Digital Ethics

Digital technologies have expanded their influence into education and now they are ubiquitous and readily accessible. However, while digital technologies are becoming used by more and more for lesson planning, assessment creation or curriculum design, ethical issues are not often considered or well understood. Here, I outline three of the most common approaches to thinking about ethics as it relates to digital technology in education.

Principled approach

A principled approach is the most common way of thinking about ethics, particularly for things like research ethics, medical ethics or data ethics (e.g. GDPR). It involves a number of key principles:

  1. Autonomy – typically realised through choice; can a student withdraw from a project, reject a technology or delete their data. This is not always possible, but it is a principle that is a central consideration of ethics.
  2. Transparency – that all participants know what the risks and benefits are and how the technology may affect them.
  3. Beneficence/Non-maleficence – this relates to the idea that any negative impact is outweighed by the positive impact. For example, having a group of students sign up to an online app, then never using it will not benefit them.
  4. Justice – this acknowledges that costs and benefits are equally distributed, and that one group (or groups) are not more or less impacted than others.

Virtue ethics

Virtue ethics is a recent turn in the discussion of digital ethics, though it has ancient roots. It draws on classical and medieval philosophy, principally Aristotelian materialism, though others as well, such as Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, to develop a set of concepts that leads to humans using technology well. While principled approach may involve us discussing what we cannot do, virtue ethics involves thinking about how technology can lead us to living a human flourishing (eudaimonia in Ancient Greek).

Virtue ethics and technology is perhaps best elaborated in Shannon Vallor's book Technology and the Virtues. She lays out a series of concepts that help guide us through various ethical dilemmas.

Relational ethics

A relational ethics approach acknowledges that, since ethics involves relations with others, it needs to account for others. In particular, relational ethicists see that society is hierarchical and asymmetrical, and the purpose of ethics is to manage that relation. Though there are various perspectives, it is perhaps most clearly articulated by the computer scientist, Abeba Birhane.