[Air-L] Casey Fiesler on Research Ethics

[Charles M. Ess]

Yes.

And thanks very much for this.
It's hard to tell - but a good portion of this reads more or less 
straight out of the AoIR ethics guidelines, including the draft for 
Internet Research Ethics 3.0 distributed last fall in conjunction with 
the annual conference.

Including the emphases on moving away from "rule-book" / tick-box 
approaches to what we call (along with many others) dialogical / 
process-oriented ethics grounded in the fine-grained specifics of a 
given case.

The invocation of care (thereby, I suppose, more specifically (feminist) 
care ethics) is also intriguing.  This is in part because over the past 
few years (since 2014 or so), I've been seeing more such invocations 
from network engineers (yes, this means you, AoIRist Bendert 
Zevenbergen) and computer scientists, including the ethical backgrounds 
to the emerging standards for "ethically-aligned design" by the IEEE.

Let me hastily clarify: I'm _not_ at all saying there was some sort of 
plagiarism. Though it would be very interesting and helpful to know what 
her sources are, e.g., the newest ACM guidelines, the IEEE project, or 
perhaps even the AoIR guidelines, just so that we can incorporate the 
article in our resource list and have a better sense of where it might 
best be indexed, etc.
However that may be: I _am_ saying there's a wonderful consonance / 
resonance, which I take to be a Very Good Thing.

Indeed, in light of the past four decades or so of efforts towards 
better dialogue and cooperation between the more philosophical / applied 
ethics folk and the multiple professional communities directly engaged 
with the engineering, design, and implementation of these technologies - 
these sorts of endorsements within the latter communities of such 
nuanced and demanding ethical approaches is a remarkable and, in my 
view, most propitious development.

Thanks for sharing!
- charles ess


On 26/03/2019 09:20, Joly MacFie wrote:
> https://howwegettonext.com/scientists-like-me-are-studying-your-tweets-are-you-ok-with-that-c2cfdfebf135
> 
> 
> *Scientists... have an ethical obligation to exercise a higher standard of
> care for people in more vulnerable positions, and this should extend to
> collecting data from potentially vulnerable groups in digital spaces.*
> 

-- 
Professor in Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

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c.m.ess at media.uio.no