Ethical Readiness Check (EN)

The Ethical Readiness Check is a low-threshold method for deliberation about ethical aspects of an innovation. The term Ethical Readiness is derived from Technology Readiness Levels, a measure to indicate the readiness of technologies. The Ethical Readiness Check aims to include ethical aspect when considering the readiness of an innovation. The tool consists of a set of questions to encourage ethical reflection, specifically on technology, complemented by a workflow for using these questions in a focus group conversation.

Ethical Readiness and Product Impact

The Ethical Readiness Check complements the Product Impact Tool by focusing more explicitly on ethics. The Product Impact Tool (developed since about 2009) offers an overview of concepts and examples for understanding the impact of technology affecting us humans from all sides. This approach is intended to be useful for analyzing the effects of technologies, and to help to design for desired impact on society, but definitely also to stimulate ethical deliberation about technologies (Dorrestijn 2020). However, ethics remains implicit in the Product Impact Tool, while the explicit focus and terminology is about impact.

In order to offer a concise and accessible tool in which the connection between the impact and the ethics of technology is upfront we have more recently (since about 2019) been developing The Ethical Readiness Check as a concise tool in the form of deliberation questions about means and ends.

The Ethical Readiness Check begins with explicitly ethical questions about ends. The last question is about the effects of technology, which is the topic of the Product Impact Tool. The Ethical Readiness Check with its series of questions about means and ends can therefore be seen as an entry to The Product Impact Tool, an entry moreover with a focus on the connection between impact and ethics.

Questioning Means & Ends

The Ethical Readiness Check consists of questions on means & ends, two basic questions and a set of sub-questions.

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These questions are complemented by a workflow and directions for:

• conducting a focus group conversation using the questions,
• reporting and evaluating the outcome of the session,
• follow-up with redesign or further ethical interventions.

Different variants can be elaborated based on this concept of an Ethical Readiness Check. For instance, we can expand the questions with sub-questions specifically tailored to the application domain. In addition, we can express the ethical reflection in narrative form, or scale it with a grade (following the Technological Readiness Levels).

The ethical section of the Drone Acceptance Readiness Tool (DART) is an example of an Ethical Readiness Check with a scale and focused questions. We created this ethical check for Space53, a drone development and testing centre with a focus on responsible innovation. The questions on means & ends are focused on drones. There are also questions on ethics and Integrity in a company’s strategy and organisation. For all questions there are sample answers on a five-point scale to choose from. (Download underlying canvas for webtool / Space53 DART website)

The Ethical Readiness Check is low-threshold and works well as an entry point into an Ethical Parallel process. The check can be used and repeated in successive phases of the parallel path.

More on Means & Ends

The basic questions in the Ethical Readiness Check deal with means & ends. This was chosen because the scheme of purpose & means links ethics and technology in a way that is recognisable to everyone. After all, ends (or values, goals, purposes) are a core topic of ethics; and technology is a means (though never a neutral means, as philosophical reflection on technology teaches).

More specifically, the approach found inspiration in two specific sources from ethics and philosophy of technology. Concrete inspiration from ethics came from Dietmar Hübner who, in his introduction to ethics, provides a very clear conceptual analysis of the different aspects of actions, such as: end, means, effect, side effect. To achieve an end, we apply a means. This means may or may not work well for the purpose and it may have unintended side effects. (e.g. Hübner 2010; online course).

Implicitly, this analysis from ethics is already about technology. After all, according to a commonplace definition that everyone knows, a technology is a means to an end. Everyone also knows the associated ethical principle that the means should not become an end. When using a means, we must keep the end in mind. What the ends or values we pursue should be, that is an ethical question par exelence. Within ethics the effects of the means, including unintended side-effects, come to the fore as part of the logical analysis of actions.

But it is philosophy of technology that really focusses on the effects of technical means, as this discipline is all about the meaning and effects of technology. A pivotal philosophical insight about technology is that it is never simply a neutral means. Technology is always loaded with values. And besides its intended functionality, there are always unintended side effects to be expected.

A concrete source of inspiration from the philosophy of technology was the article “Morality and technology: The end of means” by Bruno Latour (2002). Latour explicitly takes the scheme of technical means for ethical ends as a starting point. But he critically states, “(…) the relations of means
and ends will surely never appear as simple as is supposed by the archaic
split between moralists in charge of the ends and technologists controlling
the means.” (p. 252) Upfront in Latour’s approach is that goals and means, people and technology are intertwined. And that also means that technology development not free of ethics.

Also with regard to unintended side effects, Latour points out that while ends and means can theoretically be clearly distinguished, they intertwine in practice. Indeed, the side effects of a means can even be the change of the intention, which easily makes that unintended effects are covered up. “If we fail to recognize how much the use of a technique, however simple, has displaced, translated, modified, or
inflected the initial intention, it is simply because we have changed the end in changing the means, and because, through a slipping of the will, we have begun to wish something quite else from what we at first desired.” (p. 252)

Thus, means & ends form a basic schema in ethical theory, while the same schema is also an important starting point in the philosophy of technology. This may be implicit, or explicit as with Latour (as also, for example in Oosterling 2000, and Hubig 2002; 2006). The Ethical Readiness Check questions about means & ends are simple, but they refer to a large body of insight and research from ethics and philosophy of technology.

Sources

• Hubig, Christoph (2002). Mittel. Bielefeld: Transcript.
• Hubig, C. (2006). Die Kunst des Möglichen I: Grundlinien einer dialektischen Philosophie der Technik. Band 1: Technikphilosophie Als Reflexion der Medialität (p. 302). transcript Verlag.
• Hübner, Dietmar (2010) “Ethik und Moral” / “Typen ethischer Theorien” / “Aspekte von Handlungen” / “Stufen der Verbindlichkeit”, in: Michael Fuchs, Thomas Heinemann, Bert Heinrichs, Dietmar Hübner, Jens Kipper, Kathrin Rottländer, Thomas Runkel, Tade Matthias Spranger, Verena Vermeulen, Moritz Völker-Albert: Forschungsethik. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart / Weimar, 1-39. (See especially p. 23 ff. on “Aspekte von Handlungen”).
• Hübner, Dietmar (2014) “Zwecke, Mittel, Nebeneffecte” (lecture 11 and 12 of online course).
• Latour, B. (2002). Morality and technology. Theory, culture & society, 19(5-6), 247-260.
• Oosterling, Henk (2000). Radicale middelmatigheid. Amsterdam: Boom.