Tradeoffs all the way down

Ethical abduction as a decision-making process for data-intensive technology development

Bibliographic Data

ID5260764
AuthorsAnissa Tanweer (0000-0002-8868-4288, University of Washington, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume9
Issue1
Publication date2022-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBig Data & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/20539517221101351
OpenAlexW4285225531
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited33

Ample scholarship demonstrates that data-intensive technologies have the capacity to cause serious harm and that their developers are obliged to address ethics in their work. This ethnographic paper tells the story of data scientists attempting to instantiate a carefully considered ethical vision into a data infrastructure while balancing competing priorities, negotiating divergent interests, and wrestling with contrasting values. I use their story to develop the concept of "ethical abduction," which I characterize as an exemplary process by which actors can intentionally and systematically address ethical issues that arise during their day-to-day actions by making decisions with consideration for a foundational ethical worldview. It entails tacking back and forth between divergent but complementary ways of thinking: between establishing ideals and making decisions given practical constraints; between understanding historical context and anticipating future consequences; between acknowledging structural dependencies and accepting responsibility for moral agency

Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Harm · Negotiation · Political science · Public relations · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Computer Science · Engineering · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Information Systems Theories and Implementation · Law · Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing

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Open DOIOpen Access