van Wynsberghe Aimee, Robbins Scott
Center for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT), University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands,
Sci Eng Ethics. 2014 Dec;20(4):947-61. doi: 10.1007/s11948-013-9498-4. Epub 2013 Nov 20.
Contemporary literature investigating the significant impact of technology on our lives leads many to conclude that ethics must be a part of the discussion at an earlier stage in the design process i.e., before a commercial product is developed and introduced. The problem, however, is the question regarding how ethics can be incorporated into an earlier stage of technological development and it is this question that we argue has not yet been answered adequately. There is no consensus amongst scholars as to the kind of ethics that should be practiced, nor the individual selected to perform this ethical analysis. One school of thought holds that ethics should have pragmatic value in research and design and that it should be implemented by the (computer) engineers and/or (computer) scientists themselves, while another school of thought holds that ethics need not be so pragmatic. For the latter, the ethical reflection can aim at a variety of goals, and be carried out by an ethicist. None of the approaches resulting from these lines of thinking have been adopted on a wide-scale basis. To that end, the approach presented here is intended to bridge the gap between these schools of thought. It is our contention that ethics ought to be pragmatic and to provide utility for the design process and we maintain that adequate ethical reflection, and all that it entails, ought to be conducted by an ethicist. Thus, we propose a novel role for the ethicist--the ethicist as designer--who subscribes to a pragmatic view of ethics in order to bring ethics into the research and design of artifacts-no matter the stage of development. In this paper we outline the series of steps that a pragmatic value analysis entails: uncovering relevant values, scrutinizing these values and, working towards the translation of values into technical content. In conclusion, we present a list of tasks for the ethicist in his/her role as designer on the interdisciplinary team.
当代文学研究技术对我们生活的重大影响，使许多人得出结论，即伦理必须在设计过程的早期阶段，也就是在商业产品开发和推出之前，就成为讨论的一部分。然而，问题在于如何将伦理纳入技术发展的早期阶段，而我们认为这个问题尚未得到充分解答。学者们对于应该践行何种伦理，以及由谁来进行这种伦理分析，尚未达成共识。一种观点认为，伦理在研究和设计中应具有实用价值，应由（计算机）工程师和/或（计算机）科学家自己来实施；而另一种观点则认为伦理不必如此实用。对于后者而言，伦理反思可以针对各种目标，并由伦理学家来进行。这些思路所产生的方法都没有得到广泛应用。为此，本文提出的方法旨在弥合这些思想流派之间的差距。我们认为伦理应该是实用的，并为设计过程提供效用，而且我们坚持应由伦理学家进行充分的伦理反思及其所需的一切。因此，我们为伦理学家提出了一个新的角色——作为设计师的伦理学家，他秉持实用主义的伦理观，以便将伦理引入人工制品的研究和设计中——无论处于何种发展阶段。在本文中，我们概述了实用价值分析所包含的一系列步骤：揭示相关价值、审视这些价值，并努力将价值转化为技术内容。最后，我们列出了伦理学家在跨学科团队中作为设计师的一系列任务。
