From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing
A View on Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy
Harvard Law School Cambridge, MA, USA
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The word ‘ethics’ is under siege in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or hands- off governance, “ethics” is increasingly identified with technology companies’ self-regulatory efforts and with shallow appearances of ethical behavior. So-called “ethics washing” by tech companies is on the rise, prompting criticism and scrutiny from scholars and the tech community at large. In parallel to the growth of ethics washing, its condemnation has led to a tendency to engage in “ethics bashing.” This consists in the trivialization of ethics and moral philosophy now understood as discrete tools or pre-formed social structures such as ethics boards, self-governance schemes or stakeholder groups.
The misunderstandings underlying ethics bashing are at least three- fold: (a) philosophy and “ethics” are seen as a communications strategy and as a form of instrumentalized cover-up or façade for unethical behavior, (b) philosophy is understood in opposition and as alternative to political representation and social organizing and (c) the role and importance of moral philosophy is downplayed and portrayed as mere “ivory tower” intellectualization of complex problems that need to be dealt with in practice.
This paper argues that the rhetoric of ethics and morality should not be reductively instrumentalized, either by the industry in the form of “ethics washing,” or by scholars and policy-makers in the form of “ethics bashing.” Grappling with the role of philosophy and ethics requires moving beyond both tendencies and seeing ethics as a mode of inquiry that facilitates the evaluation of competing tech policy strategies. In other words, we must resist narrow reductivism of moral philosophy as instrumentalized performance and renew our faith in its intrinsic moral value as a mode of knowledge- seeking and inquiry. Far from mandating a self-regulatory scheme or a given governance structure, moral philosophy in fact facilitates the questioning and reconsideration of any given practice, situating it within a complex web of legal, political and economic
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institutions. Moral philosophy indeed can shed new light on human practices by adding needed perspective, explaining the relationship between technology and other worthy goals, situating technology within the human, the social, the political. It has become urgent to start considering technology ethics also from within and not only from outside of ethics.
Moral Philosophy, Ethics, Technology Ethics, Regulation, Self- regulation, Technology Law, AI.
. 2019. From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing
A View on Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy. In Proceedings of ACM FAT* Conference (FAT* 2019). ACM, , NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372860
1 Introduction
On May 26th 2019, Google announced that it would put in place an external advisory council for the responsible development of AI [1], the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (or ATEAC). Following a petition signed by 2,556 Google workers [2] demanding the removal of one of the body’s board members, anti- LGBT advocate James [3], the advisory body was withdrawn approximately one week after its announcement. This episode and the backlash it produced provide a salient illustration of the tensions around the use of “ethics” language in technology policy. Instrumentalization and misuse of such language in technology policy has recently proliferated and taken two forms.
On the one hand, the term has been used by companies as an acceptable façade that justifies deregulation, self-regulation or market driven governance, and is increasingly identified with technology companies’ self-interested adoption of appearances of ethical behavior. We call such growing instrumentalization of ethical language by tech companies “ethics washing.”[4] Beyond AI ethics councils, ethics washing includes other attempts at simplifying the value of ethical work, which often form part of a corporate communications strategy: the hiring of in-house moral philosophers who have little power to shape internal company policies; the focus on humane design – e.g. nudging users to reduce time spent on apps – instead of tackling the risks inherent in the
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existence of the products themselves [5]; the funding of work on “fair” machine learning systems which positively obscures deeper questioning around the broader impacts of those systems on society [6].
On the other hand, the technology community’s criticism and scrutiny of instances of ethics washing often borders into the opposite fallacy, which we call “ethics bashing”. This is a tendency, common amongst social scientists and non-philosophers, to trivialize “ethics” and “moral philosophy” by reducing more capacious forms of moral inquiry to the narrow conventional heuristics or misused corporate language they seek to criticize. Equating serious engagement in moral argument with the social and political dynamics within ethics boards, or understanding ethics as a political stance which is antithetic to – instead of complementary to – serious engagement in democratic decision-making, is a frequent and dangerous fallacy. The misunderstandings underlying ethics bashing are at least three-fold: (a) philosophy and “ethics” are seen as a communications strategy and as a form of cover-up or façade for unethical behavior, (b) the role and importance of moral philosophy is downplayed and portrayed as mere “ivory tower” intellectualization of complex problems that need to be dealt with in practice; and (c) philosophy is understood in opposition and as alternative to political representation and social organizing.
Grappling with the role of philosophy and ethics in tech policy requires moving beyond both ethics washing and ethics bashing and seeing ethics as a mode of inquiry. We do moral theorizing all of the time. When we ask whether a corporate ethics council can improve internal policy-making, whether a given machine learning system can lead to fairer criminal justice enforcement, or whether a given corporate decision is acceptable, we are asking moral questions that, properly framed, can lead to a better understanding of these phenomena and also to better policies. Becoming aware of this fact enables us to see things more subtly, at several levels of abstraction, and to more rigorously assess the legitimacy of corporate self-regulation and other ethics initiatives.
An important distinction must be made between the intrinsic and the instrumental value of ethics. The first is the value of ethics as a mode of inquiry which it is independently valuable when engaged in as an aspirational process and which takes moral principles seriously in achieving better knowledge and understanding of a state of affairs or phenomenon. Understood as ethical commitment, ethics here is about engaging in a justice-seeking process with or without others in the belief that the process itself has independent moral value. The instrumental perspective instead sees the value of ethics as lying in its results. These results can be good or bad. As employed in ethical codes of conduct, professional ethics, or ‘ethics boards’, ethics is a means to an end, it is instrumental to the achievement of certain more interesting or valuable outcomes such as reputation, innovation, profit, the integrity of a profession. Ethics understood in this instrumental way has no value independent of its end-results, it is not an internalized aspirational mode of inquiry
that aims at a better world, but is rather valued for its causal role in bringing about other desired results.
Intrinsic and instrumental perspectives on ethics are not mutually exclusive and can exist side-by-side. We can value ethics as an intrinsically valuable process and also and at the same time appreciate the understanding and generous mindset that engaging in it enables. However, it will be argued that the more the process of engaging in ethics is motivated by outcomes independent of the process itself, the less it is taken as an aspirational and intrinsically valuable process, the more doubtful its moral value becomes for society. Ethics washing and ethics bashing are instrumental understandings of ethics, in that both positions or tendencies envision or experience ethics as a means to an end and nothing more.
Further, what is at stake in recent controversies around the weaponization of “ethics” rhetoric are competing thinner and thicker moral conceptions of technology companies’ role, the former arguably being promoted through narrow instrumental understandings of the role of ethical work, the latter arguably being promoted through greater participatory democracy and activism. Yet this understanding obscures the potential role of ethics within a thicker conception of technology policy. The narrower the lens one uses to look at an ethical problem, the narrower and more limited the response one is willing to offer to address it. As will be argued in what follows, it is important to maintain a critical outlook on the instrumentalization of ethics in technology settings, while also recognizing and respecting its moral worth as an exercise and mode of inquiry capable of expanding our horizons and thickening our moral commitments.
This paper has three goals. First, it aims to articulate the weaknesses of both the ethics washing and ethics bashing fallacies, explaining why both are impoverished views of the relationship between technology and ethics. Second, it aims to clarify the role and importance of moral philosophy in debates about the impact of new technologies on society and to dissipate misunderstandings according to which moral philosophy is either too abstract to inform concrete policy or is a red herring that prevents proper focus on political and social action. Far from constituting a barrier to appropriate governance, moral philosophy enables us to seriously scrutinize the future of technology governance, law and policy, and to understand what humans need from new technologies and innovation from a unique vantage point. Third and finally, adopting a less instrumentalized view of moral philosophy from within allows us to be less deferential toward philosophical work in technology settings, enhancing our ability to scrutinize certain philosophical ideas or moral stances and the impacts they can have on technology and society without bashing an entire field of inquiry.
The paper is structured as follows. It first explains the function and meaning of ethics and moral philosophy, some common criticisms of moral philosophy and what it is for. It then clarifies what is
From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: A View on Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy
wrong with ethics washing, adopting a view from within moral philosophy. And finally, it clarifies what is wrong with ethics bashing concluding that we should move beyond both tech washing and tech bashing, adopt a less instrumentalist position on ethics and start taking moral philosophy seriously as a discipline and mode of inquiry.
2 A Word on Ethics and Moral Philosophy
The English word “ethics” is derived from the ancient Greek words ēthikós and êthos which refer to character and moral nature [7]. Morality comes from the Latin moralis which literally means manner, character, proper behavior. Both “ethics” and “morality” thus refer to the study of good and bad character, appropriate behavior and virtue. The two terms are often employed interchangeably but have slightly distinct uses and connotations. Morality is often associated with etiquette, and rules of appropriate social behavior, whereas ethics has instead a more personal connotation. Ethics pertains to the cultivation of individual virtue abstracted from society, and is sometimes used to refer to personal and professional standards of behavior embodied in “codes of ethics”. In Confucian philosophy, morality is about respecting the family and pursuing social harmony and stability through virtues including altruism, loyalty, piety [8].
In the discussion to follow, the term “ethics” will refer to the rhetoric of morality employed in technology circles, and “moral philosophy” will instead refer to the philosophical discipline that investigates questions around human agency, freedom, responsibility, blame, and the relationships between individuals, amongst other questions. According to some accounts within what we are calling moral philosophy, the scope of the notion of moral philosophy is limited to relationships between humans whereas the notion of ethics extends beyond humans to animals and nature. Some would also distinguish moral from political philosophy while others such as see them as interconnected [9]. Like , I construe the “moral” widely as consisting of the domain of “value,” i.e. an evaluative and interpretative mode of inquiry which one can distinguish from scientific or descriptive modes of inquiry, those that only (purportedly) pertain to facts [10]. The domain of “value” is the specific domain of inquiry of moral philosophers, and is sometimes considered to border into other domains of philosophy such as aesthetics, the study of beauty and aesthetic value, or epistemology, the study of knowledge and belief.
To better illustrate what moral philosophy is, let us use the example of surveillance. Let us ask: what is wrong or unethical about certain forms of surveillance? Disparate arguments can be offered to show that surveillance is wrong in some respects or worth carrying out in other respects. Different persons will likely have different views on which of these arguments are strongest. As philosophers might put
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it: the morality of surveillance is an evaluative matter, one that we might disagree on, a question of value, or otherwise put a moral question. Possible lines of reasoning supporting the wrongness of surveillance are as follows. Surveillance is objectionable on self- development and virtue ethics grounds because it incentivizes self- censorship, reduces human beings’ ability to develop themselves or to engage in other valuable causes because of a fear that these actions will be held against them. Another argument focuses on harm: some forms of surveillance cause harm to individuals (e.g. they lead to unjustified and stereotype-enhancing discriminatory treatment, they create asymmetries of knowledge and power, they perpetuate pre-existing and unjustified inequalities). A third line of argument focuses on equal dignity and respect for persons: some forms of surveillance fail to treat individuals as equally worthy of respect because they are covert and because some people are surveilled more than others. There are many other possible lines of reasoning for why surveillance might be considered wrong in given circumstances.
Each line of reasoning points to different policy solutions. For instance, if we believe it is key to enable the pursuit of worthy behavior and individuality and that the core reason to resist surveillance is that it inhibits such behavior or individuality, we might be satisfied with aspects of surveillance that enhance the pursuit of certain worthy life goals, including targeted and personalized services. On the other hand, if we believe the core problem is that the information that is collected can cause harm to individuals, we might be prone to advocate for solutions that minimize discriminatory impacts and ensure that harms are reduced. Finally, if we believe surveillance leads to a degradation of human dignity and a failure to treat individuals with respect, we might be prone to ban surveillance completely, or to advocate for the leveling down of surveillance to a de minimis threshold. Which reasons we find most weighty is a matter of philosophical commitment and deliberation. The process of weighing our reasons against others’ reasons allows us to overcome the intuitive and primitive belief that “surveillance is bad because I feel it is,” to reject weak arguments and to ground or re-evaluate our position based on carefully weighed stronger reasons. Identifying the drawbacks of surveillance and its morally unacceptable core also allows us to devise nuanced concrete solutions for addressing it.
This process of revising and refining our moral beliefs through philosophical inquiry is what has called reflective equilibrium [11]. This process is not, or not only, about choosing one theoretical approach to morality and applying it to all factual scenarios – be it consequentialism, deontology, or virtue ethics for example. Instead, it entails engaging with an issue of societal importance, locating it within existing debates, considering it from all relevant standpoints, and making an evaluative judgment as to which angle or way of approaching it is capable of shedding the most valuable light on it, and can best guide a strategy for addressing it. The broader the spectrum of considerations we take into account in our moral theorizing, the more interesting,
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capacious and morally significant the result of an inquiry from within moral philosophy, the more inspiring and valuable its practical implications.
It is also important to emphasize that moral philosophy and ethics can mean different things as part of different fields of study and intellectual traditions. The above is intended to capture only a glimpse of a larger roadmap of possible uses of the terminology of ethics and moral philosophy in technology governance and policy. It is not intended to fix the meaning of these rich and complex modes of inquiry.
3 The Limits of Moral Philosophy
Work in moral philosophy and ethics has a number of limitations. Before turning to an analysis of how it can inform the debates on ethics washing and ethics bashing, we should recognize four common criticisms of the moral philosophy approach that is defended in this paper and that is relied on as a lens to develop objections to ethics washing, ethics bashing and, as part of a reflexive exercise, the instrumentalization of moral philosophy itself.
First, philosophy is sometimes criticized for being abstract and for not being accessible to large audiences. This makes philosophical work often unsuited to advocacy or activism or to making provocative contributions to time-sensitive issues. Philosophy is also rarely suited to op-eds, for example, or to those who aim at quick and easy policy fixes. Yet depth and abstraction are also one of the discipline’s advantages: engaging with philosophical work prompts us to pause and think, to shield our thinking from pragmatic pressures, to enlarge the temporal and geographical scope of our research scope. As we engage in this process, our intuitions change, we extend our thoughts or revise them so that they
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