We are all ethicists.
On Monday, October 9th, I presented to the Rocky Mountain A.I. Interest Group (RMAIIG) at the ATLAS building of CU Boulder. I shared some thoughts and ideas around Ethics and participated on a Q&A panel on the topic of A.I. I also launched my latest project: The Boulder Coalition for Human-Centric A.I.
The discussion was focussed around the following ideas:
(1) As humans, we have the capacity to express our feelings, make connections, employ empathy, and guide our actions with a unique combination of both intelligence and emotions. This is a very good thing. We are creative, ambitious, and our unique "H.I.", human intelligence which includes our E.Q (Emotional Quotient) works in very unique ways.
(2) As humans we have common wants and needs that are related to our physical state (food, clothing, shelter, security) and our emotional state (love, belonging, esteem). Anyone who has taken a high school or undergrad psychology course will remember this: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
(3) "How" we go about satisfying our wants and needs and "how" our actions impact others as we do is essentially the realm of Ethics. WE ARE ALL ETHICISTS.
(5) Ethics is a human endeavor and can be quite simply defined as “What we owe to each other” in our day to day interactions in society.
(6) We are all ethicists. Ethics is essentially the pursuit of fairness. It is not just for academics, spiritual leaders, lawyers, and legal scholars. While we all have an intuitive sense for what is fair, sometimes finding fairness can be quite challenging. Life presents complex situations where all the facts are not readily available or the motivations of another person or group is not transparent. Complicating things further is our our particular biases which prevent us from seeing the forest from the trees. We must often we seek impartial opinions from trusted and reasonable 3rd parties or understand the problem from another persons perspective to appreciate what is fair.
Ethics is the practice and process of finding fairness when we interact with one another. It can be as easy as providing a reasonable explanation and defensible rationale for our actions or statements. A reasonable explanation is one that is consistent with the facts and satisfies an objective, impartial, and reasonable 3rd party or group. This simple ethical framework is a foundation for "finding fairness" and can expand into more complex systems. Our legal or justice system with a trial by jury (a group of reasonable peers). But what happens when a law is unfair or unethical?
Antonio Demásio, the neurobiologist, states it perfectly, "Human beings are "feeling" and emotional creatures with a capacity to think, not thinking creatures with a capacity to feel." While our emotions often serve us and are critical for our happiness and survival, they also make us susceptible to in-group thinking and can lead us to misguided intentions and unfair outcomes. We wade into the waters of unethical behaviors when one or more stakeholders in an ethical dilemma or issue are impacted in a manner that would be deemed unreasonable and unfair by a group of impartial observers. This is where an ethical framework for thinking comes in handy:
Any ethical challenge or issue where fairness is questioned by a stakeholder (someone impacted by the issue) can be more closely examined to determine "what is fair".
We can apply a simple method or framework to guide our thinking:
What is the ethical issue or challenge and what are all the facts?
Who are the people that are involved in this issue? (stakeholders) and who is impacted and how?
What were all of the options for action and how did each stakeholder behave?
What is the ethical decision (opinion about that action) and how did we arrive at it?
Can we find reasonable agreement from all of the stakeholders? Would an impartial 3rd party also agree on the opinion?
What will we do moving forward to monitor the system/community to see that the challenge was addressed, those impacted were compensated, or the issue will not surface again?
This simple framework can help guide a more systematic approach to examining any ethical issues (including those in and around data and A.I.) and help us arrive at an ethical decision. At the end of the day, we have an intuitive sense for what is fair and when our actions and their impacts are transparent, it allows for others in our community or group to either support or condemn our behavior based on their sense of what is reasonable and fair. Ethics is quite simply “What We Owe to Each Other.” (T.M Scanlon, Belnap/Harvard Press)
While we are all intuitively "ethicists", ethical thinking takes some practice and thought and the framework above is useful. If anyone is interested in digging deeper and learning more about ethics go to the www.bchcai.org website for a list of readings and resources that you might find useful.
Also a big thanks to Brad Wendel and the staff at Cornell University Law School whose online "Business Ethics" Certificate program provided the refresher and foundational knowledge for this article. I would recommend this program to anyone interested in ethics.