Introducing Ethics in Information and Computer Sciences

Introduction

Ethics is an established area of academic interest, but it is only fairly recently that the relevance of ethics to Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) started to emerge clearly outside philosophical studies. Professional bodies in Engineering and ICS have begun to require, as a condition for accreditation, the study of ethics-related topics, and, partially in response to these requirements, new pedagogies for teaching and learning these topics are gradually emerging.

This course explores the idea that drama and dialogue provide powerful tools to help ICS students and professionals to identify, discuss and understand the role of ethics in their professional practice. The core of the course is based upon discussion of a selection of plays and dialogues that raise ethical questions of relevance to professionals. The examples also represent different styles of argumentation and, hence, illustrate the relevance of rhetoric to professional practice in ICS. Although the course introduces some ideas taken from academic texts in the area of ethics, it does so to provide learners with a shared vocabulary that can be used for practical analysis and discussion of ‘real’ problems.

‘Introducing ethics in Information and Computer Sciences’ has been created to provide a predominantly self-contained resource including a mix of materials on different media. The last section in the course, however, revolves around the analysis of a play script – Joe Penhall's Landscape with Weapon – which we are unable provide online as it is currently subject to copyrights restrictions. To derive maximum benefit from the course, we strongly recommend that you obtain a copy of the play. Crucially, although the course has been tentatively designed to be read and studied independently, the authors strongly believe that group discussions provide the best context for exploring the materials, so, if you are studying this material online, we recommend that you use the course forum to share your views with other learners. Also, please use the course forum to leave comments and feedback you might like to share with the authors: we will be most grateful for you thoughts!

Bearing in mind that one of the aims of this course is to develop awareness of ethical issues in different contexts, we suggest the use of a learning journal not only as a note-taking device, but also as a file to register experiences and thoughts on conversations as well as readings outside the course (e.g. newspapers).

The course is based upon a conceptual framework developed by Professor John Monk, and it capitalises on the lessons and feedback gathered during a trial course run by the authors in 2008 with a small group of volunteers using FM, the Web 2.0 videoconferencing tool available on OpenLearn. The course is available in various formats for download and reuse within the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 License. The authors very much hope that learners and colleagues will not only profit from but also build on this work: we acknowledge the course as a first draft initially shared over the Web but, nevertheless, deserving of further development.

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Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• discuss what ethics is and what constitutes an ethical issue

• identify and discuss ethical issues that arise in the media, in routine conversations and, in particular, in personal everyday professional practice

• discuss the role of emotions in ethical deliberations

• discuss how negotiation might resolve apparent ethical differences

• identify and discuss the ethical issues presented and rhetorical styles used in play and dialogue excerpts, with focus on explaining how language is used to alter other people's ethical perceptions and convince them of specific points.

1 Good, bad, right or wrong?

1.1 ‘People, not guns, kill people’?

The quote above is taken from Plato's dialogue Gorgias (§511d–e). In this and the following passage, which is likely to seem more than a little insensitive to present day readers, Socrates compares the work of two professions — the navigators or ship's skippers and the engineers – with that of orators. Earlier in the dialogue, Socrates’ interlocutor, Gorgias, had arrogantly claimed that orators inhabited a province that is the ‘greatest and best human of concerns’ (§451d) and which ‘serves … to produce the kind of conviction needed in courts of law and other large masses of people … and the subject of this kind of conviction is right and wrong’ (§454b). Socrates then attempts to show that the engineer and the navigator, with little fuss, also provide services to a wide community. Nevertheless, Socrates adds that the engineer and the navigator recognise that that community will inevitably include ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people.

But why, then, is the ferry's skipper so modest? Why does the skilled navigator, after landing, walk ‘about the shore beside his ship in an unassuming way’? Socrates puts the answer rather bluntly. He suggests the navigator can deploy his skills to keep people safe but also to deliberately put people in danger and therefore has the opportunity to conduct merciful drownings, but he cannot know which of his charges deserve a safe passage and which are less deserving, or whose unbearable pain could be relieved. In a less brutal way he then explains that the ferryman ‘knows he has landed [his passengers] in no better condition, in body or soul, than when they embarked’, consequently ‘the skipper, although he saves lives, is not in the habit of magnifying his office’. Similarly, the engineer, who in Plato's day was responsible for the defensive walls around a city that kept the citizens safe, and whose ‘ability to save [lives] is as great as that of a general’, cannot know which of the citizens that have been protected are ‘worthy’ and which are ‘unworthy’.

The engineer and the navigator generally do not know how the users of their products or services have lived their lives, so they cannot know what benefit or misery their products or services will perpetuate. That is why, Socrates surmises, the engineer as well as the navigator seldom make a fuss about what they do. Socrates is attempting to belittle the vainglory of the orator, but an implication here is that the engineer, navigator or orator cannot be expected to take any part of the blame for the misdeeds of the users of their products or services, nor are they able to act in practising their chosen profession to challenge or interfere with the activities of their beneficiaries. That is, their products and services do not provide a medium for moderating other people's malign behaviour. This is closely consistent with the cliché that says ‘people, not guns, kill people’ (‘The gun Menace’ in New York Times 18 May 1972, p. 46 – see also Peter M. Nichols ‘Listening to the Shouting about Shooting’ in New York Times 27 June 1999, Section 13, p. 4). Taking the ferryman and the gun maker as representatives of different technologies, it would seem that both Plato's account and the cliché absolve the gun maker and the ferryman from any responsibilities.

1.2 Ethical examples

But is this a tenable position? In other words, is it only the people who use the technologies who carry the ethical burden? Conversely, is ethics of any interest to engineers, programmers and scientists? What, in the first place, constitutes an ethical issue? To begin examining these questions, let's look at some examples.

In the examples that I've given you, fairness, duty, the distribution of harm and benefit and the need for political skills, all of which are ethical issues, and feature clearly in a technological context. These are only a few examples amongst many, but they do suggest that ethics is something that does concern designers and engineers, lending support to the case that the study of ethics is useful to technology developers.

1.3 Your thoughts

What I have not done yet, however, is to say what ethics actually is! Before doing that I would like to give you an opportunity to collect your own initial thoughts on the matter and introduce some further ideas. Let's start with your reflection.

This example illustrates the point that there is no single ‘right’ way of doing things. Indeed you can often be faced with incommensurable ‘goods’ and ‘bads’, and it is not at all obvious as to how you can unify them, how you can compare them. It may often not be possible to figure out a single, ‘correct’ way that will reconcile very different ways of assessing thinking and arguing. This is indeed something that professional ethicists are very worried about and refer to as aggregation, and they are particularly interested in the consequences of aggregating things in particular ways. I'll discuss this in more detail later on in the course.

1.4 What is ethics?

I'd like to introduce an idea of ethics based on the work of G. E. Moore, a Cambridge Don who died fifty years ago. Bearing in mind that concerns with ethics date back at least to the Ancient Greeks, you might not be surprised that I bring in some ideas from Moore's Principia Ethica, a text written over 100 years ago but articulated in a particularly clear and plain-speaking style. Moore's take on things is that when ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are involved, then we're in the realm of ethics. He wrote:

Moore also wrote ‘good’ is ‘indefinable’, so we don't quite know what it is, though sometimes, because of connections between things, I might conclude something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ by aggregating lots of constituent indefinable ‘goods’ and ‘bads’. I still have to make a decision in the end, but there is no universal way of doing this.

So we have collections of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ that are indefinable and we may not agree upon, and ways of conflating them that we also may not agree on. Clearly, the topic of ethics is not straightforward.

To illustrate these ideas I would like to use an example taken from a play: George Bernard Shaw's (1903) Major Barbara. You can find a short excerpt in Box 1. In the play, Andrew Undershaft is an arms manufacturer who has the disarming habit of doing the ‘right’ thing for the ‘wrong’ reasons. For instance, in this particular case, people are impressed by his humility when he donates to the Salvation Army anonymously, until they discover (see emboldened text in Box 1) that he wasn't really being humble, he was just protecting himself. But the question is: if in the end the Salvation Army gets the money, and you think that's a ‘good’ thing, then what's wrong with that? The ‘right’ outcome is what is wanted, so do the reasons really matter?

What do you think: if the right outcome is what is wanted, do the reasons matter? Take a few moments to consider this question before reading on.

1.5 Reasons

One thing that reasons do is to provide explanations as to why someone acted in a certain way. If someone gives ‘wrong’ reasons, then doubts may arise about the quality of any deliberations undertaken by that person. So, ‘wrong’ reasons raise doubts concerning his or her future actions and the products of those actions. Quite a lot hinges on people's experiences of other people's judgements, so if someone's judgements seem to have given satisfactory results in the past, then we're inclined to give those people some authority and their explanations some credence. Of course relying on explanations does open the opportunity for others to use rhetoric to ‘fake’ good judgement, to rewrite history, basically, to do less than benign things. These are all tricky areas. The bottom line here is that reasons, or, rather, justifications, are about building trust. We want to see people give ‘good’ reasons because, if they give us ‘good’ reasons this time, perhaps we might trust their judgement next time. Proficiency in ethical reasoning is mainly about building and reinforcing trust, which is essential to a professional building and maintaining his or her identity. Consequently, reasons do matter because much of the work of professionals is about building ‘good’ reasons for what they do or recommend.

With its focus on the written word, academic study of ethics is less about doing things and more about the reasons for doing things. Academics in a specialist area ask questions such as:

• Is the reasoning sound?

• Are the reasons based on sound premises?

• What assumptions are being made?

On the other hand, there are also outcomes and actions that cause an outcome, aside from the reasons for action. All, actions, reasons and outcomes, could be labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and one does not exclude the other, as the words in the play excerpt in the previous section so nicely illustrated. For instance, a clumsily executed action may have a ‘good’ outcome, or a well-executed action may have objectionable results. All of these things could be treated separately, but if we're involved in the study of ethics, then in the academic world we tend to look at reasons. Reasons can be analysed, and that's where academics tend to focus the study of ethics: on justifications. Sometimes the focus of analysis is on outcomes. When reasons have not been clearly expressed, ethicists often look at outcomes and try and find out what the reasons might have been.

Naturally, reasons are not essential. We all do things without reasoning about them, through instinct, habit, intuition, guesswork and so on. But action, particularly if you're a technology developer, requires the capability to act, so you need to be able to use the tools or, more often than not because technology is a team effort, you need the authority to get others to act on your behalf. Neither the capability nor the authority may be forthcoming. Assembling the reasons is part of the effort to gain, first of all, self-confidence (‘do I know what I'm doing?’) and, secondly the trust and authority that will ensure the co-operation of others. The academic study of ethics tends to focus on reasons for doing things, which is useful because as technologists we need to develop our skill in reasoning, in presenting reasons for doing things, because reasons can persuade other people that those things should be done.

G.E. Moore wrote that both outcomes and the means to achieve them have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects and neither should be ignored. In other words, both the product (end) and the process (means) matter, and, since developers are often part of the process, then their conduct matters too.

Artefacts and services are not only used, they have to be constructed, and they often have to be maintained and, ultimately, discarded. Materials have to be sourced. At each stage questions of harm and reward can arise: harm or reward to the workforce, harm or benefit to the environment and harm and benefit to the users and possibly the harm and benefit to the mis-users. All of this is in the hands of technology developers!

1.6 Final vocabulary

Any ethical analysis has to be grounded on something, otherwise the analysis has no end. And since reasons will be couched in words, I think it is helpful to look at what the philosopher Richard Rorty has called a ‘final vocabulary’. He suggests:

I would add to this that, if I were frustrated and my words didn't enable me to justify what I was doing, then I might perhaps resort to insult or emotional outburst, of which passivity and violence that Rorty talks about are extremes. To actually get on with things, we need a set of words we can depend on, words we individually think are related to the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’.

Rorty continues to say that some individuals will be wedded to their final vocabulary while others may have doubts about theirs. The ones who are strongly wedded would be the ‘conservatives’ of this world, while those who have doubts are more likely to be the ‘liberals’ of this world. So your final vocabulary is, no doubt, different from mine. There is not necessarily agreement about what a final vocabulary should be and this will contribute to disputes about what constitutes a ‘good’ reason.

Rorty gives some examples of words that might be part of a final vocabulary. He divided up final vocabularies into two parts, a ‘thin’ and a ‘thick’ vocabulary. The first part ‘is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as “true”, “good”, “right”, and “beautiful”’ (ibid. p. 73). Probably we all use those. The other and larger part ‘contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, for example “Christ”, “England”, “professional standards”, “decency”, “kindness” …”progressive”, “rigorous”, “creative”’ (ibid. p. 73). By labelling his thick terms as ‘parochial’ Rorty appears to be linking them with a community of interest, implying that different communities may have different parochial final vocabularies. Rorty argues that these parochial terms ‘do most of the work’ (ibid. p. 73). In short, the final vocabulary provides terms that are not normally questioned and act as surrogates for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for different people, groups and situations.

For technology developers, who commonly include things as well as people in their considerations, this final vocabulary may be sometimes distilled into the properties of things: an example might be the vehicle designers who see talk of low emissions as desirable. ‘Low emissions’ is a property of a vehicle. Developers may also present the final vocabulary in the form of rules, rules of thumb – unquestioned rules or constraints on reasons that are accepted by a particular group of technologists. In the field of technology we have these rules of thumbs and final vocabularies, and different groups of technologists will have different rules of thumb and different final vocabularies.

1.7 Ideology

The notions of a final vocabulary and that of ideology are closely related. Anthony Giddens defined ideology as ‘shared ideas or beliefs which serve to justify the interests of dominant groups’ (Giddens, 2006, p. 1020). There are all sorts of problems with this definition. One difficulty, for example, is that ideas and beliefs, if they have any kind of existence, are hidden away and have to be inferred by what people do and say. Another difficulty surrounds exactly how these things can be shared. Rorty, to some extent, avoids these issues by referring to word use that can be directly experienced by observers or listeners who then have some evidence enabling them to draw conclusions about the common word usage amongst a group. What Rorty cannot do, though, is to provide a way of identifying whether or not a word is decisively part of a final vocabulary.

To illustrate this, let's look at another example taken from Shaw's Major Barbara. The main character states he will abide by ‘the faith of the armourer’, which, he says, is ‘to give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles’. The root of good reasons for selling arms is then solely based on an ‘honest price’. His successor proposes a different creed and asserts ‘I shall sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please’. Subtly this alters things and makes ‘pleasing the armourer’ the foundation of the reasons for selling arms.

So various technologies might have ideologies identified as expressed in the final vocabularies and rules that the technologists in the field share. Many of these premises about what qualifies as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes shift with changes in technology, so engineers need to be alert to avoid being trapped in a tradition that can no longer justify its maxims.

One thing that the study of ethics investigates are the consequences of adopting a particular final vocabulary or ideology, and sometimes showing how it can be analysed or broken down into other terms. Often, when you look into texts on ethics, the final vocabulary is reduced to terms like ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, ‘duties’ or, perhaps, ‘virtues’ and ‘vices’. The final vocabulary in technology development is more often than not reduced to financial terms (‘money’) or to a set of quantified ‘risks’. But if you try and reduce it in this way, there are always things that will be missed out, and of course one of the dangers of ideologies is that important things are ignored.

Just to round off this section, I thought it would be worth mentioning that ethicists have developed a shared (even if the meanings are contested) terminology to categorise and deal with issues within the remit of their studies. Box 2 presents some of the basic terms you will find in academic texts on ethics, and I have included them here just to give you a flavour of what you will find if you follow up on an academic route.

1.8 ‘Ethics’, ‘ethical’ and authority

There is some confusion over the uses of the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘ethics’. Often people use the adjective ‘ethical’ to signal things that they would expect virtuous people to do. That is they use the word ‘ethical’ instead of ‘good’. Companies, institutions and even governments might claim to have ‘ethical’ policies. Probably such a policy declares the ideology. For example, saying that ‘sustainability is ethical’ may be part of an individual's ethic but it is a tautology that is not an essential part of ethics.

Ethics commonly addresses the synthesis of people's feelings, attitudes, premises and ideologies and provides a critique of those things. Ethics cannot give instructions on what final vocabulary to adopt, how reasons should be formed or how to judge the rightness of a conclusion. As such ethics can be a source of frustration when the ethicist shows how a range of different conclusions might be reached by adopting different stances or forms of argument. Ethics is not about ‘getting an ethic’ – being comfortable with the evaluations of fellow professionals – but about recognising that different people will evaluate things in different ways and assess collections of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ in different ways.

It is also important to clarify the difference between evaluation and decision making. Ethics is not concerned with decision making, whether personal or involving others where clashes of view may occur. Decisions come after we make judgements. A decision is a commitment to act, and before you make the commitment, you engage in judgement. Judgement is something I consider to be a part of ethics; decisions come at the tail-end of ethics. However, people tend to get a sense of security when they adopt ethical assumptions, but ethical analysis is likely to show that all kinds of assumptions are not as secure as we might think. A while ago, a colleague of mine called in an ethicist to help with a decision in a bio-engineering project, and all the ethicist did was to point out that there were half a dozen positions that could be used, each resulting in a different judgement about potential actions. The point is this: the study of ethics and engagement with ethics doesn't necessarily help arriving at decisions, although ethical analysis does encourage people to think more carefully about the decisions they make.

As I have already mentioned, people use past experience to help them to evaluate how others make decisions and justify what they subsequently do, and how these contribute to the perceived authority of individuals (or groups). This can certainly lead to a degree of polarisation when you have a number of groups each with their own final vocabulary. We indeed live in a polarised world of specialist groups. Expert communities establish their authority partly by developing their justifications in terms of their idiosyncratic final vocabularies. One important message from ethics is that from time to time we need to question what the experts are saying, that is challenge justifications that are expressed in a final vocabulary sustained only through habit within the closed expert community.

In short, the first statement in the excerpt is an authoritative assertion, then there's a bit of theory and an ideological implication which says I'll get pollution. This is followed by advice on practical action and, then, actually two more statements that appeal to my sense of ‘goodness’. There it is: an ethical argument in a technological context and, of all places, in a TV user manual!

In a way this statement appears rather odd because it was in the user manual provided by the maker of a television, not a power company or the government. So why did they, in a TV manual, talk about pollution? I guess they imagined you would think it was a ‘bad’ thing, but not everybody is going to agree that pollution is a bad thing. Also, not everybody will know exactly what is meant here by pollution, or they might not be convinced how it happens. Nor were the people who wrote the manual, or so it seems, because they add further lines of argument, as I explained above, ‘you save energy’ or ‘you get a good picture’, as they are trying to appeal to people's different senses of value.

And, of course, you might say that a more persuasive argument, and one you know that works, is that if you turn your television off at night it saves you money, and irrespective of what people feel about pollution, energy, water, they will more than likely respond to arguments which describe outcomes with financial consequences. So, if I can say it saves you cash, you may be more easily persuaded to turn your television off. Even though people do value their money, would such a statement constitute an ethical argument? The difficulty here is subtle. If you tell people to turn their television off and it'll save them money, you're making just an ideological assertion. There are no justifications in this claim, there isn't really a complete argument because there are missing elements. Steps in an argument might be ‘turn your TV off’, ‘that reduces energy consumption’, ‘energy costs money’, ‘you'll save money’. Alternatively, you can avoid presenting an argument and present yourself as an authority. If you present yourself as an authority, then, of course, to be effective others must accept your authority in the matter.

1.9 Final vocabularies in context

As I discussed earlier, there are different ways of looking at things and valuing them, as there are different kinds of things we value. I also suggested that you might, in your arguments, try and value reasons: are they ‘good’ reasons for doing things? We might also be concerned with outcomes, but because outcomes require a route to achieving them, the means or process also needs to be assessed. As we'll see in the next section, Socrates says, in the Platonic dialogues, you might take a medicine that tastes bad in order to get better. In this case you have an ethic that admits a not-so-good means to achieve a desired end. This illustrates the issue that you might want to look for ‘good’ means and ‘good’ ends, but in some instances an ethic might accommodate an unpleasant means as long as the outcome is ‘good’.

And so these different things, reasons, means, ends, the agents, the people that are doing the work, or combinations of these things, all of these are worthy of consideration in ethics, and these are things we will be looking at throughout this course. However, this type analysis doesn't answer certain kinds of questions. For example, I introduced and began exploring the concept of final vocabularies, but I did not mention that the same final vocabulary may be put to very different uses. Sometimes people use words in very different situations and to very different effects. Take the words ‘modern’ and ‘sustainable’, for example. People using the word ‘sustainable’ might have quite different views on what ‘sustainable’ is; some people may think is relates to keeping things as they are, which means they are adopting a conservative view, whilst others may take ‘sustainable’ in a sense of ‘changing things so that they become sustainable’. The latter is a radical rather than a conservative view.

So, because different people may be using final vocabulary in different ways, it is important to focus on the use of this vocabulary. Take the term ‘risk’, for example. For a professional, ‘risk’ is often a matter of degree, a numerical probability associated with a particular outcome. On the other hand, for individuals, ‘risk’ actually reveals a possibility. The debate in the United Kingdom surrounding the MMR vaccine illustrates this difference quite well. Specialists say that there is a very low ‘risk’ to a child, which is acceptable from a professional perspective, but as far as parents are concerned, ‘risk’ means that there is a possibility of a problem. Specialists and parents, therefore, are using the same word in subtly different ways.

Crucial to these differences in interpretation are the differences in the relationships at play. For the government specialist concerned with vaccination in his or her professional role the relationships are with the population as a whole and the aggregate good. For the parent, the relationship is with the individual child.

The form of relationships with other people not only shape our ethical arguments but personal relationships (including self-interest) are things people value. In considering outcomes and means are we concerned about individuals or are we considering a wider community? If we are thinking about, let's say, wealth, are we talking about the wealth of individuals or the wealth of the community as being important? But also changes in relationships for the better or worse may itself be an outcome. I will return to the question of relationships later in the course.

I hope the previous activity highlighted that ethical statements tend to be fairly complex things, even if, on a first look, the argumentation itself may appear mundane. In other words, it is not only the evaluation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that needs to interest us here, but also the way in which the argument or justification is articulated (as well as the context in which it appears). To close this section I would like to propose an activity that asks you to engage with some audio-visual material. Although this format allows for very different ways of putting across an argument, this gives you another example of how a fairly short argument can indeed conceal a lot of complexity once it begins to be unpacked.

As you will have seen earlier in the course, a trial course was run in 2008 with volunteer participants from amongst OpenLearn users, and the Ethics video generated a particularly lively conversation within the group. The next activity gives you an opportunity to listen to what the group had to say.

Activity 7

Watch the video snippet below, which presents a discussion of the Ethics video carried out by participants in the 2008 trial. Please be aware that the quality of the video and audio varies as it was recorded as a Flash Meeting and was therefore dependent on the equipment and connection speeds of the individual participants.

Download this video clip.Video player: Discussion 1

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Transcript: Discussion 1

Frank:

Great, yes, I was going to say about the, well what I perceived as the purpose of the video which was to highlight the different values involved in making the decision about where the radio masts should be and possibly even if there should be radio masts at all. Coming back to John’s previous point, in the last lecture where maybe increased communication with trains might save one passenger out of every 120,000 but if the roadside people, the roadside workers were to die, I think it was one out of every 6,000, then maybe more people would be killed because of this action rather than without doing anything at all.

John:

Oh, did we lose Frank there?

Frank:

No, I just said my piece, really, and I found it interesting that some people would value the view the higher masts would be better to some people because there would be fewer of them, then some people with children might be more concerned about the radiation effects from higher power transmitters. So there was a whole load of different judgments that need to be made but each different technological solution to the problem is going to have its different varied effects and you have to give a value to each one, and assigning values and quantities to those values is very subjective, so that’s where the ethics come in.

Tim:

I think the other side of the argument, which perhaps didn’t come across in the video, is that if we didn’t have any masts there’d be no mobile phone service and what sort of impact would that have on people’s lives.

Peter:

I’ve had a couple of thoughts on this. If you’ve read the forum, I’ve tried to suggest there are more than two possibilities about short and long masts. A combination of the two would be some short and some long. And I don’t know the technology well enough but why not make the train into an aerial and so only the people on the train would be affected by the radiation during the period of their journey.

John:

I’m reminded, they’re going to build a big housing estate almost next door to me, and they said they were going to consult, and they did. They said do I want tiles on the roof of the new houses or slates, and there were another couple of questions like that, did I want wooden cladding or tiled cladding on these houses. I wasn’t asked about the siting of the houses or whether there should be any statements on. So your point, Peter, is that often in an ethical argument, things are, technical possibilities are often missed out deliberately, we don’t want people going in that direction, and one of the things I wanted to get out of that video was there’s an awful lot was not being said there.

Tim:

I think the nub of the radiation issue isn’t what the science says or anything like that. It’s the fact that if you build a mast, anyone within reach of that mast is subjected to the radiation whether or not they choose to. It’s the removal of the element of choice from the individual.

John:

So there’s an ideological statement that you think individuals should have that choice and you’re removing freedoms so a good basis for building ethical arguments it seems to me.

Janet:

Yes, just going back a point or two, just the thing that struck me most about the brief video was that there was absolutely no argument about whether the masts were needed; it was simply what kind of masts do you want.

Tim:

I don’t think I necessarily believe that there’s any reason why we shouldn’t have the masts. I’m just saying that the real issue isn’t the case of whether science says the radiation is or is not harmful. It’s the fact that nobody has a choice. So if you personally believe that it’s harmful, even if that belief is misplaced and unfounded, it’s still a belief you hold and you’re not able to choose to absent yourself from the radiation. It’s a bit like the issue with smoking in public places, isn’t it, if I don’t smoke, why should I have to suffer other people’s smoke? And now, of course, we don’t because of legislation that’s come in.

Janet:

Yes, I’d agree with that but again then there has to come a point at which you have to think about how reasonable the objections are. I’m not saying that people who object to masts are unreasonable but in any kind of argument you’ve always got to consider the balance between those who want the masts, let’s say, and those who feel threatened by it.

Tim:

Yes, I completely agree and it’s how, as a society, we find the balance between those who want the benefits of mobile phones, which is a very large proportion of the population now, and those who are afraid that the dangers of the radiation as they perceive it. Perhaps at this point it ought to be fair of me to point out that I worked in the mobile phone industry, I’ve built hundreds of these base stations, so I have been involved in all sorts of debates with people over the years. Many of whom, of course, didn’t want the base stations being built near their homes.

John:

There’s one thing I don’t want to lose that kind of appeared in a comment was that it’s people’s beliefs, it’s people’s fears sometimes that are an influence on, of course, how they react. Naturally it is. The question is if we’re constructing an ethical argument and we don’t have those fears, should we take other people’s fears into account. I guess you’d have to say that fear itself can be harmful and certainly discomforting and so fear is perhaps something else we ought to add in to our list of things that might be included in ethical debate.

Peter:

There’s also an awful lot that I personally don’t know about this. I mean how serious is the radiation risk, is it directional, is there protection against this in directions that you don’t want it to go in, is there a range on it, etc., etc.

Renee:

I was just going to say the same as you there that it depends whether it’s something that’s affecting you personally at the time and I also feel that you need a lot more information to make decisions but I’m one of these people that just wants to gather lots of information and not always make the decision.

Tim:

Normally questions such as location and height of a mast is dealt with in planning terms and general planning principles would say that people on a train are only affected, if that’s the correct word, by a mast for a very brief moment in time as they go past it. So they’re only affected in terms of their visual impact or possibly the radiation if you believe that there’s a problem with that. Whereas people that live next to it are exposed to it constantly and that’s obviously a very different matter.

Janet:

Yes, just following up on what was said before that it all seems to come down to information again and how authoritative the information is that’s being presented and quality of information.

Tim:

I’m not entirely sure that I would agree with that because one of the real problems with any information about whether it’s mobile phone radiation or pollution in the environment is that science isn’t clear and never will be clear, so I think there are actually some value judgments in there.

John:

The other thing is there is always limited time and limited opportunities for putting across the case and, of course, things will be missed out.

Janet:

Yes, I agree that a lot of these things do involve a certain amount of value judgment and my concern is that it isn’t always easy to distinguish between authoritative or good quality information and people who are irrationally stirring up fear.

Judith:

I thought the motor presentation was quite interesting because, on the surface of it, the video looked as though it was purely factual. It was telling us facts about the difference between high and low masts and the amount of power. But if you looked at the way it was presented, we had the radiation I think was shown in red and red is like a kind of danger signal to us so there were some messages there. And also the cityscape was shown quite distant from the railway track implying that there weren’t any people living close and they wouldn’t be affected.

Frank:

Similarly to that point and picking up on Janet’s point, this is where the final vocabulary can actually work against us where advertising and people trying to sway the public opinion can actually tune very much into the final vocabulary and sway people’s judgment just by knowing what buttons to press.

Tim:

Yes, I would agree with that and there’s been some highly irresponsible media coverage about all sorts of issues. The MMR vaccine that John was talking about earlier is one that springs to mind where the scientists behind that I think have now been fairly comprehensively discredited.

End transcript: Discussion 1

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Discussion 1

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1.10 The story so far

Ethics is about ‘good’ and ‘bad’, but these terms are indefinable. In practice, there are alternative forms of justifications that can cause differences and disagreements. Other causes of differences are the terms in the final vocabulary of different individuals, and these final vocabularies have two aspects. Some terms that have wider use, terms related to ‘good’ and ‘bad’, like ‘optimal’, ‘beneficial’, ‘detrimental’ and ‘useless’. Others are more parochial substitutes, terms like ‘modern’, ‘digital, ‘low-power’, perhaps more related to technology. Effectively there are things that we value and label with these terms from our final vocabulary, and combined them in ethical arguments to support ethical claims. In this manner we can have statements with complicated implications, like ‘nuclear power is good’ or ‘nuclear power is bad’, that might be analysed to ultimately, connect up with a parochial final vocabulary. So another way of looking at ethics is to say that it's about this kind of analysis, it's a way of evaluating things and providing justifications, or reasons, for the values we attribute. However, in many cases we have feelings about how valuable things are and those feelings will precede or even override any rationale. Importantly, emotions play an essential part in our ethical considerations, for instance, they play a role in determining the value we place on personal relationships and hence, in an ethical context, who we might accept as an authority in particular situations.

2 It's not all Greek to me!

2.1 Introduction

The first section introduced some basic ideas and vocabulary to get you started on thinking about ethics and ethical questions. In this section I would like to start using those ideas and vocabulary to tackle some examples taken from a selection of dialogues.

One of my reasons for focusing on dialogue is that dialogue is a written form of conversation. A crucial point about conversations is that they do not have to be logical. If a conversation comes to a halt, then someone starts on a new topic. In a conversation people can exaggerate: there's a rhetorical element to it. When dealing with ethical matters you cannot avoid the influence of your feelings, in the way you express things and in the nature of your argument. We might like to think that when we're working out what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we are being ‘logical’, but experience shows that this is rarely the case. Irrationality, the effects of our emotions, slips into the judgements we make. Indeed, it's interesting we use the word ‘judgement’ rather than ‘logic’, because ‘judgement’ seems to imply that we somehow extrapolate from incomplete evidence, possibly from rather dubious sources. In other words, you have your dubious, incomplete evidence, so what you're stuck with is not drawing a ‘good’ conclusion but making a ‘judgement’. Logic may be helpful but maybe inadequate in the face of uncertainty.

Therefore, one of the reasons for my using dialogue as the source of material is to actually reinforce this point.

I have selected for you some extracts from three of Plato's dialogues: Protagoras, Meno and Gorgias. Plato's dialogues are quite extensive and deal with a number of complex issues, but these three particular dialogues are specifically about ethics. Indeed, these dialogues constitute three essential texts in any study of ethics and are really worth engaging with, if you are interested in the area. I will ask you to look at some extracts not only to get a feel for what the Greeks said about ethical matters, but also to introduce you to different kinds of dialogue. Protagoras, for example, uses a device for putting across the argument that is very different from what is done in the other two texts, which are very much like plays. As I said earlier, I'm interested in exploring not only on the ethical matters, but also how these matters are presented, and these dialogues provide an excellent starting point for this exploration. Once you read the texts you may come to agree with me (or not!) that (the character) Socrates is a bit of a ‘bully’, and you may also wonder whether actually there is dialogue at all. Indeed, it is worth noting at this point that there are some quite considerable critiques of Plato available (see, for example, Bruno Latour's Pandora's Hope, pp. 216–265).

As you may know, Plato and Socrates were two Ancient Greek philosophers. What little remains from Socrates’ thinking, however, is available through surviving texts written by his students, including Plato. In Plato's dialogues Socrates appears as a central character, but it is not entirely clear to us whether the words spoken by Socrates in these dialogues were indeed part of his teachings or, perhaps more likely, Plato's interpretations. In other words, although Socrates is the person who does most of the talking in the dialogues, he is, indeed, a fictional character. Click on the links if you are interested in reading more about Plato and Socrates. The OpenLearn course AS208_1: Europe's awakening will also tell you a little about these philosophers whilst putting their legacy within the context of European cultural development.

Although the dialogues were written over two thousand years ago, they are relatively approachable even if they present intricate arguments (and some are fairly long). Translations of Plato's dialogues are accessible online at sites of projects that are making copyright-free texts openly available, for example, the Project Gutenberg or the Perseus Digital Library. These sites, however, offer fairly old translations in formats that are not particularly reader-friendly. So, if you would like to read the dialogues in their entirety, I would recommend a more recent, possibly annotated, translation in print, which makes things easier to follow. For your study of this course, however, I am recommending that you read some specially prepared versions (which you can download directly from this course in the relevant activities) that contain annotations and highlighting to indicate the passages you need to read. I have tried to select representative parts of the dialogues to allow for discussion of the main ideas they contain as well as their shape in terms of how arguments are put together.

2.2 Three Greek dialogues

An interesting point that Socrates makes is that, if we're going to weigh up the ‘pleasures’ and ‘pains’, we need to be ‘scientific’ (although he did not use this word, which is a nineteenth-century European construct). Because sometimes ‘pleasure’ is in the distance and ‘pain’ is in the present, things may look more like the medicine or the physiotherapy treatment that may be painful but achieves ‘good’ in the end. He claims that, if we're going to assess things of different kinds, then we need some kind of measurement. He indeed says that it is rather important to have measurement. Unfortunately, he never gets around to telling us how we set about measuring things, and this provides a background to some of the other dialogues. The assumption is that what we need to do is to measure the ‘goods’ and the ‘bads’, as in a scientific-like procedure, but he doesn't give us a method. In the end he suggests that, when we make a decision, then we will basically choose the ‘lesser evil’.

Although I used the term ‘scientific’, I did it with great care and a note. Word choice is a potentially problematic issue with these dialogues, which have been repeatedly translated from primary and secondary sources. For example, we might be tempted to assume that Socrates, who begins by weighing up the balance of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ends up weighing up ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, might be referring directly to emotions, that is, more human and immediate ‘things’ that may be relatively easier to weigh up. Although emotions are an essential element of judgements and decision making in my understanding (and I will discuss this later in more detail), that is not an appropriate way of approaching the Socrates in Plato's dialogues.

Of course, this is all highly problematic. Although Socrates might say that ‘virtue’ can't be taught, you might claim that, perhaps, it can be learnt, learnt in the sense that you can learn from your mistakes, you can learn to do better. Perhaps you will not be convinced that what he was talking about was not knowledge, and, so you will not be convinced that it cannot be taught. Before I discuss this further, I would like you to tackle Activity 10, which asks you to read some excerpts from the last chosen dialogue, Gorgias.

Although in one dialogue Socrates is saying that virtue cannot be taught, it would seem that in another he is actually trying to teach it! An interesting aspect of Gorgias is that, when Socrates dismisses Gorgias and his art, he is saying that the ability to address a crowd is not really important. ‘The need to act when opportunity arises not so important, the need to explain succinctly and express using lay language, no that's not important.’ Socrates is actually dismissing all the things that are really rather important if you are in the business of politics. The trouble with this is that technology developers can be adventurous, but to be successful they must identify themselves with the constituency in which they hope their product will become the popular choice. They will have to take lessons from Gorgias rather than Socrates and tell their stories in the most compelling way they can. They need to inject their proposals for a project into people's self-image and will need the public arts to portray their vision and gauge the public reaction.

Socrates dismissed the public arts as being on a par with pandering to people's want of immediate gratification rather than accepting a degree of pain for the long-term ‘good’. Putting this within the context of technology, Socrates’ view requires you to have the knowledge to help you see the longer term; for instance, that a product may in the long term give you a waste disposal problem. Socrates seems to want decisions and the conclusions of arguments postponed until every scrap of knowledge essential to the argument has been found. This approach poses difficulties for the technology developer who is part of a technological enterprise who needs to persuade colleagues (other technologists, managers, accountants, etc.) and, perhaps, investors, and who is given limited time and limited opportunities to do so and, hence, has to focus on being persuasive and succinct while using the limited knowledge available. Socrates seems to be seeking an unachievable ideal that does act as a reminder that in practice our arguments are restricted and insecure and thus always vulnerable and potential ojects for critics.

However, we would expect the developer who does present a proposal to have thoroughly investigated their proposition and be conscious of their competence to do so. In Gorgias Socrates refers to the doctors as experts and, interestingly, presumes that a skill they have is to convince people. The technologists that Socrates hints at are worthy people, but they do not make a fuss about it. Socrates’ reasoning is that the engineers can provide, for example, city defences for people but that does not change the people and the defences will equally defend the good and the villains. So because engineers cannot boast about improving the people they serve, they go modestly about their business (see Gorgias 512b).

So we might try to connect up the threads gathered so far from the three dialogues by saying that Socrates might expect the technologist, like all people, to strive to be ‘virtuous’, and this is a lifetime's quest. In the meantime, in their professional setting they should be knowledgeable, able to justify their proposals at least to their fellow professionals and be able to convince others.

The question of who represents your audience is crucial in presenting any argument or case, as you will know from your own experience (for example, in writing an email to a friend, writing a job application or completing a university assignment). When you look at Socrates’ arguments about what he is trying to do when talking to Callicles, he does actually sound quite like a parent in that he's actually trying to get Callicles to think about the ‘right’ ways to do things. He is talking directly to Callicles and he does not want to talk to a crowd. This is a bit misleading because at various points in the dialogue there are references to an audience who, at some stage, applaud what Socrates is saying. So, whilst he is implying that he only wants to deal with individuals, he's actually got a big audience. If you are a technology developer or designer in a big organisation, I think you need to be a little bit careful about Socrates’ approach.

2.3 Style and rhetoric

In the dialogues in Section 2.2, Plato, the author, is trying to point out convincingly the features of a ‘virtuous’ life and, therefore, offers templates for presenting a case with an ethical content.

In looking at the style of the dialogues, most of Protagoras is in the form of a narrative similar to something you might find in a novel, as I suggested earlier. Meno is much more like a play script, but it is noticeable that Meno (the character) mostly agrees with what Socrates has to say, so the dialogue is much more like a monologue. This suggests an interesting question: what does the choice of a dialogue format add? One possible answer is this: if Meno is respected by those around him, then, when he agrees, he gives authority to Socrates’ words. This is a device you might use when presenting an argument, to actually somehow or other call in the agreement of others. Of course, academics do that all the time by referring to other people that agree with their point of view in their argument, whilst probably not referring, although perhaps they ought to, to those that disagree.

Socrates in Gorgias purports to challenge the importance given to rhetoric, but does offer useful examples. The dialogue uses cooks and doctors as analogies of the rhetorician or the ‘virtuous’, and analogies are very cunning devices. Analogies shift the argument to domains where agreement over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ may be more widely accepted. In the analogous domain a secure conclusion can be established before returning to the original domain, where otherwise things would not be so clear-cut. Stories and quotations in the dialogues similarly deflect and grip the reader's attention as well as bringing in additional authorities in support. It is interesting to note, though, that Gorgias, like Meno, eventually slips into a monologue.

The use of devices such as these can be seen in two ways. Sometimes you might use those devices to try and help with understanding, for example, to give a different perspective or illustrate the form of an argument if you're in a teaching situation. Or if sections of an argument are weak switching to an analogy might obscure weaknesses and obscure rather than enlighten. It is possible to use some of the Socratic techniques to brow-beat, wear opponents down, just to exhaust them so finally they'll forget or feel insecure about their objections and, bewildered, agree with what the protagonist is saying.

Another technique that Socrates uses is contradiction. He leads people down the garden path, seeking out contradictions in their position and then, as a result, quashes their argument. The dialogic form helps with this because dialogue is a bit like a conversation, and the crucial thing is that it continues and it doesn't matter if the subject is changed. So the dialogues enable Plato, the writer, to present bits of arguments and to show that there are contradictions, and then move on to something else. But contradiction is really rather crucial to this method of arguing. To make this clear, let's look at what Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who considered contradiction useful, had to say:

In this quote Wittgenstein is basically saying that contradictions are purposely intended to produce astonishment and indecision. That's the point of a contradiction: you actually want to astonish people. Perhaps you want to produce an effect, or achieve a particular result. Wittgenstein's view of language is quite different from the usual notion that language is representational, that is, that words are spoken equivalents of things that are observed in the world. Wittgenstein has a very different idea of what language is and how it works – he talks in terms of ‘language games’. When writing about contradiction he notes:

He suggests we adopt the rules for these games (or perhaps develop a habit), such as the rules Socrates lays down for logic, but when we encounter a contradiction, it is as though following the rules caused us to break the rules and things don't turn out as we'd hoped. Hence he finds contradictions interesting and might cause us to explore extensions of our language game. Alternatively we might treat this production of astonishment in others as the objective of a language game. Contradictions may therefore be deliberately exploited for effect, or they may signal where we need to provide extensions to our language game. Contradiction according to Wittgenstein is useful but for Socrates it would have been corrosive. Socrates sees contradiction as the end of the matter, that is, a contradiction signals that a line of argument is unsustainable.

Wittgenstein's view creates a new way of thinking about language because language becomes a collection of ways of providing gestures that have useful effects. The OpenLearn units D843_1: Themes in discourse research: the case of Diana and AA308_3: Language and Thought: introducing representation explore these non-representational views of language in different domains and may be of interest, but for the purposes of this course, just think about language as providing effects rather than carrying meaning. Of course, having an effect is very useful for a technologist trying to get something done, and it also suggests that Socratic logic is not the only form of logic that people might happily use.

2.4 Relationships and conduct

Socratic dialogues tend to involve Socrates and just one significant interlocutor at a time. In practice, we have networks of relationships, all of which we value in different ways and which are sustained by conversations that extend over different and long sequences of encounters. Crucially, the actions we take and the conversations we have change those relationships and the value we attribute to them. Therefore, ‘relationships’ constitute yet another thing that we need to look at, something we should be aware of when analysing ethical argument. A dialogue with two parties can be instructive in showing how different relationships can impose constraints on one another as self-interest rubs against a relationship with an interlocutor. However, more parties have to be brought into a discussion to illustrate some of the effects of how a variety of relationships affect the argument and how it evolves since relationships also have a temporal dimension, and different parts of our networks develop at different rates and at different times.

In Arthur Miller's play All My Sons (click for a synopsis), Joe has an engineering company that manufactures cylinder blocks for aircraft engines, and a faulty batch was installed in planes that crashed in action. Steve, Joe's deputy manager, is wrongly imprisoned because Joe lies. Joe claims he was in bed when these faulty blocks were despatched. Later in the play Joe's loyal wife innocently remarks that ‘Joe hasn't been laid up in fifteen years’ and, of course, his mendacity, his lie, is noted. By then, however, his deputy manager has already been imprisoned for some time before being released. Joe is then faced with having to justify his behaviour, but he has relationships with his neighbours, with his wife, with his children, all of which were disrupted by the discovery of his deception, so he wants to restore those relationships. And he has a defence. His defence is that he was owed a favour, since in the past he acted dishonestly to bail out Steve.

There is an element of logic in this defence. Joe assumes that doing something dishonest that is beneficial for someone else should accrue a credit that can be spent on doing dishonest things for your own benefit. Although this may be dubious, he's attempting to justify his position, at least to himself, and restore his collapsing relationships with others. But, others cannot accept his logic and, in fact, attempting to present his case undermines valued relationships and worsens the tragedy. All My Sons is an example of a play which has a number of characters and a number of relationshipsthat is worth studying from an ethical point of view.

Another excellent example of a play in which you have a number of relationships is Sophocles’ Antigone (click for a synopsis). In the play Creon rules the city of Thebes, and his nephew dies as a rebel, a renegade fighting against the city. Antigone is Creon's niece, and she wishes to give her brother an honourable burial, but Creon objects since her brother was the city's adversary, and citizens of Thebes didn't bury their enemies. But Antigone wants to bury her brother to honour him, and eventually she does. Creon, outraged by her dismissal of the city's rules, orders a punishment that leads to her death and further tragedy for the whole family.

Tragedy arises because Creon is stubborn and sticks to the rules of the city, and Antigone is stubborn and sticks to the rules of honour of the family. Each has evaluated the situation in different ways. In a way, the two rules that they were using – ‘to obey the laws of the city’ and ‘to honour the family’ – are two perfectly understandable rules, but the situation is such that a conflict occurs. Antigaone says, ‘I'll do my duty to my brother’ and Antigone's sister says, ‘Has Creon not expressly banned that act?’ Such conflicts and dilemmas, of course, are at the heart of ethical analysis. The play Antigone shows that following well-intentioned rules does not necessarily avoid situations that can be resolved through argument alone. The tragedy could only be avoided by Antigone or Creon showing some humility and accepting each other's good intentions.

Another play where there are some interesting things mentioned about rules that don't work, is David Hare's play The Permanent Way (click for a synopsis). The play is a docudrama about the British railways. Characters in the opening talk about the poor performance of Britain's engineered infrastructures and turn it into an ethical issue by saying there's something wrong with the British way of life. The characters in the play attribute the failings to a lack of practical intelligence amongst the British people and a lack of know-how, which turns ‘know-how’ and ‘practical intelligence’ into wrongly neglected ‘goods’ in the British ethical constellation. So know-how seems to have become a ‘good’, something that I think Socrates would agree with. Later on, the play deals with a number of accidents that occurred on the railways, a number of incidents where there were fatalities. In one scene the policeman in charge of dealing with the accident comments on the insensitivity of the procedural manual towards the bereaved. Because of that he rejected the procedural manual and later he rewrote it. So here we have a code, a perfectly good code that people wrote in good faith, that has been rejected, because the people who wrote the manual couldn't imagine the situation in which it was going to be used. The trouble is that, although we do have codes and laws, it seems that there are situations when the previously written rules seem out of place and we might think it is ‘right’ to breach the written code.

This possibility that there are situations when breaching a code may actually be the ‘right’ thing to do raises problems for professionals and the institutions that regulate their practice. Professional institutions have responsibility for regulating the professions, and most of them publish codes of conduct. Take the American Institution of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE); here is an extract from their code of conduct, interestingly titled Code of Ethics: ‘It's the duty of an engineer to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible.’ That presents ethics as a search for a solution to the problem of finding projects that avoid conflict. Consequently, it sounds as though what engineers ought to do is to find projects that avoid conflict. Of course, this immediately prompts the question of whether conflicts of interest, real or perceived, can be avoided or even detected.

In fact, rules such as this are a gift to the dramatist. Take, for example, these two extracts from the Engineering Council UK Statement of Ethical Principles, which talks about things that engineers should do: ‘hold paramount the health and safety of others’ and ‘reject bribery or improper influence’. If I were a dramatist, I'd say ‘oh, this looks good, I'll write a play about this. I'll write a play about someone who is injured because bribery is rejected.’ You can see that these rules can be brought into conflict with one another.

Let me give you another example, this time taken from an earlier version of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Rules of Conduct. One rule stated that ‘members who become aware, or have reasonable grounds for believing, that another member is engaged in conduct or has engaged in conduct which is in breach of the Code of Conduct shall inform the Institution in writing of that belief.’ On the other hand, Rule 19 stated that ‘members shall not without proper authority disclose any confidential information concerning the business of their employer or any past employer.’ So, whilst people were asked to inform an institution if something was going on in their company that shouldn't be going on, they were also told they shouldn't disclose any confidential information, and it is fairly easy to invent a situation where informing on what's been going on discloses confidential information. So although codes of conduct are presented to try and clear things up, there are situations, and as Antigone in the play Antigone illustrates, where one rule is set against another and the set of rules carries potential contradictions.

If we have these conflicts or potential conflicts and the rules don't help or people are adopting or adhering to different rules, then a way out that avoids coercion is negotiation. It seems that the antagonists possibly including a technology developer in opposition to a professional in another field must compromise. To make a proposal acceptable they need confidence and, therefore, a rational basis for their case. On the other hand, that case will need to be simplified, abbreviated and translated into terms that other professionals find acceptable. Without the time or an audience that can cope with technical details, the developer has to find other ways of convincing others in a different manner to that they would use in persuading a professional in his or her own field. The skills of Gorgias offer a solution since the goal is not to provide a watertight logical case, but to instill conviction in each of the negotiators about the course of action.

In spite of Socrates’ assertions about rhetoric, problems of dealing with a crowd and the need for a lifetime of knowledge, the Socratic dialogues provide many examples of rhetorical devices that would grip a crowd. These include the use of allegories and analogies, as I discussed earlier. In addition to the dialogues as examples, Socrates also presents a view of experts and of good statesmen and seems to imply knowledge is valuable, and, where this is absent, inspired good opinion will substitute. Experience in translating and extending ethical arguments and adopting the translated and extended arguments of other professionals as part of a negotiation can provide a route to expanding a personal lexicon of feelings about what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ and contribute to a secure personal repertoire of good opinions.

2.5 The story so far

I have now established an understanding of ‘ethics’ as something related with ‘good’ and ‘bad’. There are other derivative words like ‘optimal’ that might also be used, and there are parochial words which are related to particular communities. When we talk about ethics, we are liable to confront cultural differences that are reflected in differences in vocabulary. But there are other kinds of differences too. Things have different properties; for example, ‘appearance’ and ‘radiation’ might be two different properties of a radio mast, and somehow or other we have to weigh those up one against another. There are also different kinds of things like ‘fears’, ‘means’, ‘ends’, ‘relationships’, ‘virtues’, ‘pleasures’ and ‘pains’. All of these seem quite incommensurate but all are related to how we value things, so one of the difficulties of ethics is how to put those things together to decide on and justify a course of action.

When combining different kinds of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’, we often get contradictions and, sometimes, ambiguities, so we need to be able to cope with those. Socrates’ solution was to ‘measure’ the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ and then perform some calculations, which might be a fine idea if we had a way of measuring things in the first place! This, unfortunately, is something which he did not suggest. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, suggests that the way out is to change the language game that we're playing. In other words, if there is a problem with vocabularies and their use, then we need to negotiate a common vocabulary and change the way things and their relationships are described if we're to avoid some of these difficulties.

I also looked at examples taken from professional codes of practice that illustrate those difficulties, suggesting that, whilst codes of practice may offer a guide to action, we can often imagine circumstances where the rules in a code of practice contradict one another. Contradictions thus created provide a source of inspiration for the dramatist, but they create real conundrums for professionals and practitioners.

3 Relationships, emotions and ethics

3.1 Introduction

In this section I would like to look at a complete play script to examine how ethics and ethical issues are dealt with. I've chosen this particular play because Katie Hims, the author, is particularly good at writing natural sounding dialogue, and this ‘naturalness’ is something that is sometimes missing in some scenarios specifically created to illustrate ethical questions within technological contexts. The play was originally written for and broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 as part of the Connecting series of plays exploring the impact of communication and information technologies, but here we are providing the original script.

In the previous section I started talking about relationships, and one of the things to look for in this play is what kind of relationships there are as well as the values that people might attribute to those relationships. This sort of focus allows us to see clearly the different kinds of values we put on different relationships. Although this play is not specifically about ethics, it sets the scene for the next play I will discuss in the next section, and that play is much more focused on ethics. However, looking at relationships and the values people assign to them is particularly useful to highlight another important issue within ethics, namely, the role of emotions, and this leads us neatly to the second resource explored in the section.

The second resource we will look at is a dialogue written by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum writes about ethics and emotions, but, in the extracts I will ask you to read, she is actually presenting something about ethics and emotions in dialogic form. Interestingly, she is not only using a dialogic form, but the dialogue actually has two different forms within a form as she presents a lecture as well as her interaction her parents.

3.2 Relationships and ethics

A crucial thing about the play is that everything is done with words, with speaking. This illustrates that words have long-lasting effects, which is consistent with Wittgenstein's view of language I introduced in Section 2.3. In a nutshell: through the words, in the end, we have effects on the world. The words spoken affect the relationships in question, relationships affect behaviour, and behaviour affects the world. Relationships are crucial, and they are most commonly manipulated through words. Because words have an effect on the world, they are something we should care about when we are thinking about ethics.

Another thing that the play does is that it shows people using all sorts of technology to communicate. Text messaging, telephones, all sorts of things that we actually take for granted these days. Despite all of this, nobody seems to know anything. Although we've got all these things called information and communication technologies, things that everybody is using to communicate, the play shows that they do not always help. What the technologies do is that they enable relationships between more distant partners, but this, by itself, is not enough. It is interesting that the main character in the play contacts all sorts of people, but she never actually talks to a next door neighbour. From this perspective, the effect of technologies has been to disperse the relationship. The play suggests that, whilst we are building relationships, different people have different interests, and different people want to build different relationships or, perhaps, destroy others, ethical questions arise because of the conflicts that occur in forming relationships.

In the play people are building relationships. For example, Carol, the principal, chooses actually not to develop her relationship with her mother over the incident. What is said and gestured tells us about the value she places on the relationship. On the other hand, the hotel receptionist is patient and polite, and Carol too is patient and polite in dealing with him. This is a rather valuable relationship to Carol because it seems to be the only potential reliable source of help, and she does indeed gain some information. Near the end of the play the HR person comes along, and he clearly has a quite different agenda to Carol's. He wants to get hold of what is on the computer, and she soon realises she is not going to get much help from him. Because of his interests he adopts a rather barren expression, and Carol grows in anger. As a result, when they part their relationship is not a particularly happy one, and it is unlikely to be particularly constructive in the future. So things such as relationships change, and people are encouraged or discouraged to do things as a result.

People are communicating in the play but, ironically, they do not seem to get particularly better informed as a result of all of this. So, perhaps, what they are doing is that they are building relationships that would have a potential to enable them to act in the future, should a possibility arise. The incapacity to act in the situation is a consequence of uncertainty about what was happening in other parts of the world.

I noted above on another interesting point about the play: that people have a collection of high-tech gadgets at their disposal (it is a high tech company, after all). However, all the conversations are hardly ever about technology. Although the technology facilitates relationships, it does not provide a topic of conversation that people want to explore. Interestingly, when the message ‘Help me Phil’ arrives, it adds to the confusion. The images on the expressive medium of television hardly make things any better because they stir up the imagination and add to the range of forebodings. So, here again the technology really has not helped. What it has done is to confuse and to open up for people another range of possibilities that just add to the confusion.

The play also illustrates another point I made earlier in the course, that ethics is not about action, but about preparation for action, about getting ready to act once sufficient knowledge is available. It is about building the authority to act and establishing reliable channels of communication. This is problematic because different players will have different interests that may be in conflict and, hence, wish to establish different kinds of relationships.

Crucially, this problem is not an artefact of drama, nor is it something that arises only in connection with ‘big’, life-changing (or threatening) situations. For an illustration, consider an example taken from the satirical novel The Tin Men by Michael Frayn. The novel is set in an Ethics Department where experiments are carried out to see if a robot will sacrifice itself to save a person. The extract in Box 4 shows what happens after a successful test.

Academic discussions about ethics often ignore everyday circumstances, but these are, more often than not, riddled with ethical assertions. Technologists’ accounts, for example, continually assert what is ‘good’ and approved by their profession. Most of these ethical assertions are not about matters of life and death, but about commonplace actions which, in spite of their banality, can still be judged to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and may (or may not) be a source of disagreement. And my point here, by quoting that, is that an awful lot of things that we do are ethical but they're not particularly interesting. In other words, even if there is agreement and the issue at stake is everyday, it can still be ethical.

In an attempt to reduce bias and uncertainties, technology developers and scientists are taught many of the techniques common to science. However, they do so within a raft of economies. Firstly, there is an attention economy, which implies a limitation on what an individual can absorb and the amount of attention others are willing to pay. There are limits to the authority of individuals. There are limitations on where people can be and at what time they can be there. There are the limitations on the locations and schedules of individuals which imply that no one can be privy to everything that is said. There are also limitations on resources, money, personal and physical energy. Available theories about things are also limited and, importantly, disconnected. Consequently, individuals have a personal archipelago of influences, goals and understandings, and within a technological enterprise these various economies stimulate differences of opinion – differences that lead to discussions and deliberation that arouse a wide range of emotions: frustration, anger, anxiety, elation, pride and so on. All of these emotions may be quickened by clashes of loyalty to the company, the public, family, colleagues and friends. Therefore, we can't avoid emotion when dealing with action and persuading people to act.

3.3 Emotions and judgements

As I suggested above, I am adopting Martha Nussbaum's view of emotions put forward in her dialogue ‘Emotions as judgements of value’ (Nussbaum, 1998). In the introduction she writes: ‘When you put a position in the mouth of a real person, especially the person you love you have to make it real’. She is suggesting that, if you do not write dialogue, then something different and abstract emerges. Her dialogue illustrates this since it is in the form of a lecture by Anna (a thinly disguised Martha Nussbaum) with lengthy interjections of a conversation between Anna and her mother and, later, her father. The topic of the text is emotion and its relationship to ethical judgements, and I will present her argument below.

In Martha Nussbaum's view, one important point about emotional reactions is that they can be quite valuable in helping people to identify what matters to them, even though this can be a bit of a disquieting idea. In her dialogue she advances the thesis that emotions are forms of judgement, so she plants them fairly and squarely in the field of judgement and, hence, ethics. Nussbaum takes her lead from the Stoics, and that leads us back to the Ancient Greeks as a starting point.

The Stoics had a twofold perspective on emotions. First of all they saw them as a type of evaluative thought, a way of evaluating things, even though they are potentially unreliable and inaccurate. However, the Stoics’ view, and that's why we use the word ‘stoical’, was that the emotions should be suppressed. We should strive to suppress our emotions as our lifetime's quest. Their argument was that, once emotions are suppressed, rationality will come through. But Nussbaum rejects that second part of this argument, the one referring to suppression. Instead, she wants to recognise the contributions emotions make to our knowledge of things, suggesting that we need to learn how to integrate the experience of emotions into well-considered judgements.

As engineers, designers or programmers, we've got theories, regulations, rules of thumb, prototypes, experiments, opinions of others, all sorts of things, and somehow those different bits and pieces never quite fit together, and some of them only fit rather roughly to what we may be intending to do. Since we experience emotion while considering all of these things, emotions are useful in that they provide an umbrella for the overall experience.

Nussbaum says that ‘emotions are not simply ways of seeing an object but they're beliefs about the object, especially those we're unsure of and cannot influence.’ She is saying that emotions can be a guide to those things that seem to be important, yet intangible or difficult to grasp. The kind of objects she is talking about are not concrete objects, but things like theories, documents, opinions, assertions and assumptions, and the people who articulate those things. For instance, she suggests that, if we experience anger, then that expresses a thought about potential harm or damage. Since we are talking about ethics, then, clearly, it is worth while reflecting on that. We may experience anger but afterwards reflect upon it, and perhaps we will be able to identify the harm or damage felt, possibly subconsciously, that caused the anger.

Nussbaum saw these emotions as being rather unreliable and suggested that we should scrutinise and rationalise them. In other words, we should formulate a reason for the emotion. This is a kind of reflection, one that hopefully brings a sense of proportion and adjustment to enable the otherwise ill-defined experience to be constructive and, crucially, be used in an ethical argument. Adopting Nussbaum's view provides grounds for recognising the bursts of anger and delight, and the responses to them, responses which always alter the course of development of technological projects.

Following from that is the idea that, if we ignore our emotions, then we neglect something, an authentic thought, about an authentic rather than imagined situation. If we work with our logic, then we are always modelling situations. Emotion, however, is much closer to a situation than our reasoning about it. The consequence of ignoring emotions, Nussbaum would suggest, is that our judgements are poorer and deficient. And this is not an uncommon view when you come to investigate philosophical writings.

For instance, Alan Janik, actually a Wittgenstein scholar, noted that the enlightenment profoundly influenced attitudes towards technology in that it proselytised about progress arising from a scientific attitude to life and its technical deployment (Janik, 1995). In addition, he suggests there was a second, often forgotten, theme, a notion supported also by David Hume, that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Section III –.

Now, although Nussbaum's view is that emotions have a valuable role in our ethical judgements, she does not see all emotions as being productive. Clearly emotions tell us about how we value things, but we're also skilled at provoking emotions in others. I talked about that when I was talking about relationships earlier in the section. Emotions provide us with the means to impress on others the value we place on things, and we do that by striking up fears, or we can strike up pleasurable thoughts in others.

Interestingly, Socrates was actually aware of this. In Gorgias he said that speechmaking can be a form of gratification, and that is how it gets its influence. But he wanted to avoid that: he is against this kind of emotional provocation. Of course, this raises the question of whether it is right to exploit other people's emotions, either deliberately or, sometimes as we do, without forethought, for example, when our enthusiasm is contagious or our grief is infectious. If this is not ‘right’, then one thing we have to do is to strive to recognise when we are exploiting the emotions of others.

Of course there are all sorts of emotions and categorisations for these, and some indeed are presented as positive whilst some are considered negative. It might be claimed that these classifications emerge from the stoical view. From this view also emerges the notion that the scientific method is dispassionate and offers techniques that avoid emotional influences by, for example, reducing a judgement to a calculation. Nevertheless, even the most pragmatic scientist or technologist would expect to be enthusiastic or disappointed from time to time, so I am not quite sure about science as being totally without ‘passion’. Also, if Nussbaum's view holds, then it sounds as though we've got a great deal to lose by suppressing our emotions even though there are emotions that we would probably agree are wrong. In the extreme, emotional provocation is what people use to torture others, and I guess we would on the whole be against that.

Nussbaum actually picks out two emotions she regards as dangerous: shame and disgust. It is interesting that both shame and disgust are used as forms of punishment or even to justify punishment. Nussbaum's argument is that, when it comes to shame, the trouble is that it attacks the whole person, whereas if you want to castigate somebody, this should be done for a particular act. Shame aimed at the whole character is not appropriate. She also says that if you want to use shame to influence people, this is inconsistent with some ideas we have about removing shame. For example, anti-discrimination laws and rules are about removing shame that people might feel, and so there is an inconsistency in talking about shame. If you want to ‘get at somebody’, she suggests that guilt is a much more directed emotion towards particular acts, which is a view that has a long history. The trouble is that the person who is being acted upon, the person being shamed, may be missing the point and not seeing which act it is that others find offensive. This is hardly productive and potentially inhuman.

Disgust, Nussbaum says, comes from holding up a mirror to ourselves to discover that we are in fact animal in nature, and this is something that we take great pains to avoid. So, if we are talking about disgust of other people, we are trying to say that they have an animal nature and they are distant from us. This is a mode of discrimination, and often discrimination that is supported not by events, but by myths.

To summarise: I think we would find that there are emotions we would not want to exploit, or there are degrees of exploitation we would not want to use. I do not want to go through a list of emotions to see which are worthy and which are not, but I want to stress the point that, in putting an ethical case, we are liable to exploit other people's emotions, and that, in itself, has an ethical dimension. So, if you use other people's emotions and you think some of those emotions are ‘bad’ things to exploit, then the relationship-building is itself an ethical entity. As we are thinking about ethics, then emotions are really rather important, and for people like Nussbaum there is a feeling that emotions can be constructive but only if we reflect upon them and build them into our arguments. On the other hand, they are, for each of us, individually, an important indicator of how much we value things and perhaps emotions provide us with things that are not expressible in words.

Activity 14

This is quite a lot to take in, so I thought it would help you to put some of this in context with an excerpt from the group discussion that took place in the 2008 trial. Please be aware that the quality of the video and audio varies as it was recorded as a Flash Meeting and was therefore dependent on the equipment and connection speeds of the individual participants.

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Transcript: Discussion 2

Peter:

John, I feel a bit Socratic in that sense, because I wonder how can we know when we’re right, how can we know when we’re wrong?

John:

Well I guess that’s what the study of ethics is about, is to try and sort that out. But the trouble is when you get ethicists working on a problem they will give you all kinds of options that are right according to your final vocabulary, the particular logic you’re using and what you include in your arguments, such as emotions or not.

Peter:

So I’m just thinking I’d like to come back on that because I tend to think that you try and learn from your experience, and yet the world we’re living in is changing and it’s changing, and it never seems to come back to a benchmark where you can think ah, I know where I am again, it’s always moving on. So experience isn’t necessarily a useful measure, but what’s the guide?

John:

Well I guess the fundamentalists have it there don’t they, that they would believe in a particular text and a particular authority interpreting that text, and that would be their guide.

Peter:

But if you’re not a fundamentalist and you haven’t got such a text and you’re looking for a new text for the new world we live in, then you have to go by gut feeling, and gut feelings are so immeasurable, well that’s what I feel anyway.

John:

Well I’d go along with that, and I guess, I mean we had an email exchange that one of the things that does guide us of course is tradition, and tradition that we get from our parents in many cases, or from our education. But also there are things that rub off by bumping into people in all sorts of activities. Just going to the shops as a child tells you that you pay for things before you take them away. So for me what seals it is tradition.

Peter:

Yes and for me, right now, tradition doesn’t seem to be working, and it’s life in a pinball machine where you’re bouncing off chance meetings or coincidence, and it’s very scary.

John:

Yeah it is. I don’t know whether anybody else has got any observations to make about how they secure their feelings about what the right thing to do is.

Judith:

Well I guess that there isn’t a right and wrong, that right and wrong shifts and it also depends on reflective dialogue, and it depends on the perspective of the person observing your actions.

John:

So no help there then.

Peter:

Well it gets a bit spooky when you think well right and wrong aren’t going to be my guide points here. It’s expediency or integrity or being able to look yourself in the mirror in the morning.

Frank:

But there are certain things that you as a human will, certain qualities that you will value in life, that will be a good, that you yourself will assign the words kind of good to, that make up what we’ve termed as your final vocabulary. So some people might see great promiscuity as being something to aspire to, some people might see a modest life with a single loved woman, some people might think that all they really want from their life is a job, but you can only really find that if you look inside yourself and go for it.

Renee:

I guess this is where some people use religion or turn to religion to decide what’s right and wrong for them, and have other people make the decisions rather than have to make it themselves, or look for different points of reference.

Peter:

Just to be neutral about this, right now for instance would you sell your house or would you wait until the market’s settled down?

Frank:

I won’t, I just bought my house a year ago and that itself has caused me some concern because I bought it with my girlfriend who I’ve known for three years. So that’s kind of affected my mindset about the relationship and the possession of the house. But now it’s kind of well actually what is more important, the relationship or making a swift buck, or weathering out the financial markets or anything? I mean I think you need to take a view on what is important in your life and the ownership of a house and making money on the market is not to me.

Peter:

Now I mention it because it’s one of those, this is a situation we’re currently facing, a bit like 9/11 to me, although not quite so dramatic, where the world is not going to be the same. So the guidelines you used to think oh well I know what a reasonable situation is, maybe it’s not going to be like that any more.

John:

I mean that question you ask it seems to demand a very personal response from people. It does depend upon their relationships with others, it does depend upon what their particular financial situation is, and it does depend on where they live. I was just reminded that I lived in Belgium for a while and on the whole people didn’t own the houses. I don’t know whether it’s still the same but they rented so it wouldn’t have been an issue.

Peter:

Well no, maybe it’s not a generally useful issue, but I’m talking about the situations where the world tomorrow may not be the same as it was in the past, and so you can’t rely necessarily on your past experience, and you can’t, you feel you’ve got to go with the gush of it into a new world. And I must admit as you get older and think of past change that becomes intimidating.

Renee:

I can identify with that, with what you’re saying Peter, because I’ve been away from Australia for seven years and just came back, and it seems that my country has changed incredibly. We’ve got a new Prime Minister, housing is a big issue, prices of things, so you’re right, if you stay in one place things change, or if you go away and come back to another place things change. So I guess change is part of being human and part of why learning is important.

Frank:

Absolutely, but there are still some central things by which you evaluate your life and your effect on other people, and the basis behind your choices, just because the world that you’re making the choices in has changed, doesn’t mean that the fundamental reasons that you make your choices, the fundamental reasons behind your choices, there’s no reason why they should change. So you’ll analyse the effect on your money, on your personal life, on other people around you, and you’ll make your choice based on those things. And they won’t change will they?

Peter:

And they may not, but for instance if your decisions affect others, and you’re in a situation where you’ve got to decide for others, then it becomes not a personal risk but a collective risk, and that’s more difficult when you don’t know if you can rely on - who was it that said, “You can expect the world tomorrow to be much the same as it was today”?

Judith:

Doesn’t all this depend on using your own best judgement, and in a way that’s working by your own moral code. That’s not to presuppose that your own moral code doesn’t shift and change as outside influences change.

John:

I’m wondering whether now’s the time to move on. Nobody was going to it seems add to that. What we’re saying is that there aren’t any absolute guides and, but people do find comfort and solace in religion, and that’s perhaps the best source if you want to turn to it. The best source of security if you want to turn to it, but of course that requires a faith that perhaps some of us struggle to have. Peter says the consolation of philosophy, I’m not sure about that, I always think philosophy actually just gives you more questions to answer, and perhaps that’s what’s happens. It gives you more questions to answer and you’re so busy doing that that perhaps you haven’t got time to worry about the other things, would seem to be partly what Socrates was about. But I think he made a bit of a living out of his pupils didn’t he? So I’m not sure whether he was in it for the money or the philosophy.

End transcript: Discussion 2

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Discussion 2

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3.4 Negotiation and adaptation

I suggested that one way out of our contradictions is to begin to negotiate. This implies that negotiation and what you do during negotiation is a part of the business of ethics. Ethical texts normally focus on contradictions, but, as I also mentioned above, actually people do agree a lot of the time, so life is not all contradictions.

Contradictions, however, do pose a problem, and I used the play Antigone to illustrate that conflict can arise. In the case of Antigone, it involved three things. Firstly, there were two views of what should be done, Antigone's view and Creon's view, which were in conflict in a particular situation. Antigone's views and Creon's views looked perfectly reasonable to both of them, except in that very specific situation, which is the third element. It's that kind of confluence of two different lines of reasoning in a specific and testing circumstance that brings about the conflict.

If the contradiction occurs, if two positions, two different lines of reasoning that are well established and persistent, then, of course, people will tend to stick to those lines, and the conflict will arouse emotions as they try and reconcile the irreconcilable. For an individual, contradictions of this kind can lead to breakdown. If we are talking about communities, it can lead to violent conflict. Hence, one reason we want to avoid contradictions is that contradictions lead to conflict, and conflict is unpleasant for all involved, and indeed lethal at times. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein reminded us that contradictions can be viewed as properties of particular language games, and the contradiction can be removed by adjusting the rules of the game.

It would seem, then, that we've got three choices: we can battle on against one another, we can adjust the language game by agreement or, because these things happen in particular circumstances, we can try and alter the circumstances. An excellent example of how circumstances can be altered is provided by Isaac Asimov's work. Asimov, you may know, wrote three laws of robotics and then produced a whole series of novels that revolved around testing out these laws. Several of his followers also thought this was a good wheeze for writing novels, but as they imagined new situations, they kept on finding they had to adjust the laws to fit their circumstances, so that they could bring their novel to an end, or they had to restrict their imagination to the situations that permitted machines to obey the rules.

In Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky's novel The Turing Option, Beckworth, the villain, is confronted by a robot. The robot, who is programmed according to Asimov's Laws, roars out ‘Killing forbidden!’ It hurls itself forward reaching for Beckworth and clutches the man in an unbreakable embrace. Beckworth fires into the brain case of the robot, and, as every single branch of the manipulator springs apart, the tiny twigs of metal slash through the man's body, killing him.

The villain is killed in that case, but notice the act of killing was executed by the remnants of the shattered robot. In other words, it was not the robot that killed him, but its disintegration into bits that killed him. In this way the robot and its programmers are released from their obligations by the villain being killed by the bits of the robot rather than the programmed robot itself. The situation is only resolved because the events were under the control of an author, that is, the author wrote it that way. Of course, however, in most situations we cannot rewrite the script, so we are stuck with the situation as it is, and the alternative that remains is to adapt the rules.

In fact, again in Antigone, Creon's son reminds Creon that he was the one who imposed the brutal punishment on Antigone, adding that the trees that bend save themselves. So it seems that the way out of the conflict is to adapt. In practice, the adaptation often takes place through negotiation, when two different parties with two different views get together. This is very relevant to technologists, who are educated to see a kind of technical landscape that may actually be invisible or impenetrable to others. Often the technologist is an intermediary, and they have to persuade others to do things without having a powerful enough argument, an argument that other people would recognise.

Consider the case of a designer who has designed something and wants it produced, but their case for the design does not convince the investors. Now, either or both sides have to do some work if they are going to profit from the design. If the investors are not going to invest in it, what the designer might do is to modify the language game and restate their case using the final vocabulary of the investors. In other words, the designer might consider changing the words they use, adapt them so that the investors can evaluate the case using terms they find dependable. This does not mean that the original case, the original reasons the designer had, have become invalid. Nor does it mean that the designer is comfortable with the vocabulary of the investors. It is simply that an alternative form of justification is used that might be convincing. As a bonus, this move has the potential to extend the designer's vocabulary and add to the sophistication of their future ethical assertions. The designer has had the chance to practice with a new vocabulary, extending their vocabulary in a way that experience has enabled.

In some cases, of course, this translation into another domain will result in a case that is unacceptable to the investors, and the designer will be disappointed. Alternatively, the designer may actually feel uneasy with the reformulated case. There may be features of the case that were not evident originally, so the designer may discover that they indeed feel badly about the proposal. In this case, because the designer is unfamiliar with the language, perhaps their emotions will be more informative than any understanding. Emotions will signal whether or not this unexplored, unfamiliar formulation reaches a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ conclusion. If these feelings are to be integrated into the negotiation, then the designer needs to put an effort into expressing that emotion, that distaste or hopefully approval.

If we look at negotiation in that way, as translating into perhaps an unfamiliar language or adapting the language game, then it appears that technologists have to be sensitive to their own emotions, to see how they feel about the case that they are putting together. They have to be able to express those feelings to persuade others that the proposed actions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Also, they must be able to accept that persuasion may rightly fail as a consequence of their actually not originally having a complete view, so they should be prepared to retire with some grace.

There is an analogy here between the logic that makes technology work and the interface that makes it acceptable. Whilst the logic of the programming may be pretty rigorous, depending on who it is that is going to use, understand, be able to use the functionality, a different interface might be necessary, hence a different interface for a child, an adult, another machine. People, different people, perhaps of different ages will operate with different kinds of gestures, will be familiar with different kinds of gestures, and may not be able to certainly cope with the sorts of gestures of language that a programmer might use. So, in terms of communication, I may have the feeling that I want to say something, but there is another step there. I want to say something because I want the person to whom I'm going to say it, to understand it, to accept it, to see it. Now I may have to change completely the vocabulary I want to express to a vocabulary that will be understood and accepted. There is no point in saying it unless it's received.

You can also think in terms of marketing, because you pick the target market that you're talking to and basically tailor the message that you want to get across to that market, and try and persuade that market. Therefore, here too we are talking about relationships: you've got to think about the relationship that you are dealing with, and what would best suit that relationship When you are marketing, you are trying to tell people that something is ‘good’ for them, so marketing too is an exercise in ethics.

If we accept Nussbaum's view that emotion tells us something that can help us make better judgements, we might expect the ‘virtuous’ technologist to make efforts to be aware of their own emotions, to be aware of the way in which they exploit the emotions of others, and also to show restraint. Therefore, translating and extending ethical arguments as part of a negotiation can provide a route to expanding a personal vocabulary of feelings that might constitute a repertoire of ‘good’ opinions. Ultimately a technologist's role is to represent some artefact and construct a case for its construction, modification or disposal. Remember that a technologist can be arguing against building something, as well as for building something. But to be effective within the emotional ‘soup’, and to play a full part in the process associated with an eventual decision, they will have to be persuasive, fluent, assertive and, perhaps above all, empathetic.

3.5 The story so far

I have been discussing ethics as related to labelling things as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or using more parochial words as substitutes. Different kinds of things could be said to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, including means, ends, relationships, feelings, appearances, radiation levels and so on. The big ethical problem is how to combine this variety of things to reach a judgement, especially when combining them, it is possible that we end up with ambiguity or contradictions. I have explored the role of rhetoric in presenting an ethical argument, but I also said that there is no universal solution, no universal logic to help us out of difficulties.

In this section I examined the play Call Waiting, and I suggested that it was essentially about relationships, their construction, maintenance and development. The play illustrates that, when we are constructing or maintaining relationships, we engage in actions, and those actions can also be ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Although the context of the play was technological, and it was a technologist who was in trouble, the technologies themselves didn't add too much to the ethical situation. All they did was to enable people to connect, so, although they brought together different sorts of people, they didn't necessarily alter the kinds of discussions these people had. Ironically, in spite of all the communication devices available throughout the play, none of the characters quite knew what was going on, so the information technology was not delivering information. Nevertheless things happened, relationships changed and people were encouraged or discouraged to do things. What brought about those changes were people's utterances, i.e. what they said, and in what they said there were emotions conveyed, and, sometimes, aroused in other people.

Regarding emotions, I looked at Martha Nussbaum's work and her rather special slant on emotions. Partially based on the Stoics' view of emotions, Nussbaum presents a case in which emotions are viewed as being indicative of the value of things. In contrast with the Stoics, however, Nussbaum stresses the contribution that emotions make to our knowledge, and she wants to integrate the experience of emotions into our judgements.

Of course we are applying all of this to the context of Information and Computer Sciences, so were talking about the professional practice of engineers, programmers and developers. Indeed, these technologists make ethical evaluations and judgements – that is partly why they are employed. However, they are informed by a relatively ill-assorted mixture of theory, regulations, experiments, common knowledge and opinions. So what is the role of emotions in this practice? Emotions act as a signpost that guides the synthesis of all the other bits and pieces that we collect that are often disconnected. But those bits of evidence, when we assemble them, will provide the firm case of action of which emotions can only be an indicator. Consequently, we should see emotions as pointing to a conclusion, to what it is we value in a situation, but we still have to make the case well to convince others. In short, emotions are imprecise, but they are a necessary constituent of the technologists' judgements.

4 Ethics everyday

4.1 Introduction

The main resource for this section is the play Last Call by Mike Walker, the play that follows Call Waiting in the BBC Radio 4 series. This is a text rich in ethical issues, and, as you will see, these include not only ‘big’ questions (concerning, for example, the deployment and use of surveillance technologies) but, interestingly, everyday issues that you or I might face in our professional practice. This is, indeed, one of the reasons why I have chosen to explore this play in the course: the play illustrates that ethical statements and arguments crop up in everyday conversations more often than not.

4.2 The good, the bad and the loyal

You might like to read the play more than once to see how your impressions change, and then try the next activity.

Indeed, Sara is an interesting character that follows a convoluted trajectory. Sara needs to interfere, to find out, because people are not telling her what is going on, and she wants, at least for a while, to find out, possibly to be better informed and perhaps act. In the end she does not, she just goes back to her old job. She is offered opportunities to take the lift, go out the door or go up to the sixth floor. But the pressure is on her to realise what is in her own self-interest, what is ‘good’ for her, personally, or, perhaps, for the many company employees. If she really wants to keep her job, she needs to join the ‘big league’ and become part of the conspiracy. Perhaps the familiarity with the job and the actions that go with it, the practices that go with it, and the people she deals with, everything turns out to be quite comforting. Maybe it should not be, but perhaps it is for Sara as well as for anyone in a similar situation.

4.3 Can theft be right?

When Sara is on her mission to find out, to get to the bottom of things, she gets hold of some financial records, and Herrenvolk accuses Sarah of theft. Strictly speaking, this is theft, but she discovers that these financial records are rather suspicious and, perhaps, provide evidence of some undercover action. So there is a question here: even if this is theft, is it ‘right’ in that case? Were suspicions enough to justify the stealing? Take a moment to think about this.

Later in the play, Sara threatens to use her knowledge and position as a press officer to ‘spill the beans’ about Patrick. She uses that blackmail to force Patrick to tell her what is going on. So there, I think, she must have been conscious that she was exploiting her power in rather dubious ways in order to persuade Patrick to give her information. He actually responds to the threat, recognising that, if she wants something so much that she is willing to compromise her professional standards, then she really means business, so he capitulates.

Interestingly, there is perhaps a measure of naivety to Sara's actions, at least in the beginning. Indeed, before she talked to the editor of the magazine, Sara was not going to do anything about the situation; she is just intent on dealing with the Mozambique contract. The conversation with the magazine editor changes her view, as he tells her a few things that, albeit surprisingly given her position, she is not aware of.

4.4 Legitimacy vs rights

Another major theme in the play relates to the surveillance equipment. The general question about surveillance is raised as soon as we are told that the company is installing a system for that purpose. You might be inclined to think that the government is entitled to deploy a surveillance system because there are problems that need to be dealt with, somehow; perhaps you view the system as just a technological extension of the police. However, individuals too have rights, and this raises questions concerning the legitimacy of surveillance systems.

Interestingly, there is an ambiguity, which I think is deliberate on the part of the play author, of which ‘government’ is being referred to. The word ‘government’ appears in a number of places, and we cannot be quite sure whether it is the British Government or the Uzbekistan Government that is being alluded to. In the situations where the word is used, the particular characters themselves seem to jump to a conclusion about which government is being discussed. This, however, means that there are differences of understanding about the system and the authorities that are installing it, which can potentially create much confusion.

4.5 Torture

The question of torture is also raised in the play. Herrenvolk claims that he does not do the torture; it is some Uzbekistan outfit that does it. He actually gives them a justification by saying, in a rather glib way, that it is a lot easier to open a human being than an encrypted laptop. Of course, the question is, is it ever ‘right’ to exploit this as a means of finding things out? I suspect most of us would say ‘no’.

4.6 What matters?

When the laptop is confirmed to be uncompromised, it is interesting that none of the characters cheers, although they all seem to be relieved. In other words, when the statement comes up, ‘laptop is uncompromised’, people seem to think that is ‘good’, the outcome is fine. They seem to have forgotten that the technician is probably dead at the time. So, in their deliberations, a person's life is forgotten. I am sure that, if they were reminded of it, they would, of course, say that this is a tragedy or a great sadness, but somehow or other, in the business of running the company, what becomes of concern is that the laptop is uncompromised, and the play moves on.

Another interesting justification is offered regarding Phil, when Sara says that ‘he was an engineer, not a bloody spy’. Gray uses an analogy by suggesting that the company is fighting a war. You will probably agree with me that it is very hard to talk about hurting somebody to gain some benefit; that is a point that is possibly impossible to justify. But if you say they are fighting a war, suddenly you move the argument to another field. By bringing in the idea of ‘war’, Gray is able to say that it is not possible to fight a war without having casualties, so he uses ‘war’ as an analogy that invites people to agree that loss is acceptable. He uses the analogy and reflects it on another situation where people get hurt, which suddenly makes the hurt that people get seem justified. Using an analogy in this way is a sneaky rhetorical trick in that provides a more secure domain in which to conduct the argument.

You can raise the question of whether it is really possible to justify war in the first place. In Section 1 we looked at Shaw's Major Barbara and the faith of the armourer, so this is a question of whether you feel something is so evil that you are in some sense justified in acting violently. There is a parallel here with the example of the gun I discussed in Activity 15. Of course, this constitutes a major ethical question that would require much more space to discuss than is available in this course. An important point to make, however, is that, whilst you and I may have difficulty in justifying a war under most, perhaps any, circumstances, other people do find they can justify it, so we get wars.

The play raises questions of benefits to society, which I have hinted at earlier when discussing Sara's actions. There is a perceived need to work together as a team and keep this company going, so things need to be kept quiet, otherwise the company will fold and the benefit to the local society will collapse. So, the ‘benefits of the local society’ justifies something that might otherwise be thought of as a ‘bad’ action, keeping things, rather dubious things, secret.

Another area of questioning regards means or ends. When Gray says that ‘we're still committed to make things better for people’, he implies that the aim of the company is to make things better for people. But, of course, the play kind of challenges that notion. Nevertheless, Sara, the press officer, is still expected to say that the company makes things better for people. She needs to create an impression that ensures the survival of the company. But actually what she does is to issue a statement, and the statement is a means to a different end, namely, the survival of the company. So you have to distinguish between statements and actions: what Sara does is to make a statement that says the company makes things better for people, but that will ensure the company survives, and survival seems to be what people are trying to do. I mentioned above familiar, comfortable work situations, and here the characters are trying to grasp at that. What you are going to do or what you plan to achieve, when these things are written down, they are no longer an end: they become a statement. This is a subtle yet quite significant distinction.

I mentioned that loyalty to the company is one of the major themes in the play, but there are other types of loyalty questions raised as well. In the play Tim says that he should have read the kids a story instead of watching Steve Jobs. We all have responsibilities for the future, the future of our family, our own futures, and, because many of us are involved in relationships, the future of others around us. So watching Steve Jobs was, perhaps, something that he should have done, because he would have learned something that might help him in the future. On the other hand, perhaps the ‘right’ choice would be to read the kids a story. What is more important? I am again talking about relationships here, and there are two relationships at work in this particular instance: there is the family relationship and the work relationship. We all have personal relationships and, often, work relationships, but they do not necessarily work in unison with one another. I repeat the question: what is more important?

Talking about relationships, there is an interesting moment in the play when Richard, the magazine editor, gets in touch with Sara and mentions ‘Lancaster’. I jumped to the conclusion that they had been at Lancaster University together, as he said ‘we used to know each other’. In any case, they have a history, and it is interesting that that relationship was forged perhaps ten years before and a single word, ‘Lancaster’, revived the relationship. In this way they can talk together in a quite different way to if they had not had that earlier connection. The word gave them a more comfortable and immediate relationship.

Of course, there are all sorts of other relationships, including those related to being part of the workforce. Carol, Phil's wife, says, ‘He does what he's asked to do.’ But, as an engineer or, perhaps, a programmer, don't you think he should be kind of asking a little more, perhaps what it is he is doing and why he is doing it? Patrick dodged the question about whether any more had been explained to Phil. The question then becomes: if people are not knowledgeable about things, can they act for the ‘good’? Is part of being ‘virtuous’ finding out about things? How can a ‘contractor’, someone who is an expert in a particular area and is asked to do a specific job, be ‘virtuous’?

I think there are parallels in some conflicts like the above and those shown in the play. There are all sorts of deceptions going on in the play, where people don't quite ‘tell it as it is’. There is actually a downright lie when Herrenvolk says he is from the HR department and we discover he is not, and there are all sorts of anxieties. Sara says, when they talk about the burning man at the beginning of the play, that it is all about images, things that grab us, just images. She then moves on to talk about the project in Mozambique, partly because it is not the company's man. In a way she is deceiving herself in that particular instance.

Another interesting aspect of the play is that there are a number of situations where emotions are actually rather poorly read, so there is a clear lack of empathy. A particularly poignant example is when Sara goes to visit Carol. Sara says she understands what Carol is going through, but, of course, there is no way that Sara can understand or can fully emphasise with what Carol is going through. Carol gets pretty cross about that, and explodes into a kind of mixture of emotions. This mixture of emotions from Carol actually informs Sara about the frustration and anger that Carol feels. After the outburst, you feel that Sara does actually begin to understand rather better something about the tragedy, and she withdraws from the whole thing with some sympathy. Once Sara recognises the seriousness of the situation, she uses all sorts of devices to find out more and to use her knowledge to shake the company up. But, of course, when she does find out about everything, she gives up.

One final issue I would like to highlight is the ‘big’ question I noted earlier concerning the project that collects data and exports it to another jurisdiction where it can be sorted and filtered without the intervention of the law, to be returned to help a repressive regime. Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a way hardly seems to matter because it all seems to be outside the control of the company, which is fettered by contracts and the need for revenue. The issues confronting the individuals seem to be much more parochial and they are very entangled. So, even if you wanted to do anything, is there the time? Can you gain the authority to do it? Certainly not within the company. If you're to do anything about this big issue of surveillance in the play, then it needs to be handled politically outside of what is going on.

4.7 The story so far

This section looked at the play Last Call. The play is very rich in ethical issues, and one of the most interesting points that are made is that, whilst there are many ‘big’ ethical questions worthy of discussion and investigation, it seems to be in the everyday, routine conversations and dealings of people that ethical questions get to be asked and answered, even if this is not clearly recognised.

A major ethical issue tackled in the play is loyalty: giving preference in some way to one group, and, by doing so, denying another group something that is being given to the privileged group. There are questions of loyalty to an employer, to work colleagues and to family, and the play presents conflicts of loyalty to these different groups that can occur routinely in anybody's life. The play also raises broader questions regarding the legitimacy of war, torture, surveillance, blackmailing and theft.

5 Landscape with Weapon: an allegory

5.1 Introduction

In this section I want to introduce Joe Penhall's play Landscape with Weapon. Having read the play several times, I must stress that it is a text that is particularly rich in ethical issues. These issues, however, are presented in a very down-to-earth way, in a very lively dialogue. I think the lesson from this is that you do not need to be in any kind of ‘formal’ situation to engage with ethics. Everyday conversation is littered with references and arguments about ethical matters, and this play enables you to see that because the dialogue is written down.

Landscape with Weapon centres on the development and exploitation of a weapon system, but you could think of it as an allegory for any technology that has the potential to do harm. So, although the discussion revolves around weapons, you could think of any other piece of technology, really. Of course, the weapon system will inevitably cause fatalities if used and, in many cases, the likely potential harms of different pieces of technology are not necessarily fatalities. But we have seen that there can be simple things like ‘visual intrusion’ that can also be seen as a kind of harm. Other possibilities include a technology that might create harmful social divisions, a technology that might have the potential to cause injury or, even, the extravagant uses of resources. The play indeed refers to the knife as a piece of technology that could cause injury, but is, nevertheless, a valuable object when used for all sorts of practical purposes.

The play raises all sorts of incredible questions. One is that it is quite easy for technology, any technology, to be justified by a concept that it is never the technology itself that is the problem, that it is the way people use it that causes the problem, the ‘people kill, not guns’ line I examined in Section 1. Of course, that is an argument that is regularly used by the weapons industry, but when applied generally to any technology it creates an impossible conundrum to resolve. Instead of talking in terms of generalities, I think we need to look at specific situations and specific circumstances. Only then can we draw judgements about how the technology is used in a particular situation, and whether that is, in some sense, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ use of the technology. Landscape with Weapon is fictional but it is not generalised. It deals with specific people and specific relationships, and we hear first-hand from the characters.

So, to summarise: Landscape with Weapon can be viewed as an allegory referring to almost any technology, including, of course, information and computer systems. This is because almost any technology can cause harm of one kind or another.

5.2 The characters

It is also interesting to note that most of the characters are linked together by their family history. There are the two brothers and there is their mother; there are Dan's children and the brothers’ partner. The play also introduces some of Ned's work colleagues, and there is a variety of other unknown people who will be the victims or beneficiaries of the work of both the brothers.

There is also somebody else in all of the play and, of course, that is the audience. This doesn't get a mention but, of course, a play has an audience or, in your case, a reader. You have to remember that your view, your relationship with the characters, is a rather special one in that you are privy to all of the situations and conversations which the characters are not all necessarily involved in. But the audience will not have the ties of history that the author has given the characters, yet you may find that there are some parallels with relationships that the people in the audience have had or have observed in the course of their own life.

I mentioned the use of strong language above. It would seem that the playwright has chosen occasionally to use language that could be offensive for some members of the audience. The playwright has got an ethical conundrum too! He's got to consider the ethics of the dialogue because it may offend people. Is the ‘bad’ language excusable? In the case of this play, the playwright is establishing a brotherly relationship, and this might be something that involved a number of expletives and occasional references to male fantasies to demonstrate it is a relationship between two males and, perhaps, it is a fairly ‘macho’ relationship.

If the playwright wanted to do that, the ethical question becomes whether the potential offence caused by the bad language is countered by the effectiveness of the portrayal. I am choosing to leave it as that here, but you might like to consider this point further: that there is an audience to the play and there is an ethical question in relation to just simply writing about something.

5.3 Ethics and ethos: ‘does mum know?’

In Act 1 we are presented with a fairly naïve Ned, who initially believes himself to be in control. We discover he is very proud of his intellectual achievements and less concerned with money. He explains his inventions and, when he does so, he finds analogies that highlight the aesthetics of what he is designing. At a crucial point in the conversation, his brother Dan asks: ‘does mum know?’ This is a really significant point in the play because it draws in another relationship and, as I have discussed in earlier sections, relationships are essential to ethical reasoning. The next activity explores this.

Activity 21

One possible aspect of ‘mum’ is that she is somebody who is non-technical, that is, she may be representing a lay person's view. Can you think of other possible aspects that ‘mum’ might represent? Jot down a few thoughts before moving on to my comments

Discussion

Comments

Watch the group discussion on video. You will find that, although we are dealing only with three words, they are strategically used in the text, and this can suggest very different ideas and feelings to different people. Have you found any similarities between your own thoughts and those expressed by the group?

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Transcript: Discussion 3

Tim:

Sorry John, wasn’t expecting you to let me in so quickly. I wondered whether the reference to ‘mum’ is actually a reference to a different ethical viewpoint, a sort of arbiter, if you like, that’s going to be different from the two brothers.

Peter:

Yes and I guess we all have ideas about family relationships, brother relationships, parental relationships, so to me ‘mum’ represents something that’s wholesome, and she would want to think you’re doing good son, and hence it’s a standard that you’d want to adhere to. Later on, there’s a reference to father but maybe John’s going to come onto that.

John:

Well the father’s a fairly fleeting reference. I think the thing I would think about ‘mums’ is I expect them to be pretty pragmatic about everything. We’ve got some ‘mums’ here that might be able to tell me whether I’m right or not. But I think you’re right that by saying “Does mum know?”, it does bring in another kind of ethic, a practical ethic that presumably a mum that is perhaps a little proud of her son so she wouldn’t want to criticise her son’s work.

Peter:

And I think that raises a point here. We’re all going to have different ideas about what ‘mum’ is. Is she pragmatic or is she wholesome, is she just loving, all those things and the same thing about all these family relationships. Individually, we’re going to obviously reference our own experience.

Frank:

Yes, possibly referencing our own experience but my thought about the ‘mum’ was that she wasn’t going to be swayed by the money, by the jobs. I thought that she would be most concerned about her son’s ethical viewpoint and probably she would be quite negative about this idea of war because, as a mother, she understands the other mothers whose children are going to get killed by this technology.

Janet:

Yes, I also got the impression that because of the way that Dan asked the question “Does mum know?” that he might have expected her to have perhaps slightly different views, be a little concerned about the ethics.

Tim:

I would agree with that. I think when Dan asked that question, I think he was hinting to Ned that mum would probably disapprove of this and I think Ned’s response suggests that he actually would agree because I think he said that he didn’t want mum to know.

John:

Well yes, Ned dismisses it. He says, “What’s it got to do with mum?” And he says, “The whole thing’s beyond her comprehension.” And there are other characters, oh sorry.

Peter:

I was just thinking, as soon as you said that, John, Freud would say well there’s a problem there with the mother/son relationship about dismissing what’s mum got to do with this.

Janet:

Yes, actually that comment actually gave me the impression that probably mum did know and had already expressed her disapproval.

John:

Yes but it does look as though Ned is trying to suppress all of that so he’s what’s it got to do with mum and perhaps he didn’t like what he heard. It also emerges, of course, that Ned’s estranged wife gets emotional about his work so it sounds as though she might possibly disapprove but he says she gets emotional so he doesn’t talk to her about it. He’s really worried about his sister-in-law who’s got strong views on “war and killing people”. The net result of this is really that Ned has evaded discussion about his project and, as a result, has kind of got a one sided view. He’s ignorant of what might, in the long run, be of concern to him.

Tim:

Yes, that bit I think had echoes for me with the debate in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s I guess in the scientific community about whether scientists should be concerned about the uses that their inventions would be put to or not and there was a lot of burying the head in the sand I think of saying well we just do the inventing, it’s not our problem what people choose to do with it. That resonated quite strongly with the ‘70s I think for me.

John:

Yes, I mean interesting your comment and all this discussion’s come out of that simple phrase “Does mum know?” I think that’s amazing piece of dialogue, just those few words, raises all sorts of thoughts in people’s minds and all sorts of feelings.

End transcript: Discussion 3

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Discussion 3

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Ned argues that he believes in what he is doing. He suggests that it is the activity that he engaged in that is the prime source of satisfaction, not the pay, although it is not very clear whether it is the activity that he believes in, or it is the outcome that he values. But, of course, he is not very specific about what he believes in. ‘I believe in what I am doing, but what is it about what you are doing?’. I get the impression from that piece of the dialogue that Ned does not have a particularly well worked out view of the ethics of what he is involved in.

On the other hand, Dan justifies things in terms of his children, but I think he does that in a very unconvincing way. He arrives at Ned's flat feeling hot and says, ‘Don't you just love global warming?’ It all seems to be couched in a rather flippant way. Dan seems to have a frivolous attitude towards something that others might consider serious, so I immediately get the feeling that he may not be a particularly deep thinker. As the conversation proceeds I think what he wants becomes clear: the money that will bring him luxuries and will allow him to retire early. He is clearly in his job in order to get money.

It is interesting that Dan paints a picture of an idyllic way of life when he realises Ned may gain the rights to his invention, and he suggests what Ned might do if he had all the money (‘a house in Spain’). So we can begin to see what Dan's ethics are rooted in. He presumes that he is entitled to some rewards because, at some point, he indicates he has put a great deal of effort into learning facial anatomy, which incurred a cost, a personal cost, and he feels that this should be balanced by the rewards he feels he is owed and, so, is going to set out to get. He talks about his jeep and various things, but when pressed about these material goods, his justification is usually, and I've said unconvincingly, couched in terms of benefits to his children. His new car seems to be an extravagance, but Dan believes it will impress his brother. Ned, however, is not impressed, so Dan switches his justification and says he bought this large car, this jeep, in order to keep his family safe. He justifies his swimming pool because he says it will help the kids learn to swim. Crucially, he justifies his extra work by saying that it pays for the school fees. As I say, I don't find those reasons convincing, but he is struggling to produce a justification. When he learns of Ned's project, he seems to show a deep-seated concern for the victims of a warfare that might ensue.

As the conversation gets going, Dan starts by talking about his brother's flat, stressing, as we might expect, the financial returns from property rather than any other interesting things about the flat. This, however, leads to a potential embarrassment when Ned points out that he does not own the flat; he rents it. Dan neatly turns the supposition that his brother owns the flat into a conversation, a conversation about his (Dan's) own speculative position. Dan talks about speculation and suggests it is a game, implying that there might be something seedy about it. Nevertheless, he claims that the game demands speculation, so, even though it may be seedy, this is part of the customary way of life, if you like, and because it's a custom, then it is permissible to do it.

I am reminded of the arguments that people use when talking about bribery. As a matter of course people actually do not agree with bribery; we think it's a ‘bad’ thing. However, some claim that, if you want to do business in a particular place with a particular organisation, in a particular country, then you just have to do it, it is part of the custom. This is an argument that people deploy. Whether it works or not, it is difficult to determine. In the context of the play, however, it tends to reinforce our assumptions about Dan and his way of going about things. This is a mundane opening, just an everyday chat about property which probably most of us engage in from time to time, but, actually, it reveals something about an ethical stance. I think this is a really good example of how everyday conversations bring in ethical arguments and ethical statements. They are part of everyday talk.

Clearly the two brothers have got very different views, and from time to time their arguments come to a grinding halt. They reach an impasse, but the conversation then continues. As in all conversations, when the argument reaches an impasse, people talk about other things. They talk about food and places to eat, for example, or they might talk about the weather. This keeps the conversation going, when one of the brothers finds a topic uncomfortable or does not find a way to proceed. Nevertheless, they do seem to want to resolve things. They keep on going back to things, either about the Botox or about the weapons. One of the reasons the conversations stall is because they both said what they are doing is confidential, and they do not reveal everything about what they are doing. So the conversation stalls because one of the partners hasn't got the information he needs to proceed. In order to keep the conversation going, every so often, a bit of the confidential information is leaked out.

Dan's secrecy is self-imposed, and he eventually ‘spills the beans’ all in one go, but Ned is really constrained by the law. Although he knows he is constrained by the law, breaking the rules appears to be acceptable when the discussions involve members of the family. There is a clear conflict of loyalties going on here, and it is not surprising because members of family often feel they are ‘owed’ explanations and, of course, members of the family are often confidantes to one another. So Ned breaks the law, effectively, but he does it because he wants to keep this conversation going with his brother to try and explain what is going on.

The dialogue, then, keeps on switching when the brothers run out of steam on one track. We get a sense of how the brothers are feeling about one another's projects and that is very strongly reinforced by the emotional reaction. It is strange that what I see on the page are words, I see some words, and often they are fragmented sentences, yet, somehow, I read into those words emotions. When Dan talks of his Botox enterprise, I clearly get the impression that Ned is shocked. Also, Dan seems really startled when he hears that the military drones can be ‘weaponised’. Then Ned gets very enthusiastic and portrays the technology as something that will have the potential to rid the world of particular cunning villains. These displays of emotion contribute significantly to the brothers’ understanding of one another but, in this particular play, they rarely do it in a constructive fashion, the emotions tend to be of shock and startlement. But, as a voyeur, I also felt their emotions in those words, and I was just fascinated that words on a page can do that, particularly in a play that is otherwise quite economical with its use of words.

5.4 Intellectual property rights and value

Another important theme raised in the play is intellectual property rights (IPR). Ned's fortunes seem to rely on control of the IPR issues surrounding his invention. He challenges the rights of others to share in the IP because, as he sees it, they have not contributed anything. The assumption is that those that have the idea have IPR, but the IPR has value and, therefore, any proceeds accrued should be due to the person who has the idea. A problem arises here because of the phrase ‘intellectual property rights’. It does seem to link it to the person who has the idea.

When it comes to patents, the person having the idea is acknowledged, and the expression of the idea often does have value, but it is quite unlikely that the originator of the idea is able to express that idea without the help of all sorts of other people. Without that support, the originator might not have the time, the energy, the facilities or even the inspiration to develop and express the idea. So the question is, then, should those who supported the inventor get some reward? My answer would be yes, but, in this case, how is that reward to be funded?

The only source of income value is the expression of the idea. So the only source of reward for anybody involved in this is having a share in the IPR. However, Ned persists in believing the intellectual property is the property of the person who put in the intellectual effort. Perhaps the problem here is the term ‘intellectual property’, which stresses the intellectual component of what is likely to have been quite a collective effort demanding intellectual skills but also practical skills of various kinds. Perhaps it is not intellectual property that we are talking about. Perhaps we are talking about the artefacts that are created by a collective of people, and surely they all deserve a share in what is called the IPR.

Nevertheless, it seems that Ned is, more than anything else, seeking control. Ned is frustrated that he's got little control over how the invention is to be deployed. Shaw's Major Barbara comes to mind. Cumming says, ’I shall sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to who I please’, and Undershaft (the arms dealer) replies, ‘Don't come here lusting for power, young man!’ Cumming continues, ‘Don't listen, the place is driven by the most rascally part of society, he is their slave.’ Undershaft goes on, ‘I’ll take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. I can make cannons; I cannot make courage and conviction. Bar, you tire me with your morality mongering.’

Shaw is making a similar point to the one being made in Landscape with Weapon. The trouble is that, if you start trying to gain control over who gets the weapons, then you enter into the realms of politics, which is effectively what Ned wants to do. However, he has entered the wrong profession to do that, and, of course, he is ill-suited to enter the realm of politics because his fear of authority lies amongst the technologists and not amongst the politicians. If he actually does want control, then he probably needs to take up a different career and become a politician.

5.5 Rhetorical devices

I talked a bit about Ned's motivations, but I am not quite sure about what he is trying to do to be persuasive. He has this interest in aesthetics, but in giving a detailed explanation of a military technology he is working on, he, from time to time, uses an analogy. One analogy he uses is the ‘flocking of starlings’, which illustrates rather the principle of operation of the technology and suggests that it is a kind of an existence proof. It implies this technology might actually work. But, of course, the analogy also shifts the context as is so often in ethical arguments. People use analogies to shift away from the thing that perhaps is causing some trouble. It shifts the context away from military application to that of nature and introduces the idea of beauty in flight, the beautiful organic movements of the starlings. Through the analogy, he romanticises the work he is engaged in. Later on he evokes a pleasing aesthetic, when he talks about the technology generating a ‘symphony in the sky’. In a slightly different vein, he talks about the technology not as a ‘thing’ that will do a particular job, but as a gesture. Technology becomes a deterrent to violent action. Just as threats, mere words, can deter violent action, so the technology becomes a gesture that will perhaps threaten others and, hence, remove the possibility of violence. Therefore, the technology is no longer a weapon: it becomes a symbol of intent or conviction that persuades others not to act.

This collection of analogies and gestures distances Ned's device and, hence, Ned, from violent action. It is somehow natural, pleasing and aesthetic, and it's just a gesture towards those who might be thinking about being violent towards us. It is difficult to know whether Ned does this consciously or unconsciously, but the effect of such analogies is perhaps to get us to thinking in different terms. Although we may, perhaps, object to the idea of weapons, we might agree with the beauty of what is being created, and that seems to me to fit in with the idea of someone being enamoured with the technology.

Activity 22

Watch the discussion on video to see what the 2008 group had to say. Please be aware that the quality of the video and audio varies as it was recorded as a Flash Meeting and was therefore dependent on the equipment and connection speeds of the individual participants.

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Transcript: Discussion 4

Peter:

Oh, sorry, just reading the chat log as well. John, have we covered their naïvety sufficiently because if you enter into a world where you know that you’re dealing with military technology, you must have thought through the consequences. Weaponising a drone from a military point of view is a very good idea; from a humanitarian point of view, probably not.

Frank:

Yes, you do get the idea that Ned is incredibly naïve about a lot of the arguments that he puts forward, and it seems amazing that anyone’s gone into his line of work without actually considering the real aspects. It seems like he’s just a technologist, just like a little kid, really intrigued about the cool funky stuff he can build, but not even thinking about the way that they’re going to be used until it’s far too late and he has to sign this horrible contract.

Janet:

Yes, I’d agree with that but I’m also thinking that most of us will often hide things that we don’t want to know about from ourselves. I mean this may be perhaps a bit of an extreme example but people will go into a job because there are reasons why they know that they’re going to enjoy it and perhaps that causes them to hide from the realities they don’t like.

John:

Yes, actually the playwright, I’ve heard the playwright talk about this play and he said perhaps he made Ned a bit too naïve but he’s written the play and it’s been performed and perhaps if he were writing it again he wouldn’t do it quite in the same way. And the actors too said they found that particularly difficult to get over. I think they did a really good job when they performed it on the stage but I think the point about Ned’s naïvety is well made.

Peter:

And it wasn’t only naïvety. Ned was looking for a paradigm shift and he wanted to retain control.

Tim:

Yes, I wondered whether the naïvety in the play had been exaggerated in order to make the point that a naïve scientist can get himself involved in some quite dangerous stuff. This is a warning really but I also think that there are some incredibly naïve people around in all walks of life and I don’t suppose scientists are any more immune from being naïve than anybody else.

Janet:

Yes, just going back to what Peter was saying about the paradigm shift and the control. I think I got the impression, at any rate, that Ned felt that he would be able to exercise control through the contractual side of things so the naïvety was in not realising how hard he’d be pushed contractually.

Judith:

Perhaps Ned was simply so enamoured by the technology that he didn’t see beyond it.

Janet:

That’s also very probably true.

Peter:

Can you be enamoured by a weaponised drone?

Tim:

He wouldn’t be the first person to get enamoured by a piece of technology in my experience, that’s for sure, and yes, I think people can get enamoured by the weaponisation, if that’s what you want to call it. I think if you look at the history of weapons development, people have got quite excited about the technology and I think some of the stuff around the Hiroshima and Nagasaki I think shows that.

Janet:

Yes, I think also if you think about how people talk about their own work, the idea that something is my brain child, I think probably people do get enamoured in very much in the way that they love their children. They want it to be the best in the world, they’re proud of themselves for having produced it or whatever. But in Ned’s case, surely he was well and truly enamoured of it before it was weaponised and while he still thought that it was a relatively neutral piece of technology.

Judith:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to butt in there, I pressed the wrong button. Yes, I think I can see what you’re saying about it was like a child to him and like a bad child you’re trying to give it all the time, a child turned bad.

Frank:

He also makes the point though that when he was coming up with this technology, we weren’t in Iraq and Israel hadn’t invaded Gaza yet so the world was a far better place. So either he’s being naïve about the possibilities of things going wrong in the world or he genuinely didn’t see the bad applications and thought it would be only used for peace.

John:

Of course, it could be that the playwright actually exaggerated because he wanted to make a point and perhaps the playwright got it in for these kind of technologists.

Janet:

Yes, just thinking about not being in Iraq and those sort of things. Yes, the other point that came to me was when he’s talking to Ros later on about it and he’s describing it in very aesthetic ways and again, this seems to show that he sees his invention, his brain child as something quite different from what’s actually going to be produced out in the real world.

End transcript: Discussion 4

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Discussion 4

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Scene two is where the negotiation takes place. The scene opens with Ros attempting to build a cooperative relationship. She enters straight away into small talk and, in so doing, she makes the same mistake as Dan: she talks about the flat, but then discovers he is only renting it. She then shifts to talking about children as an alternative strategy, but, of course, Ned does not have any. She then compliments Ned on his work, and she really strikes a chord when she admires a geometrical design for the cooling device that appears on his laptop. She says, ‘This is what I love about your stuff, it's so eclectic, it's like where does it come from, your brain must be enormous.’ You may be reminded of the section were we looked at Socrates. Socrates said what rhetoric is flattery, but, it seems to me, here we've got a clear example of flattery being deployed to get Ned on Ros’ side. She even goes on to equate his work with that of Da Vinci which, of course, Ned seemed to tacitly agree with. The result of all of this is that Ned signals that serious discussion should take place.

They discuss, at first, possible modifications to the technology, but Ned is actually a bit unhappy about this. Ned somehow senses that he needs to be in a more powerful position than he perhaps is. He uses a tactic of challenging Ros’ use of words. This is not a logical attack, nor is it a direct attack, but he tries to put her off-guard, in a way. His first attack is on the use of the word ‘selling’ to mean ‘promote’ when she says she's ‘selling the idea’. Ned protests, ‘We’re not selling it to them!’, to which Ros replies, ‘No but I mean I have to sell them on it.’ It is a figure of speech, and Ros is clearly on her guard.

A while later they talk about weapon safety, and the discussion is quite interesting. Ros uses the word ‘difficult’, ‘difficult to operate’, where she might have better talked about the tool being ‘demanding’ of the operator or requiring undue skill. But Ned picks up this word ‘difficult’ and asks, ‘What if it's too easy to use?’ He takes a slightly different meaning of the word ‘difficult’ to her. He means it is lacking in safeguards. And he continues, ‘It should be difficult to use.’ He means it should have safeguards, but she meant it is a bit complicated to use.

Throughout that conversation, he is constantly challenging her, picking up on her grammar or her word use rather than explaining what it is he is objecting to. Perhaps he does not know what he is objecting to. Perhaps he just feels it, and he is just trying to provide some sort of resistance. But in the end, of course, it emerges he is worried about the sale of the device and about the modifications that will allow others to stake a claim. When Ros says we need an indicator on this device, Ned turns it into a moral issue about the irresponsibility of putting the weapon systems into the hands of untrained users. ‘If they need an indicator, they don't know what they're doing, they're not proper operators. How can we possibly sell it to these people?’

Ned uses underhand tactics also with his brother. In an attempt to close off an argument, he pounces on his brother's rather ill-judged comment, objecting to Dan's ignorance of the brilliance of the avionics. He does two things with the one single phrase. He shuts up Dan by telling him he is ignorant, and he sings his own praises by mentioning the brilliance of the avionics. In a way, this little bit of conversation reveals that Ned views any criticism of the weapon as a criticism of Ned himself. It is as though the weapon is a part of Ned. His ideas are embedded and embodied in that weapon and it has become a part of his identity. That may be one reason why he defends the weapon and ignores some of the criticism: the weapon is Ned, is an embodiment of Ned and his ideas. Towards the end of Act 1, Ned actually says, ‘I have to get this thing made! It's what I do, it's my life!’ You can see his very strong affiliation, identification with a piece of technology.

5.6 Identification

We end Act 1 with a clear understanding that it is actually too late for Ned to pull out, even if he wanted to: the weapon has been designed. If he were concerned about the military technology, he should really have worried about that before he took on the job. But he does not, at the end of Act 1, want to pull out. He clearly wants to see the project through. Materialising this idea is what he lives for, and he says this is at the cutting edge, this is where technology is. These ideas are going to have wider ramifications. And you begin to recognise him as seeing the whole thing as an experiment that will advance technology in general, the cutting edge. He is obviously getting his gratification or part of his gratification from the thought that he is contributing to technological progress. Or, perhaps, it's simply that he wants to be sure his theoretical design and, hence, his idea, can be proved in some sense correct. In other words, he wants to know that he is right.

If Ned is actually finding himself totally identified with the project, that the project and he are inseparable, he has been given an identity that he will struggle to relinquish. Yet, at the end of the Act, he is discovering that perhaps he should be having some doubts, and perhaps there is something that later he is going to have to contest. But you may agree that, if he so firmly identifies himself with his idea, the weapon being a manifestation of his idea, then that is going to be really rather difficult to give up. We all find it difficult to give up things that we value because they do tend to become a part of us. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to give up things as well as other people we value.

5.7 The story so far

In Act 1 of Landscape with Weapon, Dan, the dentist, has been disturbed by the defence project that his brother is working on. Dan, however, is a fairly mercenary individual, so he feels that having had the idea, Ned should aim for a good return. The company is keen to exploit Ned's work, but Ned has resisted handing over the IP for his invention because he wants to control who gets access to the weapon system that his work has enabled.

In this Act Ned says weapons are empirical, that is, you don't know what will happen until you use them, and this is a particularly interesting point as we are pursuing the allegory with technology in general. This is actually true of all technology: all technology is empirical in that you do not know what is going to happen to it, and it is impossible for anyone to imagine every way the technology might be used and hence, what benefit or harm will result. Perhaps as a technologist, the best that can be done is to design with the intention of bringing benefit to people, to promote those uses that are expected to bring benefits, to warn of uses that you know will cause harm and to use knowledge of the technology to offer remedies if harmful uses take a grip. Of course, what constitutes harm and benefit and which communities gain and which lose can't be answered in general, but those questions are for the individual technologists to consider.

5.8 Rights

At the beginning of Act 2, Ned is quite explicit about not wanting to bargain over money. It is very clear he is bargaining over his right to control who uses what he sees as his technology, and his rights, he believes, will enable him to keep his weapon out of the hands of administrations that he does not really trust. So, at the centre of all this are the rights that appear to provide the means for Ned to control the distribution of devices embodying his idea, and that will allow him to prevent the distribution of his device to nations he believes will use them to cause harm. In other words, he wants to enter the wider world of politics using the rights to his ideas as an instrument. Incidentally, of course, he also feels that, with the idea being his, if it were materialised and he wanted it to be materialised, is very much a part of his identity.

How do ‘rights’ get allocated? How do you get them, if they are a good thing? If you are allocated rights you are given privileges, that is, the allocation of rights is generally performative, that is, it involves a social act that is the result of an event coupled to some social convention. The idea of performative utterances was introduced by the British philosopher John Austin and can be understood as the use of words to bring about change. Someone says you can earn rights but, actually, earning rights is related to an event that is coupled to a social convention because, if somebody has the rights, other people have to respect them. This is often reinforced by some kind of ceremony. For example, certificates get issued when people have ‘rights’, or a patent gets issued when people are allocated ‘rights’.

In other words, ‘rights’ are a social convention but there is really no compulsion. People who do not respect the convention will disregard the rights. They will show no respect for the assigned authority, and they will not consider helping the accrual of the benefit to the rights holder. In the play, Ned has ‘rights’, that is, ‘rights’ are attributed to him as a result of his having an idea; his ‘rights’ are respected by others or perhaps not in the play. Perhaps as things unfold people do not quite respect the ‘rights’ in the way you would expect.

As I said earlier, ‘rights’ are allocated performatively. An example Austin (1986, p. 5) uses to explain a performative is the marriage ceremony. When people get married, they are asked if they want to get married to the other person, and by saying ‘I do’ they bring about the change in their social status from single to married. In the case of ideas being converted into patents, then there may be some words written that bring about the allocation of rights. Austin says that, for a performative to be effective, it must be part of an accepted procedure, we must all know what is going on. All participants must adopt appropriate roles, and the procedure must be executed correctly, completely and with sincerity. There are, therefore, conditions surrounding a performative. Effectively, what people say performatively, or what they write down, effects a change in relationships. Ned gains his privileges when he acquires, presumably, a patent or some other recognition of his idea.

Performatives are fairly common utterances. Bureaucracies, for example, have rather austere linguistic ceremonies. For example, you fill in forms, which is a rather primitive kind of ceremony. You may also sign an agreement or you may be interviewed. Also, there are committee meetings where somebody says something that transforms the status of individuals. These examples are all rather formal but, of course, there are less benign performatives available, for example, you can start spreading rumours about certain individuals being liars or cheats, and if that's taken up, then that is also performative because it changes the social status of those individuals. The crucial thing is that performatives are grounded in language, so they do not involve any physical action and, certainly, they do not involve violence. They are, however, collective, because they imply social agreement.

In the play, what Ros is trying to do is to get Ned to transfer his rights to the company, and she must persuade him to go through a sort of ritual. He has to sign an agreement that declares he will give up his benefit, his privileges and hand over benefits to the company. You can see that, because there are privileges associated with it, he might want something in return. That is why Ros offers money. But, of course, that fails, so she tries a different tack. She actually talks about the importance of the work to the local community, and that is rather similar to the situation we saw in the play Last Call, where the benefit to the community is put forward as why you might do something that may be on the margins of acceptability.

5.9 Ethical reasoning

Now Ned's got three things. He's got the money that is presumably ‘good’. He's got his defence policy, which he thinks is ‘good’. Ros then introduces the well-being of the community. They are all ‘goods’ but each pulls in a different direction. Any judgement that Ned makes has to be based on an aggregation of these things. But, of course, these are quite different kinds of things, they are incommensurate, so adding up these things is not a straightforward proposition. Ros is hoping that Ned's decision would be pushed in her direction once she adds the idea of the community benefit that, perhaps, Ned had neglected. She is hoping that argument will draw him towards her view of things. But, of course, that does not work either. As a consequence, Ros has to introduce more things to try and bias the argument in her direction.

Ros is trying to persuade Ned and the various things that she brings to bear, which are all of a different kind, but somehow or other they have got to be ‘weighed up’. So what does she do? We've got the money, Ned's defence policy, the well-being of the community, all of these are ingredients of the ethical case. Ros accuses Ned of being selfish, and that might be considered ‘bad’ simply because selfishness is something that community traditions present as being ‘bad’, a ‘bad’ trait. So Ros is hoping that ‘selfishness’ is an element in Ned's final vocabulary, which turns out to be the case as he agrees this is ‘bad’. Interestingly, Ros is actually not that convinced herself. Seeing as Ned is certainly unmoved, she goes on to elaborate by talking about responsibilities: Ned's responsibilities to his colleagues, his family and to himself.

We've now got a new ethical component: responsibility. But does ‘responsibility’ persuade people? Is it an unalloyed ‘good’? Ethicists tend to talk about ‘duty’ rather than ‘responsibility’, but the notions are related. Actually, these are quite similar to ‘rights’. First of all, ‘responsibility’ or ‘duty’ couples relationships and actions. There is some relationship, and, if there is a ‘duty’, then some action is to take place amongst the people in that relationship. ‘Responsibility’ is about ‘right’ actions, about ‘good’ outcomes performed, of course, in the context of a specific relationship. One of the things about ‘duties’ and ‘responsibilities’ is that they often involve effort, that is, they are a bit of a burden. By carrying out the ‘responsibility’ the person who is performing the duty will carry the burden, but the benefit goes to others. So it is tough carrying out a responsibility because you carry the burden for which someone else benefits. It is a similar case with ‘duty’.

Because they are tough and someone else benefits, of course, ‘responsibilities’ and ‘duties’ are quite often evaded. To encourage people to carry out their ‘responsibilities’ and ‘duties’, we often pat them on the back, give explicit approval when they have carried out their ‘duty’ or ‘responsibilities’. That ‘pat on the back’ can be something that is quite informal, a simple word of gratitude, or it could be something more formal like awarding a medal for carrying out a duty, perhaps a particularly painful duty.

Moore talks about ‘duties’ (Principia Ethica, Chapter V, §89) and says that, actually, some of these things are not really related with ethics. The fact that something may be a bit of a burden might not affect the overall ‘good’. If you carry out the ‘duty’ and ‘good’ accrues to somebody, overall, the world might be a better place. The fact that it is a burden does not necessarily mean that it is something to be avoided. The business about evading may mean that the world is a worse place. But somehow or other it's not quite got the same emphasis as the ‘good’ outcome. What G.E. Moore does is that he equates ‘responsibility’ and ‘duty’ with ‘expediency’ in saying that expediency produces a ‘good’ outcome too. The only difference is that people willingly enter into something that is expedient, whereas perhaps they are a bit reluctant regarding ‘responsibility’ and ‘duty’. From a broad ethical point of view, ‘duty’ and ‘expediency’ both imply actions that deliver ‘good’ outcomes. Of course, ‘rights’ are the other side of the coin of ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ because the person benefiting from the ‘rights’ expects others to bear their ‘responsibilities’. But there is nothing particularly special or unique about ‘responsibilities’ and ‘duties’ except that they can be a bit of a chore for some people.

So when Ros says that Ned must carry out his responsibilities, it is not so much that it's labelled a responsibility that counts, but what is it that she thinks is a responsibility. But, again, that does not persuade Ned. She actually makes a personal appeal and talks about the disruption to her way of life if Ned does not sign, so he's got to accept his responsibilities and, if he does not, her way of life will suffer. Interestingly, she equates her life with those of normal people, implying that, if Ned does not sign, then her life will become abnormal, unnatural, possibly unhealthy, and he will be responsible. The words ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ do not carry much ethical weight, really. Moore actually says that we must not be frightened by the assertion that a thing is ‘natural’ into the admission that it is ‘good’ (Principia Ethica, Chapter I, §12). ‘Good’ does not, by definition, mean anything that is ‘natural’ and it is, therefore, always an open question.

In short, Ros’ argument is very much about persuading Ned that he is responsible to other people. It's a moral persuasion to the benefit of everyone else but him, really, at this point, because if he does get his way he will be gratified by having his idea materialised. So it is all on his side. Since he is not interested in money, she has to bring to bear a much bigger picture, something like an attack on his selfishness, if you like. Ned's arguments are really quite abstract, but Ros’ are very much down-to-earth and practical. But I guess Ned has not quite seen that yet. So we've got Ros talking about ‘normal’ people even though ‘normal’ doesn’t necessarily imply ‘good’. Ros is hoping the implication that she will be forced out of a ‘normal’ life will be taken to be part of a final vocabulary where ‘normal’ life is equated with ‘good’. She is, of course, hoping that Ned will share that vocabulary.

5.10 Conscience

Ned responds with the use of another ethical concept. He feels what he is proposing is ‘right’, regardless of any relationships at play, and he refers to his ‘conscience’. This is perhaps a way of saying, firstly, that he feels very strongly that he is right and, secondly, that any speculation about signing away the IP gives him a great deal of discomfort. This appeal to a ‘conscience’ is an interesting rhetorical move because it neither requires nor provides any reasoned justification. If you talk of ‘a conscience’, if you talk about ‘your conscience’, this is simply a brief account of how you feel, a personal experience, and no one else can access that, so there's no way of arguing against a statement that it is the ‘conscience’ that is driving you that way.

We looked at Nussbaum's ideas in Section 2 and they provide an interesting background against which to analyse Ned's behaviour. Nussbaum might claim that, when Ned talks of his ‘conscience’, he is having certain feelings that could be used by him as a guide for further deliberation about the decision facing him. In other words, when the ‘conscience’ pricks, perhaps we ought to seek an explanation that will help with the constructions of an argument as to why we feel that way.

Nevertheless, Ros turns mention of a ‘conscience’ into an insult by saying it is moral exhibitionism. Granted, there is no way you can challenge someone's appeal to their conscience, so I do wonder whether that might be quite accurate because, at this point, Ned seems to be pleased to have someone who will listen, and he is simply treating Ros as an audience. It seems to me that he gets carried away with his own sense of righteousness. He is quite unaware of the practicalities of his situation, so his argument remains very abstract. His appeal to ‘conscience’, however, does not provide much in the way of support for an argument.

It is possible for people to share concerns, and they can react and say their ‘conscience’ would not allow them to do certain things or act in certain ways. However, to agree about that with somebody and then to start a dialogue is only the beginning of an ethical case. It is not the ‘conscience’ that gives you the ethical case; it is the deliberation that has been caused by the prick of ‘conscience’. To say simply that my ‘conscience’ tells me something does not provide conviction to others, unless there are all kinds of gestures and emotions that go with it. But the prick of ‘conscience’ and associated reporting of it is not something that is very powerful as an argument. The deliberation that follows, however, might well be.

5.11 Promises

Having tried various devices to persuade Ned, Ros resorts to her other ‘technical’ approach. She reminds him of his employment contract, which requires him to do his best to exploit his work. A contract, of course, is a form of promise you endorse when you sign it. Signing the contract is performative, it changes the relationships. In this case, it clearly is a promise, it is a promise to do his ‘best’, and that is clearly an ethical matter. This move obviously has a strong influence on Ned because he now agrees to sign away his IP. It is a bit strange at first because he sees the honouring of a promise as a ‘good’ thing (and dishonouring of a promise as ‘bad’), but this does not seem to be an adequate explanation as to why Ned reverses his previously very strongly-held position. He has now agreed to play ball. He does not go quite as far as Ros would like, but he's saying, yes, he will sign.

Promises themselves, perhaps, are pretty neutral when it comes to ethics, unless you know what the promise is about. But, of course, if you consistently keep a promise or keep your promises, then what this behaviour can do is to build trust, and that provides a greater degree of security in the relationships where the promises are made. This can be beneficial because it will reduce the anxiety of those who are in that relationship. Promise is a bit like ‘duty’, you can't really say whether these are ethical matters unless you know the content of the promise or the content of the ‘duty’.

Ned seems to be very much persuaded by talk of the contract, and the contract is a bit more than a promise. There is more to a contract than just a promise. The signing of the contract is ceremonial and will involve others as witnesses. If you renege on the promise, then other people will probably know about it if it is a contract. And, of course, contracts contain reciprocal promises. Reneging on a contract can bring to bear punitive action, often backed by the law. When Ned reverses his position, perhaps he is being realistic about the politically-debilitating actions that his contract might trigger. Perhaps he responds because he knows, if he goes against his contract, his power will be diminished and he will not get his political way with his ideas.

So now we've got contracts, promises, rights, duties and responsibilities; all kinds of social bonds that can influence conduct. They are all performative in that they are actions that can bring about a change in behaviour which can have material or psychological consequences. But in themselves, contracts, promises, rights, duties and responsibilities cannot be said to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ without further knowledge of their demands and context. To say that somebody has broken a contract or broken a promise does not necessarily give them a black mark; you have to know what they promised.

5.12 Interests

There is quite a lot to be said about the play, but in this course I need to be selective. In the conversations that take place, one of the things that happens is that all sorts of interests unfold. There is a catalogue of benefits that could each potentially accrue to a long list of individuals and groups. We have the government that could gain benefits through ownership which would allow it to develop the device, understand threats, prevent development, protect the indigenous industry and retain a credible capability for creating deterrents. Ned can benefit from ownership by controlling the use of the technology, making money, and getting something made that is his. The Americans can satisfy their aversion to certain prejudices and their aversion to art. Colleagues could improve their CVs and win some royalties. The company could make a profit. The community could gain a source of employment. Potential enemies could grab attention through the use of the technology. Families could be fed and schooled. The public could come to feel more secure.

Regardless of whether or not these benefits are achievable, it is obvious that they might motivate the various parties to squabble over the technology without anyone being in a position to judge what the best course of action might be. Everyone has an interest and a long list of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ associated with those interests, so each of those different parties are likely to come to different conclusions about what is the right course of action. There is no one who is in a position to decide on the best course of action. This means that the business of discussing ethics simply goes on and on. However, of course, there is pragmatism because, usually, a decision has to be made, some action has to be taken, and time is limited. Time, of course, is a very important ingredient that we have not included in all of this, but everybody is short of time, as they are short of information and authority. It is this sort of limitations that are going to close the debate. It is likely that closure will satisfy nobody, and nobody will be able to say whether this was the best course of action. So the business of ethics is something where debate just goes on and on.

As an example of where things are time limited, consider national disasters we've seen like the earthquakes in China, or the floods in the United States. In events such as these, people run out of time, somebody has to decide and action has to be taken. It may not be the optimum but it is the best that can be done at the time.

In the play, Ned is not presented explicitly as a martyr, but Brooks does talk about martyrdom, which may suggest the notion that Ned is somehow a martyr. The trouble is that martyrs do not always die for causes that people necessarily respect. Ned is a martyr to a cause in that he has actually given up his life to work on his ideas. You can see that he's a workaholic: he has sacrificed his time as well as his relationship with Jamie, his estranged wife. At the beginning of the play, if Dan had not turned up, if that conversation had not taken place, Ned was on the verge of wrecking his relationship with his brother and the rest of his family. Ned was on his way to totally wrecking his life to work on his ideas as his cause. The conversations that take place throughout the play suggest, however, that he later on changed his cause into a political mission to influence who got access to his technology.

Martyrdom is ultimately about drawing attention to one's convictions in the hope that others will come to recognise that those convictions are of value. Of course, it does presume the convictions are, upon examination, worthy. Martyrdom presumes that to dispose of a life is honourable if it is attached to honourable ends. Ned saw his ideas as something honourable and has come to see his stand against handing over control of his idea as honorific. However, Ros punctures Ned's pride by explaining his ideas are worthless without a supportive enterprise provided for by governments. She even goes on to say that the government may take up the rights and not proceed with manufacture.

When you start a job and think about the products that you may be engineering, you have to think about the ethical benefits and the ethical stance you are going to take on it during the product lifecycle, or else you are just jumping with both feet into a situation where you may not understand where you are going to go. This is a lesson, I think, Ned ought to have heard, actually a lesson for young graduates going into their first job. This is one of the things that, perhaps, professionals sometimes do not take sufficiently seriously when they are pleased to get a job. But if they are not careful, they might get into Ned's position.

Ned carries on arguing, and he says that weapons give strength to negotiators, this is what they are all about. But Brooks, obviously, has been involved in plenty of arguments like this and takes the logic one step further, saying that, actually, we need some device to act when the people we are attempting to negotiate with do not have a willingness to negotiate. It is in those circumstances that, according to Brooks, warfare has a role. According to Brooks, having weapons can give people hope. In other words, weaponry becomes a technology of hope, and, if you look at it in that way, as Brooks does, then it comes in on that ‘good’ side of the scales.

At this point, Ned really gives up. But he gives up actually because Brooks gives these lengthy speeches about warfare and asks Ned if he ‘gets’ what is being said. Eventually there is a long silence and Ned says ‘I'm just an engineer’. Ned cannot match the fluency and sophistication of Brooks’ arguments, and although Ned, at one time, would have been very much on Brooks’ side, he would have used arguments couched in quite different terms to those of Brooks. By saying he's ‘just an engineer’, he is admitting that his vocabulary and fluency do not extend into the realm that Brooks has entered. Ned is saying that his final vocabulary, which is relevant to engineering practice, is not a useful tool in the domain of the arguments now being presented, and he simply has to give up frustrated.

We do get Ned sabotaging the prototype. So, although he's signed, he has one more go at scuppering things since, of course, his arguments have failed. He does not have Brooks’ vocabulary and persuasive skills, but he does have technical skills, which give him authority in that area. In performing the sabotage, he is exploiting the effective skill that he does have. Unfortunately, he is rather a broken man at this stage, so he sabotages the prototype and disappears. Brooks is trying to track Ned down, so he interviews Dan, who is an easier nut to crack because Brooks starts musing over modes of torture, and Dan's imagination takes him away. Dan misunderstands but also capitulates, eventually revealing where Ned is.

5.13 The final Act

In Act 3, Dan and Ned are back in Ned's flat and Ned is showing extreme signs of neurosis and paranoia. Dan can no longer bear Ned's rather dark and erratic behaviour, and he grabs the conversation by suddenly pouring out all the overwhelmingly negative aspects of his life as a dentist, father and lover. Some people might say that ethics is about how to live a ‘good’ life and, clearly, Dan needs a change. He recognises he is not leading a ‘good’ life. He knows all the things that are preventing him from having a ‘good’ life but he is trapped, not physically, but by a collection of social constraints that he cannot shed. So, for Dan, the social constraints are not necessarily ‘good’ but, on the whole, ‘bad’ because he is trapped by those constraints. If we are considering ethics, we need to consider only material benefit, necessarily, but also social psychological benefit.

In a way Dan ‘caves in’ and he exposes his brother in a scene of extraordinary intimacy. Brooks then goes out to Tuscany to see Ned, but there is that wonderful scene of deprivation and, ultimately, Ned comes around to seeing Brooks’ point of view. But the point is that Dan ‘caves in’ and, by doing so, he is ultimately, terribly disloyal to everybody. Perhaps he starts out a bit like that, when all he values is material riches. He does not really have a strong position, except the goal to make money, and in this final scene we begin to see that, actually, he has discovered that there are all sorts of things that his continuous struggle for wealth has wrecked.

There are actually a number of interesting sentences that I have not picked out. One of them is when Ned comes out with a phrase which he attributes to Brooks and says, ‘Everybody thinks they're doing the right thing.’ This is a kind of indicator to us all, I believe, that it is worthwhile, every once in a while, reflecting on whether you are doing the right thing or not. And right at the end, of course, the conversation shifts from Ned's work and he reaches out for the solace of his family. Work has ceased to be his raison d’être. He speculates about using his talents in other ways and suggests he might make toys. But he doesn't sound very confident about that and actually seeks assurance about his capability, or, perhaps, the approval of such a project, from his brother, Dan. This speech by Ned actually outlines the ethical situation of technologists so it is worth unpacking a little.

Ned makes a number of statements. He says, ‘The engineer's prime task is to make a machine’ – or I guess the technology – ‘as effective as possible.’ That is the ‘duty’ of the engineer; that is the task. I think most of the developers I've met would agree that that is their job, that they need to make this ‘thing’ effective, the best technology they can. Then Ned introduces the artist's imperative to discover something, and that is an imperative partly because it gratifies the artist if they discover something, and the audience might well be gratified by what the artist presents. But, of course, art also has the potential to transform the way we see things and so bring about changes to the way we live our lives.

So we've got these two things. The developer has a task and the outcome of this task has the potential to change the way we see things. All of this is within the developer's enterprise, which also has the capability to make and distribute what has been discovered or made effective. Therein lies the big issue. You can have all sorts of bright ideas but, actually, if you make something and distribute it, then you affect many people's lives.

Ned also talks about how technology can come into conflict with personal morality, which I take to mean the morality that is applied outside of the technical task, the kind of every day morality that might be deployed in dealings with your friends or your family. So, as a developer and artist, Ned has come to realise that, once the potentially damaging technology is moved from his development laboratories, it enters a world where he has little or no authority. This generates the clash when the technology, in fulfilling its function, may destroy something that you might well value profoundly.

6 Conclusion

I hope you have found it interesting to look at the various plays I have discussed in this course, not only because they are entertaining but, mainly, because they are instructive and, often, quite compact. What plays can do is to stimulate your own emotions, which, as I argued in the course, is a powerful beginning to ethical reasoning. Drama provides ready-made analogues for exploring experiences, often experiences that you have not had but also experiences you might face yourself. The skilful novelist or playwright helps us to understand, even if in some small way, what we experienced, as though we are transported into another situation. In some cases, as you have seen in this course, drama reveals what it is to be a technology developer and actually illustrates aspects of ethics that the rationalist traditions of engineering and technology conceal. These include the limitations of logical debate or the emotional and very tangible dimension of professional activities: these are facets of professional practice in ICS that are often relegated to being of secondary importance, if acknowledged at all.

Listening to or watching a performance can stimulate your own emotions, so I strongly recommend that you attend theatre performances or listen to radio renderings, to add extra dimensions to your thinking. The examples I have used in this course are only a few amongst many others that can help to guide you in your professional practice, but you may already have come across other relevant plays and novels, or may yet find new ones. Also, you will have noted that, especially in the initial sections, I used several examples taken from newspapers (and online versions of those). I hope that, having studied this course, you will be more aware of ethical statements being repeatedly made in often tacit ways on the media, which should help you develop a more critical approach to text assumedly presented as ‘pure’ reportage.

7 Summary

This course presents an understanding of ‘ethics’ as something related with ‘good’ and ‘bad’. There are other derivative words like ‘optimal’ that might also be used, and there are parochial words which are related to particular communities. When we talk about ethical things, we are liable to confront cultural differences that are reflected in differences in vocabulary. But there are other kinds of differences too. Things have different properties; for example, ‘appearance’ and ‘radiation’ might be two different properties of a radio mast, and somehow or other we have to weigh those up one against another. There are also different kinds of things like ‘fears’, ‘means’, ‘ends’, ‘relationships’, ‘virtues’, ‘pleasures’ and ‘pains’. All of this seems quite incommensurate, so one of the difficulties of ethics is how to put those things together to decide on and justify a course of action.

When combining different kinds of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’, we often get contradictions and, sometimes, ambiguities, so we need to be able to cope with those. Socrates’ solution was to ‘measure’ the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ and then perform some calculations, which might be a fine idea if we had a way of measuring things in the first place! This, unfortunately, is something which he did not suggest. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, suggests that the way out is to change the language game that we're playing. In other words, if there is a problem with vocabularies and their use, then we need to negotiate a common vocabulary if we're to avoid some of these difficulties.

The course looks at examples taken from professional codes of practice that illustrate those difficulties, suggesting that, whilst codes of practice may offer a guide to action, we can imagine circumstances where the rules in a code of practice contradict one another. Contradictions thus created provide a source of inspiration for the dramatist, but they create real conundrums for professionals and practitioners.

In Section 3 I examined the play Call Waiting and suggested that it was essentially about relationships, their construction, maintenance and development. The play illustrates that, when we are constructing or maintaining relationships, we engage in actions, and those actions can also be ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Although the context of the play was technological, and it was a technologist who was in trouble, the technologies themselves didn't add too much to the ethical situation. All they did was to enable people to connect, so, although they brought together different sorts of people, they didn't necessarily alter the kinds of discussions these people had. Ironically, in spite of all the communication devices available throughout the play, none of the characters quite knew what was going on, so the information technology was not delivering information. Nevertheless things happened, relationships changed and people were encouraged or discouraged to do things. What brought about those changes were people's utterances, i.e. what they said, and in what they said there were emotions conveyed, and, sometimes, aroused in other people.

Regarding emotions, I looked at Martha Nussbaum's work and her rather special slant on emotions. Partially based on the Stoics’ view of emotions, Nussbaum presents a case in which emotions are viewed as being indicative of the value of things. In contrast with the Stoics, however, Nussbaum stresses the contribution that emotions make to our knowledge, and she wants to integrate the experience of emotions into our judgements.

Of course we are applying all of this to the context of Information and Computer Sciences, so we're talking about the professional practice of engineers, programmers and developers. Indeed, these technologists make ethical evaluations and judgements – that is partly why they are employed. However, they are informed by a relatively ill-assorted mixture of theory, regulations, experiments, common knowledge and opinions. So what is the role of emotions in this practice? Emotions act as a signpost that guides the synthesis of all the other bits and pieces that we collect that are often disconnected. But those bits of evidence, when we assemble them, will provide the firm course of action of which emotions can only be an indicator. Consequently, we should see emotions as pointing to a conclusion, to what it is we value in a situation, but we still have to make the case well to convince others. In short, emotions are imprecise, but they are a necessary constituent of the technologists’ judgements.

Section 4 looks at the play Last Call. The play is very rich in ethical issues, and one of the most interesting points made is that, whilst there are many ‘big’ ethical questions worthy of discussion and investigation, it seems to be in the everyday, routine conversations and dealings of people that ethical questions get asked and answered, even if this is not clearly recognised.

A major ethical issue tackled in the play is loyalty: giving preference in some way to one group, and, by doing so, denying another group something that is being given to the privileged group. There are questions of loyalty to an employer, to work colleagues and to family, and the play presents conflicts of loyalty to these different groups that can occur routinely in anybody's life. The play also raises broader questions regarding the legitimacy of war, torture, surveillance, blackmailing and theft.

Section 5 looks at Joe Penhall's Landscape with Weapon. The play indeed provides a powerful allegory to technology, generally, rather than being relevant only to the weapons industry. The play raises questions concerning ‘rights’ (including intellectual property rights) and various issues involved in ethical reasoning, including the notions of ‘conscience’, ‘promises’, ‘interests’ and ‘identification’. The play illustrates some of the basic aspects of ethical reasoning, including that judgements are personal and bounded by such practical matters as the time available for action and the attention that is likely to be given to the judgement. Also, the play shows that judgements will always be biased but, sometimes, by factors that are avoidable, such as an overbearing pride or ignorance. Section 5 also looks at some of the rhetorical devices employed in the exchanges of ethical positions that take place in the play. Crucially, the section introduces Austin's notion of performatives to explain the ways in which rhetorical strategies are deployed to accomplish specific moves of tentative persuasion. The ability to persuade is presented in the play as core to the practice of developers and technologists.

In short, the course suggests that drama and dialogue have a few lessons of relevance to practitioners in ICS as well as technologists, generally, and these are the three principal notions:

• expand your vocabulary

• recognise the limit of your authority

• recognise that technology is for people and they have preferences and interests.

References

Acknowledgements

This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 LicenceSee terms and conditions. Users are responsible for adhering to any terms and conditions which may govern use of these sites.

This course has been created by Prof. John Monk and Dr. Giselle Ferreira from the Open University's Department of Communication and Systems with the support of a grant from the Higher Education Academy (HEA) Subject Centre for Information and Computing Sciences (Web). The course is based on a framework for teaching ethics developed by Prof. Monk and capitalises on the lessons learnt on a trial course run in 2008 by the authors with the support of the Open University's Centre for Open Learning of Maths, Computing, Science and Technology (COLMSCT –), part of the HEFCE-funded Open CETL.

The authors would like to express their profound gratitude to the participants in the 2008 trial. We are thankful for the many things learnt in discussion with them, lessons that we have tried to incorporate into this course, and we are also grateful for their agreeing to share openly some of the video material created during the trial.

Plato (n.d.) Protagoras, version annotated by Prof. John Monk based on original translation made available by the Perseus Digital Library.

Plato (n.d.) Meno. Version annotated by Prof. John Monk based on original translation made available by the Perseus Digital Library, available online at

Plato (n.d.) Gorgias. Version annotated by Prof. John Monk based on original translation made available by the Perseus Digital Library, available online at

Course image: @sage_solar in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

Call Waiting by Katie Hims. A BBC Radio 4 and Open University Afternoon Play first broadcast 9 May 2006.

Last Call by Mike Walker. A BBC Radio 4 and Open University Afternoon Play first braodcast 10 May 2006.

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