From the course: Technology and Design Ethics
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Primer: Consequentialism
- Of all the moral philosophies, consequentialism is probably the easiest to understand, and it's also the ethical framework most commonly used in tech. Consequentialism, as the name suggests, looks at the consequences of any acts as performed and sees whether or not that consequence increases or decreases the overall common good or overall utility. So, instead of looking at the intent of the person who's acting or anything else, you just look at the outcomes and see, are they the outcomes we want for the majority? Let's say a tech company wants to improve how people get around a big city, and after exploring several different options, they land on rentable electric scooters. They distribute the scooters all over the city and see what happens. Now, when we look at this, we have to then from a consequentialist perspective say, does this improve the overall common good? We do that by looking at every possible impacted…
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