Abstract
Weaponized in support of deregulation and self-regulation, “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. The author defines “ethics bashing” as the parallel tendency to trivialize ethics and moral philosophy. Underlying these two attitudes are a few misunderstandings: (1) philosophy is understood in opposition and as alternative to law, political representation, and social organizing; (2) philosophy and “ethics” are perceived as formalistic, vulnerable to instrumentalization, and ontologically flawed; and (3) moral reasoning is portrayed as mere “ivory tower” intellectualization of complex problems that need to be dealt with through other methodologies. This article 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 simplification and seeing ethics as a mode of inquiry that facilitates the evaluation of competing tech policy strategies. We must resist reducing moral philosophy's role and instead must celebrate its special worth as a mode of knowledge-seeking and inquiry. Far from mandating self-regulation, moral philosophy facilitates the scrutiny of various modes of regulation, situating them in legal, political, and economic contexts. Moral philosophy indeed can explainin the relationship between technology and other worthy goals and can situate technology within the human, the social, and the political.
Highlights
On May 26th, 2019, Google announced that it would put in place an external advisory council for the responsible development of AI, the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC).[1]
Beyond AI ethics councils or AI Ethics researchers, the ethics washing critique extends to corporate practices that have tended to co-opt the value of ethical work: the hiring of in-house moral philosophers who have little power to shape internal company policies; the careful selection of employees that will not question the status quo; the focus on humane design—e.g., nudging users to reduce time spent on apps—that does not address the risks inherent in tech products themselves;[9] the funding of “fair” machine learning systems combined to the defunding of work on algorithmic systems that questions the broader impacts of those systems on society.[10, 11]
The technology community’s criticism and scrutiny of instances of ethics washing, when imprecise, have sometimes bordered into the opposite fallacy, which the author calls “ethics bashing”. This is a tendency, common amongst non-philosophers, to simplify the issues around tech “ethics” and “moral philosophy” either by drawing a sharp distinction between ethics and law and defining ethics as that which operates in the absence of law[12] or by conflating all forms of moral inquiry with routine politics, for instance by merging or drawing artificial separations between the frameworks of “ethics”, “justice”, and “political action”.[13, 14]
Summary
On May 26th, 2019, Google announced that it would put in place an external advisory council for the responsible development of AI, the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC).[1]. The term has been used by companies as an acceptable façade that justifies deregulation, selfregulation or market driven governance, and is increasingly identified with technology companies’ selfinterested adoption of appearances of ethical behavior Such growing instrumentalization of ethical language by tech companies has been called “ethics washing”.[8] Beyond AI ethics councils or AI Ethics researchers, the ethics washing critique extends to corporate practices that have tended to co-opt the value of ethical work: the hiring of in-house moral philosophers who have little power to shape internal company policies; the careful selection of employees that will not question the status quo; the focus on humane design—e.g., nudging users to reduce time spent on apps—that does not address the risks inherent in tech products themselves;[9] the funding of “fair” machine learning systems combined to the defunding of work on algorithmic systems that questions the broader impacts of those systems on society.[10, 11].
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