Howdy all,
Last week was a stressful time for many Americans like myself, and honestly, I just need some time to recover and catch my breath. I haven’t been reading much as a result, so, this week’s missive is going to be different.
Instead of the usual curated list, I want to discuss two items I recently ran across, two items that really grabbed my attention, and left me thinking about them long after I put them down. Two essays that ask difficult ethical questions, but that couldn’t be more different in their approach to answering them.
As always, you can find back issues of The Ethical Technologist in the archives. And if you found this issue thought-provoking and informative, don’t forget to share!
Let’s begin with a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review.
Eric Siegel’s title for his essay poses is an interesting question, but his handling of it is disappointing. Siegel offers a few pat examples of iffy targeted advertising and companies tracking employee behavior for dodgy reasons, before criticizing China’s use of facial recognition to identify and track Uighurs (something truly worth criticizing).
But he immediately backs away from any real ethical digging into the question he poses:
> It’s a real challenge to draw the line as to which predictive objectives pursued with machine learning are unethical, let alone which should be legislated against, if any. But, at the very least, it’s important to stay vigilant for when machine learning serves to empower a preexisting unethical practice, and also for when it generates data that must be handled with care.
This kind of is designed to make corporate executives feel good: “At least we’re not in the business of repressing minorities”, “Of course we wouldn’t take on any project that represented a liability risk”. But it doesn’t challenge us to be better people, and it doesn’t offer us a way of thinking about these problems that moves the conversation forward. Siegel never asks us to move beyond superficialities.
It’s the Harvard Business Review, yes—they’re not exactly in the business of challenging the status quo, I understand. But the very act of raising these kinds of questions is a challenge to the status quo, and if we fail to follow through in our thinking, we’ve done something wrong. If our follow-through is designed to reassure us, rather than revel in the challenge, we’ve done something horribly wrong indeed.
The contrast case here comes from a completely different place: Ethics in photography.
Street photography is a genre of art that often relies on taking candid portraits of people in public, usually without their permission. This practice is very much legal in the United States (less so in Europe). But of course there is a long-standing debate over the ethics of privacy—a debate that has largely been confined to the nearly homogeneous community of white men who practice this art. And more often than not, that debate devolves into questions of mere legality. In this video essay, Jamie Windsor wants to break out of this stale discussion:
> I think there’s a danger of thinking: It’s legal, therefore someone has done the ethical thinking for me, therefore I am exempt of all responsibility for my actions.
Instead, Windsor attempts to inject some actual ethical thinking into the conversation. He asks a hard question: Is this style of street photography unethical? But instead of throwing his hands up in the air, he wrangles with the question. And he rapidly sees through the superficial analysis to something more insightful. Windsor reflects on the fact that certain photographic practice makes him uneasy, and grapples with why that is.
In the end, he stakes out a bold claim: Street photography as a practice is designed to form an empathic connection between the photographer and viewer, and the subject of the photograph. And this idea can be used as a guiding principle when deciding whether to take someone’s portrait: Are we using the subject as a means, or are we treating them with dignity and respect? Does it reinforce that empathic bond, or strip it away?
Unlike the first essay, we walk away from this one with a better understanding of an ethical problem.
Two essays that both purport to tackle difficult ethical questions. The easy approach is to throw our hands up and say it’s difficult and leave the question there. The hard approach is to admit it’s complicated and nuanced, try to understand why that is, and reason about a set of principles we can use to guide our behavior.
We’re often confronted with ethical questions, in our work or outside. It’s so easy for us to ignore our own discomfort, and find excuses not to confront the difficulty head on. It’s easy to create a narrative that keeps us in our comfort zone, that reassures us that we’re doing as best we can. But this kind of thinking leads only to stagnation, to more of the same, to a reaffirmation of the status quo.
My challenge to you then is this: Just once this week, find such a moment of discomfort, and get out of your comfort zone. Instead of dodging that discomfort, feel it. Reflect on the source of that discomfort. Move beyond superficialities. See if there is an underlying value that maybe you didn’t know was there, and take it out and look at it and get to know it. Recognize that value, write it down, and have it at the ready for the next time you need it. I’ll be trying to do the same.
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One last word! Keep sending me your finds, as next week’s issue is dedicated to sharing what’s caught your attention. I’m looking forward to sharing the content that moves you! Share with me by either replying to this email, or pinging me on Twitter. And as always, if you enjoyed this issue, share with your friends!
Until next time,
yours,
Don Goodman-Wilson