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Short abstract

I investigate how specific tools and interventions empower developers to ethical reframe the design problem, systematically analyse it from a techno-ethical perspective and assess potential implications of their research to integrate ethics deeply into technology research and development practices.

Long abstract

In this contribution I investigate how integrating ethics deeply into technology research and development can help developers overcome a major obstacle in the ethical alignment of innovation processes, namely, the “principles-to-practice gap”. By reference to a specific ethics intervention made by our Ethics Lab featuring an AI system under development, I show that the gap is not about a failure to operationalize principles for research and development practice, but rather that it originates in divergent styles of thinking: ethical reflection and design thinking. Based on these insights, I elucidate how ethical reflection can be integrated on a foundational level into research and development practices. An essential starting point is the creation of a space for reflection to explore potential designs, a space dedicated to contextualizing and re-conceptualizing technology. Drawing on an example, I will show how specific ethics interventions in combination with ethics tools allow to foster ethical reflexivity and stakeholder engagement, thus integrating ethics in applied research settings without the necessity of an ethicist being embedded in the research team throughout the entire process. The interventionist setup empowers the developers to critically reflect their own research by an ethical reframing of the design problem, a systematic ethical analysis, and an assessment of potential implications. I conclude by presenting the ways in which this approach of deep ethics integration challenges other approaches to integrating ethics at an early stage (such as embedded ethics, STIR, VCIO, ethics by design, VSD) and demonstrating what additional benefits it has to offer.