The End of Ethics

By Stephen Downes
Nov 19, 2021
Transcript of The End of Ethics

Unedited Google Recorder transcript from audio

Hi everyone. I'm Steven Downs. Welcome to another edition of Ethics Analytics and the Duty of Care, and this is approaching the end of module 5 on approaches to ethics with the appropriate title video. The end of ethics. And what I want to talk about here are two related questions.

One is, what is the goal or the objective of ethics? What are we ultimately trying to do here with this whole inquiry and second how or why do we conclude our discussion of ethics? How ultimately does it end when we put this down and move on with our lives?

We're going to find that these questions aren't exactly straightforward. We might think of this video as meta, meta ethics. And of course, we could go on into infinity asking this sort of question. But at the same time, I think we do have a responsibility to sit back and, and, and question, just what were the presumptions that we had going into this?

Not methodological presumptions not presumptions about values or states of affairs. But presumptions about the nature of the inquiry itself and, you know, we think of ethics, when when we think of it at all is you know a universalist sort of thing. We we think that what we're after are ethical principles or ethical statements or what have you that apply to everybody take this back to the early days of.

So long's law code and you know the intuition that we have that ethical principles ought to be the same for everyone and yet but at the same time we know that they're not. Yeah. I mean if anything the recent pandemic has shown us that at the start of the pandemic, everybody like to say well, we're all in the same boat, but it's time went by it.

Became clear that well, we may have all been in the same storm. We were certainly indifferent. Boats and some boats were nice. Big crews liners. Other boats for were handy dandy sailing boats. It's kind of what I was. And I think other boats were leaky row, boats and and those refugee boats filled with people trying to find a better way.

And some people a lot of people didn't have a boat at all. And the same is true with ethics quoting from government and adder bell here, members of our most disadvantaged communities of long asserted that they fall under heavier and more hostile scrutiny. And empirical research supports some and it's not just empirical research.

I mean you just have to look at the news to see that there's one standard for one type of person and another standard for another type of person yesterday. You know, a white kid who went out and shot, some people got off, they're not shot. Some people. I didn't know.

And in this case was the the admitted rapist who got off without any jail time as compared to the poor young black kid who serving years in jail for a minor case a shoplifting. Well, that's not one ethics that rolls of law. And we know that this is the case and it's foolish to pretend otherwise One about character, we think we have in ethics, something like an understanding of what it would be to be in ethical person.

But, you know, when we look at the actual principles of exceptional character or ethical attributes, these lists, very considerably. I've been involved with a product called their a project called covidy. A and character is at the center of some of the things that are being put forward by project members and again, it's a different list.

So, you know, as resilience part of a character is collaboration part of the character compassion. Contemplation loyalty justice initiative, ask different people, you get different answers, you know, there are all kinds of different ways of coming up with what you think are ethical characters, this spirituality part of an ethical character.

For example, is generosity and sharing part of an ethical character or is ultra premiership and competitive edge. You know, there are no answers here. And there's there's not going to be a simple way to break them apart and even more to the point, we find some character attributes. More valued in some cases, in some people, in some types of people than others, the character attributes that we value, or say, we value or at least our represented.

Well, in media, for people like Elon Musk. For example, our very different from those that we might value in the current president or interpersonal like memo public servant. So what are we up to here, really? Look at how we approach some of these fundamental ethical principles. Like, for example, killing is wrong.

It's right there in the Christian Bible, right? Thou shalt not kill. Except in some translations, the wording is thou shalt not murder. That's a very different thing, right? And then one case you have thrash out, not kill the other hand. You have thou shalt not kill without the proper paperwork to very different things, but she wanted there seems to be a lot of wiggle room in this prohibition against killing right for soft defense.

Maybe it's okay. Florida. And other states in the US, have the stand your ground law, which lets you basically shoot people who are trespassing. What about war all nations, virtually, either participate or have shown a willingness to participate more. And one of the salient features of war is people get killed or what about euthanasia again.

You know, in Canada now using Asia is permitted under the law. There are conditions of course but there can be physician assisted deaths. So you know, we say there are some people say killing is an absolute moral principle, but really not so much. And again, doesn't apply to all the people all the time in the same way.

Certainly we look, there are whole classes of people, for example, police for whom killing seems to be permissible. And, you know, something that's likely to happen on the job. But again, not all police are like this either. What do we say about killing? We don't have a thing that we can say about Kelly.

Similarly, with lying, you know, the, the general perception is that honesty is the best policy. In fact, even the saying to that effect, but the facts are we lie a lot and we don't even know why. You know, I was sitting in my office at the NRC building before the pandemic, hit maybe a year or so before and our business development officer walked in, he had I hadn't seen him for a while.

He looks at my bookshelf and goes out a lot of books and I said, yep. And I've read them all. No, it's not true. I brad a lot of them, you know. But I hadn't read them all. Why did I say that? Now I've wondered ever since what the point.

I mean I said it before I even thought about it and he of course responded. Oh, you read DOS, copy towel and I said, well, I use that as a reference work. You know why? Why would I lie? But I do we all do to more or less a degree.

Maybe there's a person who has never lied in their life. I don't know who it is and we don't have the same view about all of these lies. I thought, that, that particular lie was wrong of a no harm was caused by it and you know, and perhaps maybe it was wrong because it was so transparently a lie, maybe it was wrong because it was a bad lie, you know.

And we hear about white lies and so on and you know we we hear about lying which is deceitfulness etc. They're all kinds of reasons why we at least rationalize our lying spying. There's a lot of talk in the world of AI and analytics about surveillance and the general tenor of the discussion is it's wrong, but it's not clear to me at all that that people would agree that it's wrong.

Even those who are saying it's wrong, you know, one of the big problems with offshore banking and tax havens is that everything there happens in secret. And so the fact that most of all money is hidden away, seems to be a problem. At least to me, it seems to be a problem.

And when we get release is of say the panama papers, which reveal this duplicitness, we can see that they release of these papers was a good thing or the the actions of people like Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden or even Julian Assange in releasing private information and and reviewing things like, for example, torture and you know, spying and releasing information about torture seems to me to be a good thing or, you know, to make it a bit more prosaic using cameras or doorbell cameras to spot people who are committing crimes, seems like a good plan.

Now, that's not to say, all cases of spying are good and it's not to say all justifications of spying are good. The old saying, if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. Does not hold up as a justification for anything. If you're saying that really, what you're saying is?

Well, I don't care if it happens to other people and I'm not worried because bad things aren't happening to me, but there isn't a single principle, single prohibition against spying and this suggestion that ethics somehow simply bands, surveillance is wrong and misleading. By the way, assume this is what we're up to trying to come up a bad sort of principle.

I think, you know, a lot of this comes down to what's called axiology. It's from the Greek word, axia, meaning value or worth and then logio the study of, it's the philosophical study of value, what matters to us, and it's more than just financial value. Although, of course in today's society, where the capital ethos has run rampant, everything is reduced to financial value, but we can imagine, at least other kinds of values or other ways of things being valued, one's own life.

For example, you're probably not going through exchange that for money. So it has a value that is not a financial value. Axiology looks at what are called intrinsic and extrinsic values intrinsic is the value of thing has in and of itself. So you know, when can't say to treat people as ends and not means what he's saying is people have, I mean, trends value in and of themselves.

Extrinsic value is value as a sign by external factors or external people. The principle of supplying demand is a mechanism for calculating extrinsic value, right? The value of a commodity isn't in the commodity itself. It's in what people will pay in order to acquire that commodity substandard, theories of value trying to determine which entities and we use the word entities, very loosely here, have intrinsic value whether they have just one intrinsic value.

The heating is saying, happiness, is everything is an example of a honest intrinsic value versus pluralist. Like, the character theorists that I've talked about thinking, that there are numerous different ways, something can have value. And then, of course, there's denialist, nothing has value what any examination of value will show.

And we'd look a bit about, we looked a bit at values when we looked at ethical codes, shows that there's a wide range of things that can be, considered determinative value, or values in and of themselves. Everything from happiness, to peace to contentment, to joy, to good character, to harm any, to money, to life, to whatever, right, free time, my freedom, you know, liberty, it's accurate.

All of these words are all different values and we can combine them, mix them, remix them. And throwing that into our analysis of ethics, doesn't make it clearer. It makes it muddier because, you know, here we are trying to determine what's right and wrong and we don't even know what the basis is for counting.

What's? Right? And what's wrong? It's a problem that we see a lot in the study of education, generally. Actually people say, you know, this method is a success that method is a success, but the question comes up, what does success look like in education? Is it getting a job?

Is it learning how to live the good life? Is it achieving satisfaction? Is it the pursuit of inquiry? Is it staying out of jail? All of these things could be thought of as legitimate outcomes of an education. And when we say you know, this educational practice has been successful, success is measured against some of those but it which ones its measured against depends really on your point if you.

And you know this is the same sort of thing for ethical theory, right? And ethical theory successful measured against some metric of value, but it depends, you know what you think is valuable, whether you think and ethical theory is successful.

So, we can maybe recast ethics. I mean, the current inquiry seems to be, you know, more and more breaking into more and more different parts. Maybe let's try this on for a hypothesis thinking of ethics, as a, as a branch of something else. And we certainly have many different divisions of ethics.

Bioethics business, ethics environmental ethics, etc. And then the different aspects of each of these, the clinical research, research allocation etc and each of those determines in its own way. What is valuable? And what will count as evidence for that value and how we obtain the evidence for that value.

And to, what sort of question those calculations of value will be put. So, you know, it's just like, natural philosophy. Used to encompass all of what we call today, science broke down into physics chemistry. Biology for example, looking at different domains asking different questions. Using different methods to get evidence, you know, you don't use a microscope to do astrophysics.

It just wouldn't make any sense. The unit of parsecs, pretty much never comes up and biology, you know, that meas distance just isn't appropriate And so maybe what we think of ethics, really breaks down into these different divisions. And we were, you know, we've done enough research now to know this and we can look at these more particular applications Certainly, a philosophy based on ethical codes, seem to presuppose something like this.

So let's try that out as a hypothesis, But maybe ethics is a matter of social development. A March Yesen, for example, talks about evaluating the value of governments against the concrete capabilities of the citizen, right? So instead of using something transcendental and institutional like roles is theory of justice, really?

What you need to do is look at something that is both comparative and realizations. Oriented and example in the Wikipedia article that I'm citing here, suggests for example. Citizens must have functioning to have a capacity to vote, For example, they need to be literate, they need to have some idea of knowing what the options are, They need to have transportation to the polling place.

They need to be able to satisfy in a reasonable manner. The conditions for voting, all of these things, come into a definition of ethics. If by ethical you mean democratic right? And you can't just say, well, you know, you have this principle of fairness, fairness doesn't make sense when the lived experience people is so different, really it goes back to some of our earlier slides, you know, the actual principles that apply to some people are different than others.

It's just that instead of saying, well, sure the rich have their own system of ethics and whatever. Send kind of turns out upside down. And says, you know, if we're gonna get anyone latitude in ethics, it's should be poor people, right? And they acquire if you will, and I'm kind of really paraphrasing and putting my own interpretation on us here.

But if you're going to hold people accountable, ethically accountable, at all, you have to increase their capac, increase their functionings so that they can act as ethical agents. There's very similar to what Martha must bomb. Would call a capabilities approach. Maybe ethics is a branch of critical theory or maybe there's at least a type of ethics that it's is a branch of critical theory in the US these days.

There's a big debate about critical race very, which is defined by royal Brooks in 1994. As and I quote a collection of critical stances against the legal the existing legal order from a race-based point of view. And it's the idea here that race is ultimately a social construct. It's not a natural kind and I think there's plenty of evidence for that, you know, you can say, well, yeah, it's obvious, you have black people and white people, but I mean, it's not obvious.

You know, we talked about say African Americans, which don't actually include aboriginals living in Australia, or her even black living in Canada. Race is a social construct. You look at the difficulties, they had in South Africa, distinguishing between members of different races and having to go to deep genetic analysis in order to try to come to some sort of distinction.

But the problem is race doesn't break down genetically. They're you know, they're not genetic characteristics. They're superficial, color-based characteristics. Organelles shape of your ears or your nose or whatever. The second point of critical race there is that racism isn't merely an individual bias or president or prejudice but is rather embedded in the legal system.

We could talk a lot about that and we should say that it not it is it is not merely embedded in the legal system but is embedded in institutional systems generally which is the point of this cartoon here where the one person says the child says you got me the wrong history book.

This one not only has slavery in it, but it says it was bad, you know? The idea that you know, there are ways of teaching children that institutionalize in their mind a certain race-based way of looking at the world where race is attached to value is an inherent part of critical race theory and that's how the racism is supplemented with policies and procedures.

Everything from preferential policing to presumption of innocence and guilts to, whether it's okay to shoot them. The core here though is that is not so much to question, whether racism is bad, right? Which would seem to be the ethical issue, but rather to talk about how interpretations of the ethical principle are embedded in our social and institutional structures.

Now, that isn't something that they teach in school, but maybe it should be, we can look at large swaths of instances of structural discrimination, and, you know, again, it makes ethics into something like, social political analysis discourse again, rather than the question of whether something is right or wrong.

And, you know, we, we look at matters of fact in our community and we see evidence of this. For example, there's a BBC report titled, why hard work alone isn't enough to get ahead and the reason why is and I quote, you need to be light by people at your level, by people above your above you, and by people below you, but being light, isn't something in that is in the control of any particular individual.

For example, if you are, if you are ugly. However, ugliness is defined, you are less likely to be light. If you are of one gender or another one race or another, this will have a bearing on whether you are light. So, the principle which isn't really a principle because nobody would say it's an ethical principle that you need to be liked.

But this principle in practical applications, has ethical consequences on the actions of people in workplaces. And in society, you know, a lot of times, these ethical concerns are very tightly bound to context in Canada, we add a case where military leaders and I quote, saw pandemic, as unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on Canadians and the assertive thing in what context is that ethically appropriate?

That was certainly my reaction. But clearly, it was felt to be appropriate by at least certain members of the Canadian military. It's like, oh, look at this situation. This is a great way to test suction such, you know, we can find out whether our techniques are working and it may have just simply been an operational procedure and not even thought of as an ethical issue.

And that's how ethics becomes structural. When you know, longer think of it, ethical terms, you're thinking of it in management terms, corporate terms, military terms. And so ethics kind of disappears into this management and institutional policy. Maybe that it's good but just as often it could be bad, all of these suffer against what I call the joker problem.

The joker problem is some gap and a phrase from the dark night. Some man just want to watch the world burn, right? And it's increasingly hard to say why they're wrong. You know, in our, in our society, we allow that there are different motivations and, and we allow that there were different virtues.

But in some cases, there are people that have no virtue at least, none, that we would recognize. And the thing is we see them as unethical but the really isn't any ethical principle properly. So called that, they're overall approach of wanting to see the world burn denies take that and put that into a concrete practical situation.

And you have what's known as the Byzantine generals problem and there's a little diagram here and a link to a description of it. And it, it plays a major role in blockchain systems and the Byzantine generals problem is essentially, you have, devising keen emperor, who is engaged in a war because they always work with various generals reporting to him now.

Communication was horrible in those years. And so it was hard to get messages from the generals to the leader. But the general, the leader needs to know whether the generals think that he should attack her retreat. But the thing is in the bicentene emperor empire, the general can and sometimes once to undermine the leader and become emperor himself.

So in a situation where the leadership retreat, the general advisors attacking hoping that the leader will attack and be destroyed. And then let's confused by the fact that the leader would like a consensus of a opinions from all of the generals but some of the generals want to undermine him and sometimes some generals report on what other generals are saying.

So one general might say well, the other two generals also said attack and I say attacks and we should attack when in fact, only one of them said attack. You see the problem, right? You just can't trust your generals. Well, it's like the jockey it just can't trust the joker but that's the world.

We live in, right? A lot of ethics is based on the idea of creating trust you know a mechanism not allows us to interoperate to not kill each other etc but the Joker problem tells us that we need to make it about more than just trust. If fact what they're trying to do and blockchain is to create trust free or trustless mechanisms for commerce.

Now, if we could do that and financial commerce, maybe we could do that in other areas. Certainly it is the case that whatever we think of as ethics, doesn't seem to apply even the financial community. That's why you need solutions like this. But maybe it doesn't apply either in the wider society.

And maybe there are just jokers walking among us and no matter what ethical principle we have. It's not going to be enough to solve the problem. Maybe, indeed, ethics, is nothing more than the technical problem. We see a lot of work being done in contemporary artificial intelligence and machine learning, addressing ethical issues as technical problems to be addressed.

By the best model where the best model is determine by challenges or competitions and varied run. And other set competition has historically had a great impact on bringing the attention of the research community to a particular problem. I think attracting their researchers to the areas ethics is one of those problems.

So for example, I got some links here. A competition on gendered pronoun, resolution or vision challenges, or inclusive images challenge etc. Right? So really if we just put it open to competition and had different teams work on the ethical problem, maybe that would resolve the issue of ethics for us.

Now intuitively that doesn't seem like you good idea, but alterationally that's what people are doing and you know, it's hard to say why they're wrong or maybe ethics really is just a commercial market waiting to develop. Certainly seeing a lot of that these days, I have a number of examples in my in my deeper text.

But here's a simple one where the company Accenture has come out with what they call the Accenture Fairness Tool which enables a user to identify and fix some of the problems that result in unfair outcomes by analyzing both training data and models. Congratulations. Accenture. You have solved ethics. Well, I think and I'm calling here from quite a nice paper written by David Weinberger just the other day, although he says he's been working on it for two years and maybe that's true.

To pull out a few sailing and quotes when people say, we don't know how machine learning works what we're hearing. And we should hear perhaps, is that these models do indeed work. And the reason why they work is that they're better at reading the world than we are. The big problem that a lot of people have with the ethics of analytics and machine learning is that they're not explainable.

You can't take the decision of a machine learning model and express in plain words, the sort of thinking that the machine learning went through to reach the conclusion that it did. But that's what we would expect of a human, right? We asking, how did you reach the decision that this action was right?

Well, I thought this and I rely on that principle. Yeah. That's what we ask humans to do, but you can ask that of the machine because the machine isn't able to just sit there and start rationalizing. The way human can and what we learn. I think, from what we see in world of artificial intelligence today is not that there aren't generalizations laws or principles are certainly.

Ours observationally true that they are that there are but it's a denial of the idea that they are sufficient for understanding what happens in a universe is complex as ours. These ethical principles that were trying to get at perhaps to explain what it is worth thinking. When we decide that some behavior is good, some character trait is bad.

We're trying to pull out these principles and we do pull up these principles, but they are just not sufficient. As I say, the word's are two blunts and instrument for the find two knowledge that they're trying to represent and we see locks of efforts to uncover simple universal principles, but they're just not sufficient Jones rights, implementation must deal with interdependent problems.

Navigating nonlinear and often unpredictable change processes involving a diverse range of stakeholders. Even the factors in that sentence are enough to me an environment unknowable in any sense that we understand. There's noable the capacities to tackle, these problems are often distributed across a number of different people. No one person can actually address.

These also, their complex systems. So the actual outcomes are on predictable. It's like the weather, right? And even worse these complex problems. Often involve conflicting goals or conflicting values or conflicting principles etc. So, the simple universal solutions that were hoping for from ethics, are not going to apply here.

So, what does that mean? I think it means the end of ethic properly, so-called I think that we should start thinking of ethics in the sense of pulling out, some sort of, abstract principles, universal or not, based on abstract values, the we can derive these universal principles. We should not I quote from Douglas Rushkoff here.

The only real weapon against the fearful vision of a cold cyber Siberia is joy. Appreciation of the space gives the surfer. His bearings and balance in Siberia. That's kind of a complex idea and it was quite precient for rush coughed to be writing and that way in 1994. But you know, the world of ethics is a lot like the world of surfing.

It's a hot like the world of living in Siberia. The real Siberia where it's really hard to see, what sort of principles are going to matter next, because it's really hard to see what's going to happen next. Maybe the wave changes, maybe the storm front comes on you unexpectedly.

Maybe you use suddenly find yourself running a ground maybe you suddenly find yourself in the deep freeze, whatever? Right and what ethics needs to be in these kind of environments is this joyful apprehension of the environment? And appreciation of the environment. Good is something that we bring to the world.

It's not something that was in the world. It's something that we bring to the world and instead of thinking of ethics, as you know, some kind of stern sentinal that tells us what we ought or gone on. Do we should be thinking of ethics as how it is that we find and, or, or define or recognize, what is truly good in the world?

What makes our existence? Not merely bearable but the wondrous thing that it is. The question of how we do. That is a hard question, and we're going to look at some approaches to this in the next module of the course. So next module of the course is the duty of care and it sounds like I'm going back to during task master again with the word duty.

But really the idea of care is about the idea of nurturing and about the idea of relationships and it has a basis in a feminist principle of ethics, but it doesn't end with a feminist principle of ethics. And it's an approach that helps us understand how we can describe and bring out and comprehend the way we are related to the rest of the world and why we are able to find good in that.

So I'll leave you with that for now. And I'll see you next week on off to go. Watch a football game in Montreal trying to find the greater and everything. Even the last place team on their final game of the year. So have a good weekend and thanks for now, I'm Stephen Downs.

I'll talk to you next time.

Force:yes