Ethics As An Escape From Regulation. From “Ethics-Washing” To Ethics-Shopping?

Wagner, Ben

doi:10.1515/9789048550180-016

Cited by 53 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…The US Executive Order is an exception in that regard, although constitutes more a series of directions to government agencies rather than a detailed set of legally binding ethical principles. This situation overall leads to concerns about 'ethics washing' (Wagner 2018;Watts 2019) as mentioned earlier in relation to the EU High-Level Expert Panel activities, but on a broader scale: that ethics and governance initiatives without the binding force of law are mere 'window dressing' while unethical uses of AI by governments and corporations continue. Indeed, in various of the countries and regions we have examined, despite the existence of ethical guidelines on AI, unethical AI applications exist, which may fail a test against those very principles.…”

Section: Implementation and Enforceabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Ethics: Global Perspectives

Daly

Hagendorff

et al. 2019

SSRN Journal

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Section: Implementation and Enforceabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Ethics: Global Perspectives

Daly

Hagendorff

et al. 2019

SSRN Journal

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…In this sense, some authors indicate that (soft) ethical solutions suffer from conceptual ambiguity and lack of enforcement mechanisms, arguing that creating strong ethical principles is only the first step and that more should be done to assure implementation and accountability (Winfield and Jirotka 2018). Others believe that it constitutes an ethics washing exercise (Wagner 2018;Metzinger 2019), while others stress that this is better than not taking ethics into consideration all together (WEF 2019).…”

Section: Technology Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While ethics helps us understand 'good' and 'bad' applications of robot technology, it lacks enforceability. They are often ambiguous and are criticized for avoiding red lines, provide 'ethics-washing,' and transform fundamental rights into 'potential rights' (Wagner 2018). Therefore, even though ethical considerations are valuable, 'roboethics' cannot be an omnibus governance solution for the use of healthcare in robotics, due to ambiguity and lack of enforceability.…”

Section: Dignity As An Overarching Concept For the Governance Of Robomentioning

confidence: 99%

“Oh, Dignity too?” Said the Robot: Human Dignity as the Basis for the Governance of Robotics

Zardiashvili

Fosch‐Villaronga

2020

Minds & Machines

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Healthcare robots enable practices that seemed far-fetched in the past. Robots might be the solution to bridge the loneliness that the elderly often experience; they may help wheelchair users walk again, or may help navigate the blind. European Institutions, however, acknowledge that human contact is an essential aspect of personal care and that the insertion of robots could dehumanize caring practices. Such instances of human-robot interactions raise the question to what extent the use and development of robots for healthcare applications can challenge the dignity of users. In this article, therefore, we explore how different robot applications in the healthcare domain support individuals in achieving 'dignity' or pressure it. We argue that since healthcare robot applications are novel, their associated risks and impacts may be unprecedented and unknown, thus triggering the need for a conceptual instrument that is binding and remains flexible at the same time. In this respect, as safety rules and data protection are often criticized to lack flexibility, and technology ethics to lack enforceability, we suggest human dignity as the overarching governance instrument for robotics, which is the inviolable value upon which all fundamental rights are grounded.

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“…With the outcome, he is, however, not satisfied and thus called the overall endeavor "Ethics washing made in Europe" [2], thereby coining the term ethicswashing. Ethicswashing is inspired by the much more popular term greenwashing [3][4][5], even though it has a slightly different meaning. Ethicswashing refers to overstating the role of ethics in a corporation's policy and culture and to (repeatedly) initiate ethical debates in order to (1) avoid or escape governmental regulations [5] and (2) to convince and reassure customers to keep with the company's products or services [1,6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trustworthy AI: How Ethicswashing Undermines Consumer Trust

Peukert¹,

Kloker²

2020

WI2020 Zentrale Tracks

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Ethicswashing is a neologism that has, due to the release of ethical guidelines for trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) by the European Union, recently gained in popularity. Although the term is closely related to the concept of greenwashing, it is currently primarily used to describe companies' undertakings to keep ethical debates running in order to influence or avoid strict regulations. However, it is not clear yet whether ethicswashing has further implications similar to those already revealed for greenwashing or sharewashing. In an online survey with 94 participants, we find that perceived ethicswashing has a significant negative effect on consumer trust, whereby the effect is mediated by the perception of risk and consumer confusion (based on PLS SEM). With our results, we thus contribute a further flipside to the discussion of ethics in AI and provide a starting point for developing a comprehensive understanding of ethicswashing and its influence on trust.

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Ethics As An Escape From Regulation. From “Ethics-Washing” To Ethics-Shopping?

Cited by 53 publications

References 1 publication

Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Ethics: Global Perspectives

Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Ethics: Global Perspectives

“Oh, Dignity too?” Said the Robot: Human Dignity as the Basis for the Governance of Robotics

Trustworthy AI: How Ethicswashing Undermines Consumer Trust

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