From the course: Technology and Design Ethics
What are tech ethics
- So what are we talking about when we talk about ethics? If you think about ethics, you often have this picture of a list of dos and don'ts, rights and wrongs. These are the things that are ethical to do, these are the things that are not ethical to do. In reality, ethics is frameworks and tools and methodologies we use as a society to judge the rightness and wrongness, or goodness of acts. We agree upon ways of thinking about activities and what people do and then say this kind of stuff is good and this kind of stuff is bad because this produces more good things in the world and these things produce more bad things in the world. So ethics is less of a list than it is a way for us to judge what is happening around us. Now, you can juxtapose ethics with morals, our personal internal judgments about what is right or wrong, and these are quite different. You see, morals are anchored in societal beliefs, in religion, in culture, in politics, and all these other things and they're deeply entrenched in how we think about the world and how we interpret what is happening around us, whereas ethics is this societal agreed upon way of judging things. So, morals and ethics often come into conflict with each other. Imagine, for example, you discover the company you work for sits on a trove of proprietary data that can help an underrepresented group in some significant way. Morally, you may feel compelled to release this data to that underrepresented group to help them, but ethically you can't do that 'cause it's not your data to release. And if you choose to break some rules and release it, you're setting a precedent for anyone else to follow to say if you feel morally compelled to do something, you should just do it, which creates an ethical problem because morals are different from person to person. So it's easy to think about ethics as this wet blanket stifling our creative flames and we can choose to use ethics that way, but doing so robs us of the opportunity to use ethics as a design and discovery tool. Used mindfully, ethics can be the hearth that directs the heat from our creative flames where we want it to go while preventing them from burning down the house.
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