Fostering Responsible Computing Research Foundations and Practices (2022) / Chapter Skim
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2 Theoretical Foundations from Ethical and Social Science Frameworks
2 Theoretical Foundations from Ethical and Social Science Frameworks
Pages 23-43
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From page 23... ...
The social and behavioral sciences provide methods for identifying the morally relevant actors, environments, and interactions in a sociotechnical system; ethical reasoning provides a calculus for understanding how to resolve competing moral tensions involving those actors, environments, and interactions. The theoretical foundations presented in this chapter can thus support the computing research community in identifying and making informed decisions about ethical and societal impact challenges that arise in 23
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From page 24... ...
In particular, schol ars with expertise in these areas can assist computing researchers in designing research projects that adequately meet societal constraints, norms, and needs. To address the ethical and societal impact challenges discussed in this chapter, computing researchers need to be able to envision alternative ethical values and trade offs among them as well as alternative socio-technical contexts.
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From page 25... ...
The second concerns practices of moral blame and praise, and aims to identify who is responsible, and to what degree, when a morally right or wrong act is performed. Both these questions are important: achieving responsible computing research requires not only determining whether an action (e.g., a design choice)
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From page 26... ...
One useful contribution of moral theories is to provide a shorthand for thinking about those values and their structure. So, this report adopts a pragmatic distinction to facilitate ethical analysis of responsible computing research: the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values.6 Intrinsic values are things that matter in themselves.
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From page 27... ...
shared intrinsic values and illustrating how they are served by instrumental values specific to computing, this report offers computing researchers concepts with which to structure and understand both their own moral intuitions, and the inevitable 7 One approach to addressing ethical questions in computing research would be to rely almost exclusively on ideas of rights, perhaps rooted in domestic or international law. At least in principle, for example, virtually all countries in the world accept the idea of human rights.
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2.1.3 Instrumental Ethical Values Instrumental values are ethically important because they contribute to the realization of (or capability to realize) intrinsic values.
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Trust thus enables people to do or realize much more when that trust is appropriately placed. For example, a trustworthy computing system could be valuable because it maintains data integrity, or learns from incorrect predictions, or otherwise supports intrinsic values such as material well-being or autonomy.
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Theoretical Foundations from Ethical and Social Science Frameworks 33
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From page 34... ...
In particular, this approach draws social considerations into focus for even the most seemingly purely technical systems, and thereby shows the advantage of fram ing the challenges of responsible computing research as sociotechnical problems. More socially accountable technologies that support people's manifold values require the expertise of both social scientists and computing researchers.13 2.2.1 Sociotechnical Systems Briefly Explained The social contexts that participate in this feedback loop include the many interpersonal, linguistic, cultural, professional, institutional, and historical experiences that shape individuals as well as their personal experiences.
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From page 35... ...
As a result, seemingly purely technical systems are not just technical, and approaches to responsible computing must grapple with the myriad ways computing research interacts with people and the social contexts they inhabit. The facial recognition example presented below illuminates and explores the sociotechnical nature of computing technologies.
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From page 36... ...
Box-bounding makes it possible for human annotators to mark the borders between the features of an image to help computer vision methods develop the ability to distinguish among different objects, including faces. The second was the use of human work to assist the machine learning systems by labeling image recognition training data, which harnesses human work to assist computing systems, to label image recognition training data.
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What kinds of governance struc tures need to be in place to ensure appropriate use of and access to ImageNet and other data sets, or of the uses of facial recognition overall? 2.2.3 Characteristics of Sociotechnical Systems Facial recognition technologies illustrate several key characteristics of sociotechnical sys tems: interactivity of social scales and technology design, divergent stakeholder values, challenges of achieving universality, the role of social historical contexts, limited predict ability of future uses, values implicit in design, continuous integration and evolution, and impacts beyond the individual level.
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From page 39... ...
Yet, many applications of facial recognition technologies rely on classifying gender as a stable, binary category. As a result of their need to classify and causally discriminate according to assumptions about the ground truth of gender,21 such technologies cannot inclusively reflect the social phenomena of gender identities.
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From page 41... ...
This loop creates a challenge for responsible computing research: social phenomena and their relationships with tech nologies can seem stochastic and hard to interpret. From the viewpoint of any individual person and any specific technical system, it can seem impossible to predict, let alone pre vent, what happens with technologies as they unfold.
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From page 42... ...
The sociotech nical perspective described in Section 2.2 along with ethical analyses of values and trade offs as described in Section 2.1, combined with methods of ethical reasoning and such social science methods as ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, survey studies, and historical analysis, can support computing researchers in identifying and resolving the ethical and societal impact challenges that arise from introducing novel technologies into social worlds. Chapter 3 illustrates their use in identifying underlying roots of such challenges.
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From page 43... ...
Rather, responsible computing research requires that they collaborate with experts in other disciplines who can bring these important instruments to bear as computing research is designed and carried out. Theoretical Foundations from Ethical and Social Science Frameworks 43
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