The Ethical Issue
Ethics are boring. That’s the way ethical quandaries are often presented—as the tedious truths you’d rather not have to think about, the still small voice that ruins your fun. If anything, ethics demands that we not just be present to the moment, but rather look to consequences, supply chains, fair trade, behind-the-scenes exploitation, and other considerations that can cool our enthusiasm and weigh on our conscience. And even that presumes that in advanced global capitalism we can know enough the implications of our consumption habits to make sound ethical choices in the first place.
The U.S. sitcom The Good Place played around with this theme to great effect; in it, Chidi Anagonye—a nice guy and painstakingly conscientious Professor of Moral Philosophy who agonized over doing the right thing—wound up in hell anyway, in part because of his crippling indecisiveness (too worried about making the ethical choice to do much of anything, good or bad), but also because given the complex Afterlife points system that dictated who went to heaven and who was tortured for eternity, it was impossible to track the ultimate and varied ripple effects of any given action.
So in the absence of clear answers to many of today’s ethical dilemmas, what’s a person who aspires to do no harm supposed to do? It’s been suggested that the rise of conspiracy theories we’re seeing around the world are in part a result of ethics fatigue—for those who believe in them, they provide “exits from dilemmas,” an escape from feeling responsible for the state of the world (as all adults should) while also overwhelmed by the available choices.
But I wonder: Can we get beyond the tired framing of ethical choices as a kind of abstinence from something it would be more pleasurable or profitable to do? Can we see making the right ethical choice as an act that frees us up to be our best and highest selves, and helps others do the same?
As someone whose “Don’t tell me what to do!” reflex is easily triggered, I’m not eager to be lectured, and I don’t like feeling guilty. I buy from Amazon regularly, even though my beliefs strongly suggest I shouldn’t, and I think many of us are the same. We trade a clear conscience for convenience some of the time, we take Ubers but leave big tips, and get on with our day.
This week, however, let’s consider what might happen if we jettisoned our usual strategies for avoiding ethical decisions, be it willful ignorance, denial, or aestheticism. From vaccine passports that compound existing privileges to the crazy-high profit potential of being a cute child on social media, from retraining engineers away from “extractive literacy” to “ethical literacy” to anticipating the yet-unknown physiological, cognitive, and behavioral effects of Extended Reality technologies, there’s a lot to ponder. Rarely in recent history have the ethical quandaries before us seemed so palpable, so tied to systemic justice or injustice.
Making ethics sexy again, that’s the goal this week.
—Megan Hustad
PS. Lots to discuss around ethics: join our voice-message-only Telegram group; drop in to our Clubhouse room on “The Dark Side of CRISPR” on Wednesday; take part in the Living Room Session on “Extended Reality (XR) Ethics” on Thursday; and, finally, do the right thing and become a Resident of the House of Beautiful Business to have access to many more experiences and insights on a regular basis.
First, some questions for you
Who are the three most important people in the world to you, at this moment?
Does your selection surprise you?
Are you good at disagreeing with others?
How often do you think of the consequences of your actions?
When was the last time you lied?
When was the last time you cheated?
Do you believe everything, or everyone, has a price?
How important is winning to you?
Who has lost because you won?
What products do you buy from ethically questionable brands, if any, and why?
Do you think robots have rights?
Should we treat them the way we treat pets?
Have you ever harmed someone else on purpose?
Can you forgive?
On the deathbed, what will be your greatest regret?
With all that in mind, here are seven ethical issues confronting us now. Where do you stand?
1. No jab, no nothing
Thesis:
Intersectional solidarity, not vaccine nationalism, will carry us out of this pandemic.
Choice:
Acting on your privileges vs. considering who gets harmed
For example:
Israel, U.S., the EU, and other countries
One year into the pandemic, COVID-19 vaccinations are progressing, at different speeds around the world, with Israel leading the race and many African countries, including Liberia, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan, being left behind and coming to a halt in distribution due to “constraints around funding, planning and human resource shortages,” Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said.
This new pandemic divide—between the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated—stands at the cusp of being accelerated through vaccination certificates. Here’s where the “vaccine passport” conversation stands: The Biden administration, the British government, and the European Union are considering their feasibility; Australia, Denmark, and Sweden have committed to implementation; and Israel already issuing vaccinated residents “green passes,” which function as a ticket to the free world of social life, travelling, and the return to the office.
Vaccination and its privileges has begun to propel a first wave of vaccine tourism within the U.S. Daniel Block writes in The Atlantic about the effects on New York’s Plattsburgh and other depressed localities with open vaccine appointments: “My Airbnb host during the second trip told me that, since the Plattsburgh site started giving out shots, more than half of her bookings had come from people visiting town to get a vaccine.”
Françoise Baylis, bioethicist and philosopher with whom we spoke in last week’s Clubhouse room, argued that both the roll-out of vaccines and the potentially attached certifications would further diverge societies and systems of oppression. She calls for “a public health ethic—centered on the common good and protecting the most vulnerable” instead of a focus on individual liberties for the privileged. The ethical question ties back to: Who has access to such certificates? Who can access the data for which purpose? Who will be left out, stigmatized, or discriminated against?
For employers and businesses, requiring vaccine certifications would come with a privacy issue, too, given that such private health data needs to remain protected against a large risk of fraud, counterfeiting, discrimination, and privacy violations. Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, and Alexandra Phelan, global health lawyer at Georgetown University, write:
“People around the world are eager for the pandemic to end, and those who are vaccinated are understandably eager to take advantage of the freedom that immunization promises. But any moves to institute vaccine passports must be coordinated internationally and should be coupled with global and equitable access to vaccines.”
Questions for you:
Check your privilege. Which policies could you put in place that avoid immunity-based discrimination at your workplace? And if you travel, ask yourself not just what rights you have, but what responsibilities come with them.
2. Is it child labor if it involves Instagram and piles of free toys?
Thesis:
Young or old, it’s hard to preserve innocence in the face of big money.
Choice:
Exploit the system as is vs. walk away from life-changing funding opportunities
For example:
PocketWatch
Ask a group of children what they want to be when they grow up, and you’ll probably hear a few “YouTubers.” Some probably already have their own channels.
But what if your child’s channel was pulling in millions of dollars a year for your family? Ryan Kaji (pictured above on products bearing his name) is nine years old. His main YouTube channel has 29 million subscribers and serves as the bedrock for licensing deals with companies including Walmart, Target, and Skechers footwear. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, products bearing “Ryan’s World” branding generated more than $250 million in sales in 2020 alone.
In traditional advertising, toy companies used children to show how much fun their products are. So as marketing models shifted from TV commercials to social media influencers, it made sense that children would still be the ones delivering the message. The difference is that it’s no longer a child actor being paid to play with a Barbie doll to make a 30-second spot that’s regulated by the government. It’s a child (actor or not) whose very real life has become a machine for corporate marketing plus the consumerist desires of all the other children watching.
“In Ryan’s family, they’re able to constantly consume content and products. They’re opening up a new toy every day, and subsequently playing with that new toy every day, so there’s this constant consumerism that’s being embedded within these messages for children,” remarks Benjamin Burroughs, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at UNLV who studies emerging and social media trends.
Some children are naturally attracted to entrepreneurship, or the idea that they can become a star. But as adults shepherding the licensing deals cash in on these still-developing desires, the potential moral hazards loom large. Sheila James Kuehl, former child star and co-author of the 1999 law that overhauled California’s labor protections for child performers, argues that people are taking advantage of the lack of regulations protecting children in this new space.
“It definitely is time to take a look at the ways parents or other adults are making money off the performance or work of minors,” Kuehl says. “The law needs to be amended to catch up with the technology.”
Questions for you:
Is a childhood spent becoming a celebrity inherently problematic, or does it depend? Should children whose caregivers’ tendencies tilt toward harmful exploitation be protected by force of law, “ruining the fun,” and stemming the cash flow, of others?
3. Software is killing the world
Thesis:
Doing your work beautifully is paramount, especially when digital technology removes you from the impact of your actions.
Choice:
Growth at all cost vs. valuing every single action
For example:
Volkswagen, Facebook, Boeing
Digital technology has shifted the focus of work ever more towards results. But processes that are purely goal-oriented are more difficult to moralize. Those who think of work in terms of the end (“What is important is what comes out of it”) are more generous from the outset with the means, or the HOW, and, if necessary, relax their minimum ethical standards. A Zen gardener who sweeps stones, on the other hand, knows that the quality of their work is manifested in every single action, that they must pay full attention to every detail, that it is a moral obligation to handle all aspects of their work—from planning to preparation, from execution to finishing—with care, that is, with emotion, devotion, and utmost concentration.
This philosophy, borrowed from Buddhism, was described by the late Robert Pirsig in his cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but it has regained urgency against recent scandals at Volkswagen, Facebook, and Boeing. Strict results-orientation led to a culture at all three companies that accepted moral compromises and subordinated quality awareness to demands such as speed and efficiency.
Driven to conquer market share and save the future of diesel engines in the face of stricter emission regulations, engineers and managers at Volkswagen misled millions of customers as well as their colleagues and the public.
Driven to grow more and more, faster and faster, Facebook under CEO Mark Zuckerberg consciously agreed to disregard users’ rights. The company’s proverbial “break things and move fast” motto also included deliberate collateral damage in the form of millions of affected individual fates, in particular the disclosure of personal data to third parties without the user’s permission or even their knowledge.
Finally, Boeing deliberately took shortcuts (such as not carrying out expensive pilot retraining) in the development of a software system for its 737 Max aircraft in order to get to market more quickly and catch up with its arch-rival Airbus. Two 737 Max aircraft crashed with a total of 346 fatalities. And new problems surfaced again in the past few days, with Boeing telling airlines to stop flying some 737 planes.
The journalist Paul Kedrosky argues in The New Yorker that the problem lies in the high degree of abstraction of work. If all companies become software companies, the only remaining link to the customer is often software. Far-reaching material and moral transgressions are often only virtual features in front of the computer. “Stealing CDs from stores feels like stealing. Stealing music by downloading MP3s was not a problem, at least not for a long time,” writes Kedrosky, who claims a direct correlation between a lack of physical immediacy and a lack of awareness of injustice. The same is true of the Dieselgate scandal at Volkswagen.
Question for you:
Will you nurture a culture that transcends mere results-orientation and honors HOW the work is done—beautifully, not just efficiently?
4. The sentimental education of engineers
Thesis:
Ethical literacy needs to replace “extractive” literacy, starting in tech.
Choice:
“Let’s build it because we can” vs. “Let’s not build it because we decided not to”
For example:
Google / Alphabet
In January, about 230 Google employees announced the formation of Alphabet Workers Union, after years of organizing and internal rumblings, as Coworker.org co-founder Jess Kutch shared in a conversation with us. Shortly after, two Google engineers, David Baker and Vinesh Kannan, quit over the dismissal of Timnit Gebru, former co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, after she sent an email expressing her frustrations to the company’s Brain Women and Allies listserv.
In a farewell note, David Baker, engineering director wrote:
“We cannot say we believe in making a more understanding, informed world, and then ignore how our products amplify biases. We cannot say we believe in diversity, and then ignore the conspicuous absence of many voices from within our walls.”
The call for a new “sentimental education,” including ethical literacy, is becoming louder in the tech industry.
“The ‘it’s not my job’ [to teach ethics alongside engineering] platitude is outdated, Marcel O’Gorman writes in The Conversation.
Meanwhile, Alphabet shareholder Trillium Asset Management is pushing Google to adopt better whistleblower protections suggesting that such policies must be put in place as part of a modern corporate culture that allows for such ethical challenges and critical thinking.
Question for you:
In the next meeting, will you encourage yourself and your colleagues to reflect upon how your product might amplify your biases?
5. Making this world a better place will no longer be enough
Thesis:
XR technologies will require us to develop new ethics for new experiences.
Choice:
A bigger world for greater selves vs. the ultimate manipulation machine fueled by surveillance capitalism
For example:
Oculus Rift, Valve, Google AR, Varjo XR-1
Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality—so-called Extended Reality (XR) technologies—are a double whammy. They concentrate our attention on all the ethical concerns we are already confronted with in the real world, while also constituting a set of new proprietary issues inherent to extended reality. On the one hand, XR applications demand us to address issues of ownership, value, tolerance, diversity, agency, privacy, and data control. On the other hand, they may fundamentally alter our sense of self, and have unprecedented physiological, cognitive, and behavioral effects on us.
At their best, XR experiences are escapes from reality, extended playing fields that offer users opportunities for reinvention across all aspects of the human experience: through alternate and more fluid selves, unstifled identity expression, and new social recognition and status. At their worst, they represent closed, ungoverned worlds with captive audiences exposed to unbridled surveillance capitalism. XR applications can foster imagination and offer positive alternate world experiences. They may desensitize us—or enrichen our sensory faculties. They can cause trauma—or heal us from trauma.
The XR Ethics Manifesto by cultural historian Kent Bye, first released in 2019, does a comprehensive job at mapping the full landscape of ethical issues related to XR.
House partner IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization of engineers, has further detailed the specific ethical (and political) issues related to XR in a chapter of its Ethically Aligned Design guidelines:
“The growing prevalence of augmented and virtual environments is set to extend our collective human cognizance. Our sense of physical identity, time, and agency will become subject to entirely new paradigms, where the gateways to these experiences might be controlled by interests other than that of ordinary citizens.”
XR designers can create complex interactive worlds whose eventual use may greatly deviate from the intended use, which makes the creator’s ethical awareness even more important, beyond legal or regulatory compliance. So what to do?
Ben Kenwright observes that complicating matters is the fact that “traditional moral responsibilities in the physical world do not necessarily translate to virtual worlds created by designers.”
As a consequence, XR creators must possess heightened traditional ethical awareness and acquire new ethical literacy specific to XR-inherent behaviors and impacts. And as XR applications become more embedded in the daily fabric of our lives, we all must become more ethically literate, too: as users or family, friends, partners, or colleagues of users.
Question for you:
In the future, which values and skills will you need not only to make this world a better place but that one, too?
PS. Interested in deeper immersion in XR Ethics? Then join us this Thursday, April 15, 6:00 pm CET for a special Living Room Session hosted in partnership with IEEE, featuring the aforementioned Kent Bye; Monique Morrow, the president and co-founder of Humanized Internet, a non-profit with a focus on digital identity and ethics in technology; tech ethicist Mathana; and John C. Havens, executive director of The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Sign up here.
6. Bad vibes around “good genes”
Thesis:
Shifting our view of biological human flaws will save what makes life beautiful.
Choice:
Alter humanity to perfection vs. embracing multiplicity
For example:
You or your child
CRISPR is one of gene technology’s most remarkable tools. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and having contributed to the development of diagnostic tests for COVID-19 last year, CRISPR promises to cure genetic diseases—quite literally erasing them from our bodies entirely. The market celebrates its momentum with rising stocks and investment in emerging businesses like Scribe Therapeutics, which recently received $100 million US to continue work on its gene editing treatments for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). The ethical question here is not so much a yes or no to CRISPR, but where to draw the line as gene-editing becomes more accessible. Who decides what the “best of humankind” should look like, and which diseases, features, and intellectual abilities get to stay and which we’d cut?
In our capitalistic societies, the deeper ethical challenge is the distribution of the technology, and the fear of “capitalist eugenics,” is how Walter Isaacson, author of The Codebreaker, refers to it in a podcast conversation with Ezra Klein: “Everybody can go to the genetic supermarket, and they can buy what they can afford. And companies will market cool things that you can get if you go to your fertility clinic and you’re given the shopping list from the genetic supermarket. And in the privacy of that genetic clinic—and they shut the door. They promise not to tell people what you chose. They say, what skin color do you want? What sexual orientation do you want? What height? What eye color? What IQ?”
Sandy Sufian and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, writing in Scientific American, argue that genome editing:
“...can also harmfully reduce human diversity and increase social inequality by editing out the kinds of people that medical science, and the society it has shaped, categorize as diseased or genetically contaminated—people like us who are understood as having bad genes. But we should be reminded that bad genes don’t necessarily lead to bad lives, just as good genes don’t necessarily lead to good lives. If CRISPR is put to use to eliminate rather than to treat genetic difference, we as a society would essentially instrumentalize this moralistic and reductionist assumption.”
Or to put it differently, in idealizing conformity and what’s perceived as “a perfect life,” we might accidentally cut away what makes life worth living in the first place.
Questions for you:
Look at yourself. What genetic traits would you consider altering? And would you, if you could?
7. Who wants to live forever?
Thesis:
As much as we seek to overpower nature, it will (and should) always win.
Choice:
Postpone death vs. practice humility in being alive today
For example:
Elon Musk, Alexey Turchin, Zoltan Istvan
Speaking about life, let’s turn to death. Although phrases “We are all going to die someday” or “We are all mortal” are commonly shared. As professor Jonathan Lear points out, they’re clichés “to tranquilize us out of any real encounter with how what we are saying targets us. Although we say ‘we,’ a stealthy I slips the noose.”
So if you could live forever, would you want to? Transhumanism, a movement to enhance the human condition beyond natural aging, wants to make it possible. Research into “hacking the code of life and cure aging” is being supported by Elon Musk (not surprising) and his work on NeuraLink, Silicon Valley even invented the Palo Alto Longevity Prize (not surprising either), and then there are people like Alexey Turchin, who have set out an immortality roadmap with multiple pathways forward into eternity (ok, wow). Hear more from Zoltan Istvan in conversation with Léa Steinacker, co-founder at ada, at the House annual gathering in 2018.
On Humanity+, also known as the World Transhumanist Association, explains its position on extending life with the following:
“If some people would still choose death, that’s a choice that is of course to be regretted, but nevertheless this choice must be respected. The transhumanist position on the ethics of death is crystal clear: death should be voluntary. This means that everybody should be free to extend their lives and to arrange for cryonic suspension of their de-animated bodies. It also means that voluntary euthanasia, under conditions of informed consent, is a basic human right.”
If these ideas take hold, what will this do to the idea of the natural timeline of generations coming and going? How will the social stigma on suicide and euthanasia stand?
We might not need to worry, given the fact that we might be closer to extinction than we’d realized—precisely because of our obsession with technology, from gene-editing to geoengineering and assisted evolution, author Elizabeth Kolbert argues in her latest book Under White Sky.
Question for you:
What three moments would you store in your afterlife avatar?
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