Moral Destinations and Realistic Routes: The Political Economy of Innovation Ethics

This year I’ll be teaching a course on the ethics of innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. My plan is to prompt students to examine both normative approaches to innovation ethics – i.e., views and principles about how we ought to direct and regulate innovation – and the pragmatic possibilities for and constraints on ethical action – i.e., the ways that apparent realities on the ground (e.g., institutions, interests, ideas and power) open and narrow opportunities to evaluate, use, and regulate new and emerging technologies. In short, it’s a course on both the ethics of innovation and the political economy of innovation ethics. 

Initially, my plan was to design an applied ethics course in which we’d explore different conceptions of justice; how to weigh and reconcile values like liberty, equality, and community; and how these conceptions and values might help us evaluate new and emerging technologies from an ethical point of view. The idea was to equip students with ethical frameworks and use these to evaluate innovations and technologies like facial recognition, human gene-editing, the platform economy, automated decision-making, and other innovations.

But that seemed insufficient. An approach to innovation ethics that does not engage in a systemic way with the recent history of ethical evasion, manipulation and misunderstanding in the innovation ecosystem – and why it happens – strikes me as incomplete. Similarly, an approach that does not equip students with ways of thinking about ethics in real institutional settings characterized by reasonable disagreement, mixed interests and incentives, risk and uncertainty, and unequal power is inadequate. Most students who will take the class imagine themselves not as future philosophers, but as future entrepreneurs, scientists, policy-makers, managers and engaged citizens. 

We need a map of the institutional terrain on which ethical battles are fought as much as we need a clear view of the moral high ground. Which is not to say that the terrain is fixed, nor that we resign ourselves to it and bend ethical principles to accommodate an unjust world. As Rousseau says in the Social Contract, “the limits of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think; it is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that shrink them.” Still, ethical action in innovation ecosystems requires seeing both moral destinations and realistic routes for reaching them. The course is built around this conviction. 

I think there is a larger project buried in this somewhere, but we’ll see where the course goes. I’ll share some observations here and invite reactions along the way. I’ll also be thinking about a format and home for continuing the conversation beyond the classroom in a few months. Podcast with guests? Innovation ethics café? Practitioner training? Ideas welcome.