Living out ethical questions

and the perils of practical tech ethics

“If theories don’t change the way you walk down the street or treat the cashier, then what the hell are they good for?”

My mother’s words ring in my ears as I travel across campus. I work at a technical university and people all around me are putting theory into practice. It’s how they build robots, make navigation systems, and shoot things into space. But the wise matriarch is talking about something more than mere application of concepts. She’s talking about living out ideas. Embodying them. Cooking them into our meals and becoming nourished.

As a philosopher and technology ethicist, I’m often met with the question, “But, what am I supposed do with ethics?” I know the person asking looking for something useful, which in our culture means measurable and implementable. To date I’ve crumbled under the pressure of this question and quickly list off three changes they could make in their work.

“You can create interdisciplinary teams to learn from more diverse perspectives. You can change x to increase privacy. You can chose more sustainable materials.”

And just like that, I’ve reduced ethics to a product that can be implemented (or not) without affecting the practitioner in the least. And by narrowing in on practical actions, I’ve turned my back on the questions that reverberate louder with each earthquake, data breach, and bank bailout.

What the hell are we doing? Who is this innovation serving? Why do we continue on this hurtful path? Why can’t we just… stop?

These questions can’t be answered in a few bullet points or even in a very long book. There are myriad explanations, each a tapestry woven together from threads of individual lives that build up to larger cultural myths and political stories. The smallest colours and broadest shapes each give each other meaning. The textures can be touched by theory, but are only really felt when the answers are sought out in our own specific lives.

Why do I keep buying from Amazon? Why do I keep taking planes? Whose hurt do I contribute to when buying a new phone?

There, in tight shoulders and mouth opened to defend, you’ll find parts of the answers. Don’t worry. We’re all complicit in some ways. Breathe through the dismissal and judgement to explore the questions with curiosity. Then you’ll start to hear deeper questions calling from the horizon.

How can I be good? How can I care for the life around me, including myself?

There’s no clear answer here, either. But, moral purity is a fool’s goal. Our entanglement with others is inevitably riddled with missteps and challenges. Instead of a solution, it’s the continued reflection on the questions that creates the fertile ground for caring action to emerge.

Rilke knows.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

“Some distant day” isn’t a deadline that capitalism accepts. “Live the questions now” doesn’t fit into the code. Some might say that following Rilke’s words is impractical and don’t respond to the needs of the times. The news cycle holds us in a constant state of catastrophe, making us desperate for answers and leaving no time or space to meander in questions for lifetimes.

But meander anyways. Slowly, your life becomes the answer. The way you take up seemingly mundane and singular moments— speaking to your partner, choosing your next job, preparing food, buying a new computer— gather together to tell a larger story of how you care and what you think is good. Philosophy should encourage you to pause and reflect on these interactions in your life.

It’s the living out part that differentiates practical ethics from ethics as practice. The first can be input into a machine or added to a research program. The second is a reflective way of being that inevitably shapes everything you do— including designing machines and research programs.

So next time someone asks me what to do with ethics, I’ll say: “Go for a walk, let the big questions sink into your soul, and perhaps your daily life will shift.” There’s no immediate gratification here. No box ticked off a research checklist. But I can’t think of anything more useful.

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Practice: Take one big ethical question, like "How should I care?”, through your day and ask it at every turn. How do you walk with care? How do you eat with care? Send an email? Show up to a meeting? Greet your child? I suspect that most of the time your intuition will know exactly what to do, if you take a moment to listen. And in the times when you’re really unsure, breath past the urge to get it right. There’s no rush and the answer will come. You’ve got a lifetime.

Inspiration: Okay, this section is getting fun. My mind pulls from a huge range of sources and I’m going to try and share them all.

When including the quote from Rilke, I thought of Ethan Hawke’s TED talk where he reminds us that art is sustenance, not a luxury. I find it strange how little poetry and storytelling there is in technology ethics, as these are vital to the humanity that the field seeks to protect.

Abebe Birhane’s paper on how AI Ethics often focuses too much on the technical fixes, missing the big questions and the labour injustices involved in current AI development. It’s an academic paper, but very readable.

Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, which talks about how our culture’s obsession with purity ultimately thwarts our efforts towards liberation. Shotwell argues when living an ethical life our feet will always be in the mud, but we can reach for each other and the light anyways.

This Emergent Strategy Podcast episode with adreinne maree brown and Mia Mingus. brown and Mingus talk about the importance of practice in transformative justice (a term I just heard of!) and being intentional about what goes “into our soil” (movies, social media, friends, etc.).

Since we’re on the subject of purity, my husband read me some pages from

Michael Pollan

's book Second Nature on how American purity culture is manifest in their lawns. I haven’t read the full book, but this example of how ideology shapes our relationships (here with the land) comes to my mind often.

And Annie Dillard’s line, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing” in her book The Writer’s Life. Ethics isn’t settled in one grand gesture or sweeping policy. It’s built up over time through our daily interactions and choices.

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Next week, The Curves of Motherhood.

-M.