Enactive Principles for the Ethics of User Interactions on Social Media: How to Overcome Systematic Misunderstandings Through Shared Meaning-Making

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital environment and the particular nature of user interactions: disembodied, asynchronous, and ambiguous intent about the target audience. I argue that, by contrast to face to face interactions, additional factors make it more difficult for users to exercise moral sensitivity in an online environment. An ethics for social media user interactions is ultimately an ethics of human relations mediated by a particular environment; hence I look towards an enactive inspired ethics in formulating principles for human interactions online to enhance or at least do not hinder a user’s moral sensitivity. This enactive take on social media ethics supplements classical moral frameworks by asking us to focus on the relations established through the interactions and the environment created by those interactions.

APLICACIÓN DE LA CELULOSA BACTERIANA EN EL DISEÑO DE PRODUCTOS: UN CAMINO A LA SUSTENTABILIDAD

Los niveles de contaminación ambiental provocados por la industria han sobrepasado la capacidad del planeta, en este resultado tiene una responsabilidad importante el diseñador de productos, por ello juega un papel sustancial la ética del diseñador en lo que respecta a la sustentabilidad. Las innovaciones de los biomateriales brindan una oportunidad en esa reivindicación, es así que, la investigación pretende a través de la aplicación de la celulosa bacteriana obtener nuevas posibilidades para la industria del diseño y cuidado del medio ambiente reduciendo los niveles de basura que generan los materiales comunes, debido a que este material celulósico es considerado como sustentable y de carácter renovable. Se planteó el desarrollo de los productos a través de la ruta metodológica ARZ, que coloca los criterios de sustentabilidad como eje de inicio y final al momento de plasmar la necesidad, ideación, venta, uso y desuso del nuevo producto. Como resultado se obtuvo un biomaterial con características fisicoquímicas y mecánicas que permitieron la aplicación en tres series de productos: calzado, carteras y bisutería. La sustentabilidad es la opción del nuevo pensamiento productivo del diseño y de los diseñadores, es decir, crear con responsabilidad social y ambiental. Palabras clave: Celulosa bacteriana, biomateriales, diseño ético, diseño sustentable, diseño de producto. AbstractThe levels of environmental pollution caused by the industry have exceeded the capacity of the planet. The product designer has an important responsibility for this result, therefore, the ethic of the designer takes a substantial role related to sustainability. The innovations of biomaterials provide an opportunity in this claim, and so, this research aims to obtain new possibilities for the design industry and care for the environment through the application of bacterial cellulose in order to reduce the levels of waste that is generated by the common materials because this cellulosic material is considered sustainable and renewable. The development of the products was proposed through the ARZ methodological route that places the sustainability criteria as the starting and ending axis at the moment of reflecting the need, ideation, sale, use, and obsolescence of the new product. Consequently, a biomaterial is obtained with physicochemical and mechanical characteristics that allowed its application in three series of products: footwear, handbags, and costume jewelry. Sustainability is the option of the new productive thought of the design, as well as the designers; that means, creating with social and environmental responsibility.Keywords: Bacterial cellulose, biomaterials, ethical design, product design, sustainable design.

Applying Ethical AI Frameworks in practice: Evaluating conversational AI chatbot solutions

Ethical AI frameworks are designed to encourage the accountability, responsibility and transparency of AI applications. They provide principles for ethical design. To be truly transparent, it should be clear to the user of the AI application that the designers followed responsible AI principles. In order to test how easy it is for a user to assess the responsibility of an AI system and to understand the differences between ethical AI frameworks, we evaluated four commercial chatbots against four responsible AI frameworks. We found that the ethical frameworks produced quite different assessment scores. Many ethical AI frameworks contain requirements/principles that are difficult to evaluate for anyone except the chatbot developer. Our results also show that domain-specific ethical AI guidelines are easier to use and yield more practical insights than domain-independent frameworks. We conclude that ethical AI researchers should focus on studying specific domains and not AI as a whole, and that ethical AI guidelines should focus more on creating measurable standards and less on stating high level principles.

Ethics and Values in Design: A Structured Review and Theoretical Critique

A variety of approaches have appeared in academic literature and in design practice representing “ethics-first” methods. These approaches typically focus on clarifying the normative dimensions of design, or outlining strategies for explicitly incorporating values into design. While this body of literature has developed considerably over the last 20 years, two themes central to the endeavour of ethics and values in design (E + VID) have yet to be systematically discussed in relation to each other: (a) designer agency, and (b) the strength of normative claims informing the design process. To address this gap, we undertook a structured review of leading E + VID approaches and critiques, and classified them according to their positions on normative strength, and views regarding designer agency. We identified 18 distinct approaches and 13 critiques that met the inclusion criteria for our review. Included papers were distributed across the spectrum of views regarding normative strength, and we found that no approaches and only one critique represented a view characteristic of “low” designer agency. We suggest that the absence of “low” designer agency approaches results in the neglect of crucial influences on design as targets of intervention by designers. We conclude with suggestions for future research that might illuminate strategies to achieve ethical design in information mature societies, and argue that without attending to the tensions raised by balancing normatively “strong” visions of the future with limitations imposed on designer agency in corporate-driven design settings, “meaningful” ethical design will continue to encounter challenges in practice.

Advantages, Challenges and Limitations of Audit Experiments with Constituents

Audit experiments examining the responsiveness of public officials have become an increasingly popular tool used by political scientists. While these studies have brought significant insight into how public officials respond to different types of constituents, particularly those from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, audit studies have also been controversial due to their frequent use of deception. Scholars have justified the use of deception by arguing that the benefits of audit studies ultimately outweigh the costs of deceptive practices. Do all audit experiments require the use of deception? This article reviews audit study designs differing in their amount of deception. It then discusses the organizational and logistical challenges of a UK study design where all letters were solicited from MPs’ actual constituents (so-called confederates) and reflected those constituents’ genuine opinions. We call on researchers to avoid deception, unless necessary, and engage in ethical design innovation of their audit experiments, on ethics review boards to raise the level of justification of needed studies involving fake identities and misrepresentation, and on journal editors and reviewers to require researchers to justify in detail which forms of deception were unavoidable.

Navigating the ethics of remote research data collection

COVID-19 has accelerated broad trends already in place toward remote research data collection and monitoring. This move implicates novel ethical and regulatory challenges which have not yet received due attention. Existing work is preliminary and does not seek to identify or grapple with the issues in a rigorous and sophisticated way. Here, we provide a framework for identifying and addressing challenges that we believe can help the research community realize the benefits of remote technologies while preserving ethical ideals and public trust. We organize issues into several distinct categories and provide points to consider in a table that can help facilitate ethical design and review of research studies using remote health instruments.

Ethics as a Service: A Pragmatic Operationalisation of AI Ethics

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning (ML), has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment from AI harms. In response to this realisation, there has been a proliferation of principle-based ethics codes, guidelines and frameworks. However, it has become increasingly clear that a significant gap exists between the theory of AI ethics principles and the practical design of AI systems. In previous work, we analysed whether it is possible to close this gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of AI ethics through the use of tools and methods designed to help AI developers, engineers, and designers translate principles into practice. We concluded that this method of closure is currently ineffective as almost all existing translational tools and methods are either too flexible (and thus vulnerable to ethics washing) or too strict (unresponsive to context). This raised the question: if, even with technical guidance, AI ethics is challenging to embed in the process of algorithmic design, is the entire pro-ethical design endeavour rendered futile? And, if no, then how can AI ethics be made useful for AI practitioners? This is the question we seek to address here by exploring why principles and technical translational tools are still needed even if they are limited, and how these limitations can be potentially overcome by providing theoretical grounding of a concept that has been termed ‘Ethics as a Service.’

Robot Care Ethics Between Autonomy and Vulnerability: Coupling Principles and Practices in Autonomous Systems for Care

Technological developments involving robotics and artificial intelligence devices are being employed evermore in elderly care and the healthcare sector more generally, raising ethical issues and practical questions warranting closer considerations of what we mean by “care” and, subsequently, how to design such software coherently with the chosen definition. This paper starts by critically examining the existing approaches to the ethical design of care robots provided by Aimee van Wynsberghe, who relies on the work on the ethics of care by Joan Tronto. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to their non-principled approach, an alternative suited to tackling some of the issues raised by Tronto and van Wynsberghe, while allowing for the inclusion of two orientative principles. Our proposal centres on the principles of autonomy and vulnerability, whose joint adoption we deem able to constitute an original revision of a bottom-up approach in care ethics. Conclusively, the ethical framework introduced here integrates more traditional approaches in care ethics in view of enhancing the debate regarding the ethical design of care robots under a new lens.