood as laws, and professional or moral norms/rules
  • The moral question is new, and nobody has ever had to answer it before

Vacuum vs. Lag

  • A vacuum: nobody has yet determined what the rule should be
  • Regulatory lag: we know what the rule should be but institutions haven’t caught up

That means that “There’s no law against it” is not a good argument.

Developers/designers see new capabilities before regulators do.

Group Discussion

Who is held responsible when an autonomous vehicle kills someone? (a remote operator, the vehicle manufacturer, the owner of the vehicle?)

References and Further Readings

Journal Writing

Reflect on what you liked and disliked about this lecture, what you learned, and what you wished you’d learned.

  1. What you learned from the lecture and discussion – this can be something that surprised you, something you had not considered before, a new way of thinking about something
  2. What you wish you’d learned from the discussion – this can be questions you still have and questions you would like to explore further
  3. Anything you liked of disliked (were the discussions helpful? were the contents of the slides clear?)