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- Convenors:
-
Margarita Boenig-Liptsin
(ETH Zürich)
Jim Dratwa (European Commission and Woodrow Wilson Center)
Karen Huang (Georgetown University)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
STS has worked alongside and grappled with the theories, practices, and scholarly identities of ethics. This panel examines encounters between STS and ethics across time with the aim to build common ground between these traditions in the making of just human-technology futures.
Long Abstract:
Since its earliest days, STS has worked alongside and grappled with its relationship to the theories, practices, and scholarly identities of ethics. Expanding the understanding of ethics' role in the context of science and technology, STS scholarship has contributed to the analysis of S&T ethical practices as modes of expertise and forms of governance. Meanwhile, central STS concepts and frameworks such as co-production, sociotechnical imaginaries, and ANT have contributed to empirically more nuanced understandings of the central concerns of moral philosophy, such as human agency, responsibility, and visions of the good. This panel invites papers that investigate relations between STS and realms of theory and practice known as "ethics" broadly construed (including: traditions of Western moral philosophy, critical ethical theories such as feminist care ethics, narrative ethics, and post-colonial and cosmopolitan ethics, empirical modes of ethical inquiry in moral anthropology and moral psychology, institutionalized modes of distributive justice, and applied ethics initiatives disseminated in technoscientific practice and pedagogy). What are the formative sites of encounter between ethics and STS across time? How do we characterize the contemporary relationship between STS and ethics? How can encounters between STS and ethics generate experimental modalities of normativity? How might these encounters engage in both critical inquiry and construction? How can STS and ethics, recognizing and respecting their differences, contribute towards the contemporary need—amidst urgent challenges—to foster situated encounters on common ground? How might these modes of inquiry make the move from spaces of situated, interpersonal encounters to normative political projects of transformation in technoscientific societies?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Martin Oliver (UCL Institute of Education) Jade Henry (University College London)
Long abstract:
The UK’s government recently committed £2m as “the first step towards providing every teacher with a personalised AI lesson-planning assistant”. Following a national consultation about AI’s educational risks, ethics and possibilities, this was selected as “a perfect example of the revolutionary benefits this technology can bring”. However, many teachers and parents disagreed.
Education, like healthcare, is often treated as inherently ethical (e.g. as integral to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Mainstream discussions position AI as a means to achieve these forms of “social good”, downplaying ethical risks as manageable technical issues (Boenig-Liptsin, 2022). Yet normative assumptions about technology’s benefits, and what may be championed as “social” or “good”, remain contestable (Arora & Sarkar, 2023). Education scholars claim that industry has influenced policy-making, favouring market economics and foreclosing debates about other societal values (Eynon & Young, 2021). This has led to critiques of the principle-based, deontological ethics pervading the field, and calls for the “(re)politicization of data-driven education” (Knox, 2023).
In this presentation, we will analyse ethico-political debates around this investment in AI, building on studies of educational technology and care (Prinsloo & Slade, 2017; Zakharova & Jarke, 2022; Henry & Oliver, 2022). We situate this analysis as a form of speculative ethics, putting theories of care into play with constructivist accounts in STS (Mol, 2008; Pol, 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). We describe how speculative ethics enacts a “common ground” of research practices, connecting deontological ethics with relational and applied approaches in technoscience.
Mark Brown (California State University, Sacramento)
Long abstract:
How should we understand the relation between empirical research and normative critique in STS research? This presentation will critically examine three common approaches to this question. The first approach follows analytical philosophy and applied ethics to focus on making logically compelling normative arguments. It attempts to persuade people to adopt a particular position on controversial issues like GM foods or vaccine mandates. A second approach, more common in STS, rejects the perceived moralism of “a priori” modes of inquiry. Scholars taking this approach are suspicious of attempts to apply pre-given ethical principles as tools of analysis or critique. They advocate micro-level approaches that allow concepts and categories to emerge from empirical research, and they insist that actors rather than analysts should determine the meaning of normative concepts like justice or democracy. A third approach, also advocated by many STS scholars, promotes conversation between actors and analysts, and between conceptual and empirical research. According to a dialogical approach, analysts attempt to articulate and justify the normative concepts they bring to their empirical investigations, while allowing themselves to be challenged by the actors they study. Analysts might begin with actors’ concepts and ideas, but the analysts also draw on existing concepts and theories as tools of social critique. This presentation will discuss advantages and disadvantages of each approach, while making a case for the dialogical approach.
Daniela Schuh (University of Vienna)
Long abstract:
In recent decades, advances in biomedicine have facilitated new forms of clinical labor, such as the commodification of organs, oocytes, and reproductive services, as well as participation in clinical trials for financial gain or as a means of accessing medical treatment. This paper examines human rights approaches to clinical labor, noting their tendency to operate within what Lawrence Cohen (1999) has termed "ethical publicity"- a framework that reduces ethical considerations to the moment of transaction between rational actors, eliding contextual conditions. While ethnographers have demonstrated the political and analytic benefits of examining the contextual conditions of clinical labor, focusing on questions of power and inequality, they often did so by ignoring questions of law and ethics altogether.
This paper discusses how co-production helps to analyze how we practice ethics through law, allowing us to move beyond the narrow framework of ethical publicity. Drawing on examples from my fieldwork on civil and human rights debates about surrogacy, I discuss how the insistence on a narrow framework of ethical publicity and the positioning work done within it are deeply entangled with epistemic orders. I argue that understanding the dynamics of their co-production, and the specific cultural and historical experiences that inform this process, can serve as an entry point for practicing law beyond ethical publicity, potentially allowing for a more democratic engagement with civil and human rights.
Chessa Adsit Morris (University of California, Santa Cruz) James Karabin (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Long abstract:
Both STS scholars and ethicists are beginning to understand that creating more just and equitable science requires different modes of collaboration. One dominant mode of collaborative engagement in the U.S. has been through the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) framework, where ELSI scholars have generated approaches for grappling with and addressing normative ethical concerns. While ELSI has furthered the “integration of ethics” into STEM research, it has also long been critiqued for its narrow orientations, practices and impacts, which have largely been facilitative of STEM research and limited in its ability to center issues of justice and equity. Drawing on a review of gray literature and interviews with key stakeholders (including funding agency program staff and ELSI scholars) we explore the expectations and experiences of ELSI scholars doing this normative and integrated ethics work. We analyze their experiences and practices in relation to ELSI’s broader organizational configurations and its development as a form of moral expertise. As STS scholars and others are called on to engage beyond observation and critique to take up more normative work, we believe that learning from/with the experiences of ELSI and ELSI scholars can be fruitful and (in)formative for exploring the possibilities of STS to contribute to broader projects of justice and equity. These findings and reflections are part of a broader ongoing research project aimed at clarifying, reviewing, and revitalizing the roles and value of STS scholars, bioethicists, humanists, and artists in collaborative STEM research.
Jonathan Wald (Concordia University)
Long abstract:
From the perspective of many philosophers, ethical and moral questions should be considered a priori. To do otherwise, as philosophers in the Kantian tradition have argued, would be to collapse morality into mundane pragmatism. The a priori status of morality poses a challenge to empirical scholars in the social sciences interested in ethical questions. If morality must be abstract, then all STS can offer are reflections on the application of ethical principles rather than the principles themselves. This presentation challenges this position through empirical observation of climate scientists. I argue that STS and other empirical sciences can directly address moral and ethical questions at the moments when norms and values are thrown into question. Focusing on the self-reflective practices of Brazilian climate scientists facing both the climate crisis and the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, I examine how the values of scientific expertise, democratic participation, and effective governance were not just reinvigorated, but fundamentally transformed. This work provides both a glimpse into the ongoing transformation of ethical thinking in the climate crisis as well as a demonstration of the capacity of STS to fully engage in moral thinking.
Melanie Smallman (University College London)
Long abstract:
Over the past 20 years, we have seen STS critiques of ELSI style approaches to bioethics develop into ideas such as participatory technology assessment and RRI, with the focus around broadening perspectives and democratising decision making relating to science and technology. While the idea of more democracy is hard to dispute, the recent emergence of AI ethics as a largely philosophical discipline is perhaps an indication of the limited impact of democratising approaches in practice. In this paper, I will argue that the poly-crisis that climate change and AI presents to humanity offers a moment when we can review this critique and cleavage in disciplines. Sociological and political perspectives are urgently needed in order to deepen and broaden current approaches to AI and climate ethics, bringing important concepts like power, care, community and inequality, as well as rights and justice, into the frame. At the same time, we might need to challenge our discomfort with normativity and perhaps give thought to how we might be able to draw the normative from the democratic.
Gabriel Abend Patrick Schenk Vanessa Müller (University of Lucerne)
Long abstract:
These days AI ethics is all the rage. And for good reason. Policy makers, regulators, pundits, philosophers, and laypeople are struggling with two sorts of questions. First, what’s morally right and wrong in this domain? To what extent is AI ethics unique? Second, autonomous AIs and self-learning algorithms challenge traditional views about responsibility. Wouldn’t true autonomy entail being morally and legally responsible?
Both in policy and scholarship, most accounts of AI ethics rely on concepts of decision and choice. A driverless car must decide whether to swerve to the left. What’s the morally appropriate decision? A firm uses AI to hire a new employee. As it turns out, the AI was more likely to choose white than minority candidates. Were its choices discriminatory and thus unethical?
Drawing on STS, cultural sociology, and moral philosophy, we cast doubt on AI ethics’ widespread and largely uncritical reliance on decision and choice. Our project investigates what counts as decision and choice in the first place. We argue that this varies in patterned ways across societies, groups, and individuals. Plus, it shapes who and what is deemed responsible.
To study these issues, we conducted a factorial survey experiment, coupled with an attitude survey. Respondents were a random sample of the Swiss population (n≈1900). They were asked to attribute decision-making capacity, moral responsibility, and trustworthiness to AIs and human agents in three scenarios: job recruitment, cancer diagnosis, and fact-checking in journalism. Crucially, we manipulated morally significant aspects of these situations, including the outcome, transparency, and discriminatory bias.
Karen Huang (Georgetown University) Jim Dratwa (European Commission and Woodrow Wilson Center) Margarita Boenig-Liptsin (ETH Zürich)
Long abstract:
As diverse traditions in STS and ethics have proliferated and shared space in conversation, boundaries have also been drawn around their theories, practices, and scholarly identities. In prominent strands of thought, STS has been characterized as “descriptive” in contrast to ethics as “normative”. At the same time, ethics has been demarcated from questions around justice, solidarity, and power. In this paper, we interrogate the boundaries that have been constructed and maintained between STS and ethics. In so doing, we aim to think with these two endeavors in their fullness and plurality, and to reclaim spaces of encounter on common ground.
How have boundaries between STS and ethics come to matter? Why are these boundaries important to address amidst contemporary crises in technoscientific societies? How can encounters between STS and ethics, recognizing and respecting their differences, generate experimental modalities for scholarly analyses of agency, power, and normativity? Concerned with the configuring of the human in technological societies, STS contributes a new universe of entities and relations, which provide an ability to reformulate questions around agency and power. STS work in co-production, sociotechnical imaginaries, and ANT has contributed to empirically nuanced understandings of central concerns of ethics, such as identity, responsibility, justice, and visions of the good. By aiming to overcome double misunderstanding of STS and ethics, we contribute to a humanistic project of bringing back together the “is” and the “ought”, and build a foundation for STS and ethics to continue to learn from one another in making just human-technology futures.