To Each Technology Its Own Ethics: The Problem of Ethical Proliferation

Abstract

Ethics plays a key role in the normative analysis of the impacts of technology. We know that computers in general and the processing of data, the use of artificial intelligence, and the combination of computers and/or artificial intelligence with robotics are all associated with ethically relevant implications for individuals, groups, and society. In this article, we argue that while all technologies are ethically relevant, there is no need to create a separate ‘ethics of X’ or ‘X ethics’ for each and every subtype of technology or technological property—e.g. computer ethics, AI ethics, data ethics, information ethics, robot ethics, and machine ethics. Specific technologies might have specific impacts, but we argue that they are often sufficiently covered and understood through already established higher-level domains of ethics. Furthermore, the proliferation of tech ethics is problematic because (a) the conceptual boundaries between the subfields are not well-defined, (b) it leads to a duplication of effort and constant reinventing the wheel, and (c) there is danger that participants overlook or ignore more fundamental ethical insights and truths. The key to avoiding such outcomes lies in a taking the discipline of ethics seriously, and we consequently begin with a brief description of what ethics is, before presenting the main forms of technology related ethics. Through this process, we develop a hierarchy of technology ethics, which can be used by developers and engineers, researchers, or regulators who seek an understanding of the ethical implications of technology. We close by deducing two principles for positioning ethical analysis which will, in combination with the hierarchy, promote the leveraging of existing knowledge and help us to avoid an exaggerated proliferation of tech ethics.

Ethical and methodological challenges in building morally informed AI systems

“…The study offers a comprehensive overview for scholars, practitioners, or policymakers, condensing the ethical debates surrounding fairness, safety, harmful content, hallucinations, privacy, interaction risks, security, alignment, societal impacts, and others. We discuss the results, evaluate imbalances in the literature, and explore unsubstantiated risk scenarios.Keywords -generative artificial intelligence, large language models, image generation models, ethics being inefficient, useless, or whitewashing [11][12][13][14] ; it became increasingly transferred into proposed legal norms like the AI Act of the European Union 15,16 ; and it became accompanied by two new fields dealing with technical and theoretical issues alike, namely AI alignment and AI safety 17,18 . Both domains have a normative grounding and are devoted to preventing harm or even existential risks stemming from generative AI systems.On the technical side of things, variational autoencoders 19 , flow-based generative models 20,21 , or generative adversarial networks 22 were early successful generative models, supplementing discriminatory machine learning architectures.…”

“…Keywords -generative artificial intelligence, large language models, image generation models, ethics being inefficient, useless, or whitewashing [11][12][13][14] ; it became increasingly transferred into proposed legal norms like the AI Act of the European Union 15,16 ; and it became accompanied by two new fields dealing with technical and theoretical issues alike, namely AI alignment and AI safety 17,18 . Both domains have a normative grounding and are devoted to preventing harm or even existential risks stemming from generative AI systems.…”

Bioethics: No Method—No Discipline?

“…It may also be argued that bioethics has many diverse tasks, 40 for example, to describe or explore ethical issues, make normative judgments (based on broad assessment), to argue for specific solutions, 41 or to reflect on basic moral concepts. Accordingly, it could be argued that there is no clear or uniting methodology for all these tasks, but rather well-established methodologies within the various tasks of bioethics.…”

Do European smart city developers dream of GDPR-free countries? The pull of global megaprojects in the face of EU smart city compliance and localisation costs

“…Yet, ethics-based approaches to technology are criticised for being prone to ethics washing (Floridi, 2019, pp. 187-188;Metzinger, 2019), and vulnerable to a proliferation of overlapping ethics frameworks (Saetra & Danaher, 2022). Relevant principles, even if based on the content of fundamental rights (Smuha, 2019, p. 101;AI HLEG, 2019) are unenforceable (Hagendorff, 2020, p. 99).…”