Applied Ethics

Special Emphasis
Technology and Ethics
Applied Ethics
 Applied Ethics - Examples

• Animal Ethics: e.g.: Is it permissible to eat meat?

• Biomedical Ethics: e.g.: On whom are we allowed to perform medical tests?
• Business Ethics: e.g.: Do corporations have moral status?
• Environmental Ethics: e.g.: Ought we curb climate change for the sake of future
generations?
• Information Ethics: e.g.: May I pirate music?
• Law: e.g.: Should personal, recreational drug use be illegal?
• Philosophy of the Family: e.g.: What do children owe their parents?
• Practical Distributive Justice: e.g.: To what extent ought we give to charity?
• Procreative Ethics: e.g.: Is it permissible to abort a fetus?
• Sexual Ethics: e.g.: Should prostitution be legal?
 Applied Ethics - How Used
• Applied ethicists are more concerned with particular cases
• They aim to apply their ethical training to the study of actual ethical
situations, and to draw conclusions
• Philosophers who study applied ethics look to the world around them
and analyze the ethical problems they find.
• By doing so, the applied ethicist is able to use philosophy as a tool to
address important moral issues in various practical disciplines.
Technology and Ethics
 Technology and Ethics
• Last year, major tech players Facebook and Google faced ethical crises
because they disregarded the private information of their users.
• Similarly, the public was outraged that Amazon licensing biased facial
recognition software to police departments around the country.
• Who exactly is to blame
• How can the public trust that the tech companies will keep their
information safe?
 Why Ethics needed in Technology

• Gartner believes that digital ( technology) ethics and privacy is one of

the top trends in technology
• Even more importantly, they need to be conscious of how their
decisions can disrupt society
• Tech companies need to take into consideration how their software
development affects user privacy
• Surprisingly, it’s the tech company employees themselves who are
proactively taking steps to come up with ethics policies.
 Why Ethics needed in Technology

• Google employees have asked for a company policy that says they
wouldn’t use Artificial Intelligenceto develop weapons or
technologies whose main purpose is to hurt people. They’re
concerned that some technology used in government contracts could
be used to violate basic human rights
• These concerns are all legitimate, given the global power of the
internet to transmit information.
• Many professions are driven by a code of ethics. Medinr is a great
example, with the golden rule being “First, do no harm”.
 Why Ethics needed in Technology

• It also curbs advancement without considering outcomes. For

example, just because we can clone a human being doesn’t mean we
should. It’s not the ability that stops cloning. It’s the ethics.
• Ethics boards are there to ensure patient safety and deter historical
moral failures, such as medical experimentation without patient
consent.
• The technology industry has no such code of ethics.
• Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted how a lack of
ethics can cause serious damage to societies, and even threaten
democracies.
 Why Ethics needed in Technology

• As technology creates self-driving cars, what is the code of ethics

behind the car’s decision making?
• As Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning begin to drive many of
our online experiences, ethics become even more important.
• For example, if AI is used in employment decisions, would it
automatically eliminate women who are most likely to have a child in
the coming years? Would it eliminate people with disabilities?
• If we do not think through these scenarios in advance, we leave open
the possibility for unethical outcomes.
 Why Ethics needed in Technology
• New facial recognition programs also give rise to ethical problems. Tracking
human beings by their face means companies can track everywhere they go,
who they meet and possibly assume patterns of association.
• For example, you may not be a criminal, but what if you happened to visit the
same coffee shop as a criminal on more than one occasion? Would you be falsely
profiled as a criminal?
• Aaragya Setu hue and cry was our recent experiene of Govt tracking the
movement of its citizens
• The problem with the technology industry today is despite the number of
intelligent minds driving the world’s greatest innovations, there are no great
minds considering the consequences of those innovations or mitigating the risks.
 Why Ethics needed in Technology

• Self-regulation through a code of ethics seems to be the optimal

solution since Government does not have the understanding of the
technology and its fastness of change
• IT Industry must come together to solve the ethics vacuum in
technology or risk unwarranted and useless regulation (by Govt)
attempts by those who do not possess the in-depth expertise
• The time has come for us to step up and take responsibility for what
we have created and will create.
 Why Ethics needed in Technology
• How much can we allow machines to replace humans? These questions
sketch technology as a force that needs to be contained for the good of
mankind.
• Hans Jonas, a German-born Jewish philosopher - His ecological imperative is
a simple request to inventors and users around the globe: “Act in a way that
the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of real
human life on earth.”
• Both tanks and flamethrowers had been previously conceptualized, but
were used in WW I
• The discovery of nuclear fusion by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz
Strassmann enabled the development of nuclear bombs used in WW II.
Light Humour on Privacy
Technological innovations
 Technological innovations
• Researchers have been actively working on computer vision
algorithms that can determine the emotions and intent of humans,
along with making other inferences,
• Emotion recognition technology is an extension of facial recognition
• If people rely on a system that isn’t accurate in making decisions, the
users of that system are worse off.
• It’s also well-known that humans tend to trust these systems more
than other authority figures.
• These Technology is already being used in multiple domains