Artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making, computational modeling, data analytics, and other digital tools are increasingly common in business and research. While this allows for greater insight and efficiency in some ways, it can lead to questionable societal outcomes – from hard-to-notice discrimination to non-consensual sentiment manipulation to unhealthy social anxiety and blue-screen loneliness. We are faced with unique ethical questions that we are not prepared to address.
DigEthix is an education and communications project aimed at enhancing the level of public discourse around issues involving technology and ethics. One wing of the effort is a podcast aiming to promote high-level, practical ethical analysis through conversations with scholars and industry experts, particularly through in-depth discussions of real-world case studies. While there are other podcasts that focus on technology, computer science, and social media trends, DigEthix is unique in its focus on ethical issues and concrete cases. The podcast aims to discuss these cases in-depth, outlining how particular problems occurred and figuring out how to avoid those problems in the future. Because the topics discussed affect most of society, the podcast strives to be as accessible as possible in its presentation of ideas.
Just Horizons Alliance (JHA) is a non-profit organization in Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated to combining knowledge with wisdom to prepare for a future we can scarcely understand. JHA publishes books, convenes conversations among thought leaders, and sponsors a network of expert researchers who tackle complex social problems such as social integration of immigrants and refugees, religious self-radicalization, spiraling suicide rates, illegal child trafficking, and the ethical risks of digital data and computer algorithms.
JHA’s research wing is unique in using interdisciplinary teams of experts. Teams employ computational models, data analytics, historical interpretation, philosophical analysis of concepts, and other methods to generate practical answers to the host of challenges confronting us. JHA researchers rely on extensive collaboration to implement this leading-edge research, training, and public education. DigEthix employs this same multidisciplinary approach.
The Ethical Framework for DigEthix
DigEthix is operated within Just Horizons Alliance by professional ethicists who are deeply invested in the analysis of new and emerging technologies, and in the equipping of a new generation of AI-is-normal young people with the ethical tools and personal virtues needed to navigate an increasingly complex future. How do the DigEthix leaders think about ethics? What’s their framework for ethical reasoning and analysis?
DigEthix employs a personalist, global, multidisciplinary ethical orientation. Let’s take those one at a time.
- A personalist ethics orientation stresses the dignity and intrinsic value of every individual person. It is the ethical orientation of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his inspiring mentor Howard Thurman. It is a central plank of the Boston Personalist school of ethics. It has a vital presence in the advanced teachings of major wisdom traditions worldwide, from the religious juggernauts to secular humanism, the name of which even advertises the connection to personalism.
- A global ethics orientation stresses the shared obligations human beings have to one another, across the boundaries of culture, language, religion, and race; and also to our planetary habitat, which is the most basic condition for the continuation of the human project. Global ethics has been relatively less emphasized than personalism within the big religions, but it is critically important to international collaboration efforts such as the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights and global ecology and sustainability movements.
- A multidisciplinary ethics orientation stresses the critical role that being fully informed plays in formulating sound ethical reasoning and communicating clearly about it. Biomedical technologies require deep understanding of biomedical engineering, medicine, public health, religion, law, and even developmental and social psychology. We can’t just guess about these things, any more than we can guess about AI or other emerging computing and data-science technologies. We must know the details so we need to employ the relevant disciplines to build the necessary knowledge base.
A personalist, global, multidisciplinary framework for ethics can be learned, taught, and communicated. And that’s precisely what DigEthix does.
Personal Virtues for a New Generation
Classic virtues will always matter. Just think of Aristotle’s cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Or call to mind the five constant virtues of Confucianism: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness. Human social life, family relationships, the social fabric, and economic exchange are all made possible and healthy because of such virtues. In a crisis, it is people who possess such virtues who make the largest positive difference, leading the way and inspiring others to adopt such virtues as well.
One meaning of “free riders” is people who benefit from a society enabled by such virtues but lack those virtues themselves, contributing nothing of value. To avoid free riding, these virtues must be learned, practiced, and deeply internalized, so that they are available when nobody is watching and when we are under pressure, keeping us steady in the face of threats of all kinds, from physical danger to the destabilization of our social world.
That’s important. But in our time of rapid technological development and confusing cultural change, we see new virtues arising to complement the classic virtues on which we have always depended. Here are some of them.
- Interpreting complex systems. We need to understand complexity to avoid being at the mercy of what we create. The effects of our shortsightedness are evident in everything from climate change to unregulated AI: we fail to discern even the relatively short-term consequences of our actions so we plunge ahead, heedlessly, unwisely, and without true wisdom. The virtue of accurately interpreting complexity is vital for our shared future as well as for personal happiness.
- Understanding-based empathy. Truly empathizing with another person is a profound journey of identification and compassion, prized as a virtue within religious and secular wisdom traditions alike. But responding constructively to our enemies calls for a different kind of empathy, based on understanding our enemy’s perspectives and deepest commitments. Understanding-based empathy is far less grueling than intimate interpersonal empathy, but it is a critical skill for managing political polarization, for navigating intractable disagreement, and for transforming tragic conflicts. It can be learned, practiced, and internalized, just like the classic virtues.
- Regulating cognitive error. Over the last century or more, cognitive psychology has identified numerous species-wide tendencies to cognitive error. One of the most profoundly relevant virtues of our era is diagnosing and mastering those tendencies. Recognizing and regulating our cognitive biases can change everything about how we interpret our environment, how we do political economy, and how we handle our interpersonal relationships, making everything healthier and more satisfying.
One line of work within DigEthix focuses on these new kinds of virtue and their cultivation, studying them and learning how to cultivate them so that we can be better prepared for a deeply uncertain future.
Support DigEthix
DigEthix is funded by generous donations from people who believe ethical awareness and training is critical to prepare for a complex technological future we can scarcely understand. To support DigEthix, donate through its home at Just Horizons Alliance.
