Assignment #1

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Ethics Can Help: Towards a Framework for Digital Ethics

5.1 The contribution of ethics

What can ethics contribute to this debate? What are the ethical issues relating to cybersecurity, privacy and big data?

Digital ethics aims to understand how subjects – human beings, organisations, computers, software, connected objects, drones and robots, etc. – must act and behave towards each other and those around them. As noted in the Introduction, digital ethics will also have to deal with decisions made by autonomous systems.

Increasingly, the digital world throws up issues that challenge our most fundamental conceptions of human rights, such as the right to security, to privacy and human dignity, and to freedom of expression and information. It is not simply a matter of needing to balance one right against another. Arguably, the challenges are now so profound and wide-ranging that we need to radically rethink our approach to human rights for the digital age.

Digital ethics precedes and extends law, which largely tracks the evolution of digital behaviour with regulation, more often than not endorsing fait accompli usage.28 We need to think more deeply than that. It is necessary to create rules very early on, for example on whistleblowers and other forms of behaviour that challenge accountability and transparency, in order that everyone acts with best intentions in the digital world, without disturbing others and the environment.

In its debates around security and privacy DigEnlight has identified many issues and relationships with an ethical dimension. Some of the most significant are:

1) Disempowerment and loss of human agency: In our technologically- oriented society, almost every action we are able to take (what ethicists call our ‘agency’) is mediated, either through technology, such as computers, phones etc., or through third parties, such as banks, the retail supply chain, telcos, Internet service providers, identity providers, and so on. Ethically, the fact that what we do is mediated often moves us further from the

28 Floridi (2013)

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 6 . I O S P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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Ethics Can Help: Towards a Framework for Digital Ethics

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consequences of our decisions and actions. Even more fundamentally, the prevalence of technology-mediated phenomena distances us from societal norms such as equality, fairness, and justice, and so challenges our core understanding of what it means to be human. The asymmetry in power between individuals/users and service providers (both commercial and public) leaves us feeling disempowered and that we are losing our human agency. Can we design systems that empower users and so restore human agency, and what does this mean in reality?

2) The ethics of non-human agents: A growing number of digital agents are non-human and in some cases are increasingly capable of autonomy (robots, drones, self-driving cars, etc.). Algorithms are responsible for decisions in a wide range of areas these days (for example in stock marketing trading), and any algorithm that makes decisions is not ethically neutral. Some algorithms are adaptive, able to learn and adjust their behaviour over time. We have to understand how such actors affect us and our societies. Autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars will react to changing conditions and deal with circumstances that they have never encountered before, without human intervention. Does it make sense to think of these technological systems as ethical agents in their own right? Is there a fundamental ethical principle based on ‘global’ human values? What is the ethical status of machines that are increasingly autonomous and might even, at some point, be described as conscious?

3) The ethics of platforms and eco-systems: As more and more activities come to be mediated by technology, the platforms by which that mediation takes place are increasingly influential. They articulate themselves carefully to users, clients, advertisers and policy-makers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in society should be understood. In effect, platforms are becoming curators of public discourse and values. Yet the ethical implications of this change have received little attention. Again, much of the influence of platforms is due to the power of hidden – and unknowable – algorithms. Algorithms are not the same as software code, which is (or can be) made visible and subject to intellectual property laws. They underlie the methodologies and business models of the digital world. Facebook’s algorithms, for example, choose which pictures and adverts users are shown when they login, giving them enormous power over users. This has important consequences as Facebook evolves from a social media network to a commercial platform funded primarily by advertising. There is a risk that we are unable to define the ownership of

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