Ethical foundations: Part 1

- In this video, we'll talk about ethics. We're going to talk about what it is and how it relates to data and creates this kind of new field called data ethics, and I think I know what you're doing right now. You're probably typing what is ethics or ethics' definition into your search engine. I mean, if you want to do that, that's fine, you can. I just don't think it's going to be very useful because what's going to pop up are about a million results, some of those definitions are going to be pretty good, some of them are not quite as good. But the abstract definitions just end up being complicated and/or hard to remember, so what I want to do is just make it as simple as possible, instead of an abstract definition that, let's be honest, you're going to forget about anyway. Let's just talk about what it means to be an ethical person, what it means to have ethical concern, and that just means a concern with human well-being. So if you are an ethical person, you care about the well-being of people. It's as simple as that. So there is something complicated or at least we can make it complicated if we want to. There is this concern, I mean, if you know anything about ethics, there's a lot of different theories and there's a lot of different principles and some of them, it takes a while to understand, and certainly, if we have to go back and compare and contrast them, that can get really messy. And in fact, if you really wanted, you could probably get in your car and drive to an ethics conference somewhere, somewhere in the world ethics conferences are happening, and what's happening at these conferences are experts who spent their entire lives reading these complicated texts are arguing about the best ethical theories or how to interpret these principles. Look, I don't think, I mean, if that's what it takes to be an ethical person, there is probably no hope for the rest of us, right, because, most of us just can't afford to spend our entire life going to ethics conferences and talking about ethics. So the good news is that the actual process of just engaging in ethical thinking, being an ethical person is much simpler. Okay, so here's how this works. You've probably heard of specific ethical theories, utilitarianism, deontology, or maybe it's called Kantianism sometimes, contractarianism, there is virtue ethics, all these are ethical theories. What they have in common, now, not all moral theories. There are some theories like cultural relative or divine command theory, you might have heard of those. They are not built on any human value, but really good moral theories, such as ones that I just mentioned, and there are a couple others, are built on an observation about a particular value, something that makes life go well for human beings, something that's central to human well-being, they take that value, and then they build a complicated theory around it, and comes out with lots of principles, and then we can get to the business of comparing and contrasting those principles and comparing and contrasting those ethical theories, and that's where it gets complicated. Now, if our job were to attempt to understand, even the basics of those arguments and how they work, we would have a lot of work to do, and as I suggested, the experts are still busy disagreeing with each other about how this all works, and so maybe an infinite amount of work to do, which is just not going to work for us. So what I propose doing is let's leave the theories and principles where they are. Are theories and principles bad? Absolutely not. My job is to teach the theories and principles and I like my job very much. I think there's definitely a role for it, but when we're talking about what it means to be an ethical person, what it means to think ethically, we don't need to understand the theories. We need to understand the values underlying those theories, and remember what I said about the values. Any good moral theory is built on an observation of a particular value, and the other good news, we're continuing the string of good news, there are really only five values. Now, that's my list. Someone else, another professional ethicist might have a slightly longer or shorter list, but I count five values.