Ethics Right From the Start

The end of the year 2021 brought an extraordinary announcement that a technological genie was being shoved back into its bottle: Facebook (now: Meta) stopped using the facial-recognition software that allows it to automatically detect and tag people in photos and videos. Over the decade in which this capability has been in place, over a third of its users had set their profiles to allow the site to create a template to spot their face and use that identification in various ways. Now, those individual templates, numbering over a billion, are all deleted.

The company’s pledge is interesting and important because this was a move based on one thing: ethics. But for anyone focused on that topic, the dismaying aspect of the news is that decade of prior use. If the software is so at odds with the set of moral principles that should govern a tech company’s behavior, why did it take so long to figure that out? Couldn’t anyone see this clash coming?

The Role of Ethics

The mistake is extraordinary in its scale but all too typical of how organizations bring ethics into their decision-making: it is far too often a distant afterthought. On one level, this is an issue of roles. Most people working on digital transformations in organizations—let alone developing the relevant technologies—are not the same people who think of themselves as ethically responsible for corporate conduct. To the extent the word ethics comes up in their daily lives, it is most often in a reference to someone else’s job—perhaps their company has a “chief ethics officer”—or to a brief training module their compliance group obliges them to sit through on a screen. Often, their experience of the word feels like a threat. At the end of an exciting project to develop a new digital innovation, few teams like to hear that “before we can launch, we have to run it by the ethics people.”

This tendency to see ethics as an obstructing voice, slowing things down or preventing new tech offerings by asking critical questions, becomes more of a problem as innovation moves faster. The intervals for new technologies get smaller and smaller and their breakthrough applications rush the markets. Conceived as an afterthought, ethical questions can only play the role of a spoiler—and potentially a magnet for negative public attention. This means as long as ethics responds to innovation, it will constantly be outpaced. And time will be wasted on development efforts that were ethically flawed from the start.

Worse, by getting around to ethical considerations at the end of an innovation process instead of putting them front and center from the beginning, companies are undoubtedly missing opportunities to develop the technologies that would benefit the world most.

Interaction Between Ethics and Technology

The relationship of ethics and technology should be understood as reciprocal, with each contributing to the other. Applications of groundbreaking technologies often reshape the ethical environment by creating new solutions to societal challenges and new value. At the same time, scientists and technologists all perform their work within an ethically informed context. Meanwhile, ethics contributes to technology by stimulating technological innovation, by recognizing technological inventions, and by providing ethical guidance.

Ethics Enabling Technology

We could go even further to state that ethics belongs to technology. Horizons of meaning and ethical ends inform technology in an ethical sense. Ethics should be considered right from the start because of the very nature of technology as a human creation. As agendas are set for technology research and development, what other than ethics should guide the priorities?

Ethics bears on technology even by setting the parameters in which research, discussions, and studies can be conducted. No one should delude themselves that freedom of research cannot be infringed. New ideas and discoveries have always faced suppression on ethical grounds, because they represent challenges to putative “absolute truths” or undermine the enforcement of economic or political power structures. Even in today’s world, the danger of members of the technology community not being able to conduct their research freely and independently still exists.

Ethics can be useful in another way, by interrogating the often vague or hyperbolic claims associated with new technologies. From the ethicist’s standpoint, for example, even the term “artificial intelligence” deserves serious pushback, because it implies a faithful imitation of human intelligence, when the technology is actually limited to the simulation of only certain cognitive capacities. Moral capability is, for example, one of the areas of human intelligence which “artificial intelligence” cannot achieve due to its lack of freedom and autonomy.

Peter G. Kirchschlaeger is Ethics-Professor and Director of the Institute of Social Ethics ISE at the University of Lucerne, Visiting Professor at the ETH AI Center of the ETH Zurich, and author of Ethical Decision-Making (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag, 2023) and Digital Transformation and Ethics: Ethical Considerations on the Robotization and Automatization of Society and Economy and the Use of Artificial Intelligence (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag, 2021).

Read more on this topic in the Business and Human Rights Journal.