Open AccessWhere Can We Find an Ethics for Scale? How to Define an Ethical Infrastructure for the Development of Future Technologies at Global Scale
Author(s) -
DULL IAN,
BAUM FANI NTAVELOU,
HUGHES THOMAS
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
ethnographic praxis in industry conference proceedings
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1559-8918
pISSN - 1559-890X
DOI - 10.1111/epic.12015
Subject(s) - normative ethics , normative , engineering ethics , information ethics , ethics of technology , scale (ratio) , ethical theory , applied ethics , business ethics , meta ethics , epistemology , sociology , foundation (evidence) , ethical theories , environmental ethics , political science , public relations , law , philosophy , engineering , physics , quantum mechanics
Despite companies facing real consequences for getting ethics wrong, basic ethical questions in emerging technologies remain unresolved. Companies have begun trying to answer these tough questions, but their techniques are often hindered by the classical approach of moral philosophy and ethics – namely normative philosophy – which prescribe an approach to resolving ethical dilemmas from the outset, based on assumed moral truths. In contrast, we propose that a key foundation for ‘getting ethics right’ is to do the opposite: to discover them, by going out into the world to study how relevant people resolve similar ethical dilemmas in their daily lives – a project we term ‘grounded ethics'. Building from Durkheim's theory of moral facts and more recent developments in the anthropology of morals and ethics, this paper explores the methods and theory useful to such a mission – synthesizing these into a framework to guide future ‘grounded ethics’ practice.