The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Technology Ethics in Practice

作     者：Ben Green 

作者机构：the Gerald R.Ford School of Public PolicyUniversity of MichiganAnn ArborMI 48109USA 

出 版 物：《Journal of Social Computing》 (社会计算（英文）)

年 卷 期：2021年第2卷第3期

页      面：209-225页

核心收录：

学科分类：01[哲学] 0101[哲学-哲学] 010105[哲学-伦理学] 

主　　题：technology ethics AI ethics ethics-washing Science,Technology,and Society(STS) sociotechnical systems 

摘      要：This article introduces the special issue“Technology Ethics in Action:Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.In response to recent controversies about the harms of digital technology,discourses and practices of“tech ethicshave proliferated across the tech industry,academia,civil society,and *** despite the seeming promise of ethics,tech ethics in practice suffers from several significant limitations:tech ethics is vague and toothless,has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design,and is subsumed into corporate logics and *** limitations suggest that tech ethics enables corporate“ethics-washing:embracing the language of ethics to defuse criticism and resist government regulation,without committing to ethical *** these dynamics,I describe tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central debate is not whether ethics is desirable,but what“ethicsentails and who gets to define *** approaches to tech ethics are poised to enable technologists and technology companies to label themselves as“ethicalwithout substantively altering their ***,those striving for structural improvements in digital technologies must be mindful of the gap between ethics as a mode of normative inquiry and ethics as a practical *** order to better evaluate the opportunities and limits of tech ethics,I propose a sociotechnical approach that analyzes tech ethics in light of who defines it and what impacts it generates in practice.