Teaching notes: Ethics

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Fragen für die letzte Session

Liebe Studierende,

in der letzten Session haben wir wie besprochen die Gelegenheit, neben der Probeklausur auch offene Fragen zu klären. Wenn Sie Fragen oder Themen dafür einbringen möchten, posten Sie diese gerne in unter diesem Beitrag.

Mit besten Grüßen

Gerit Wagner

Fair compensation

  • Ask students what they expect as a starting salary (e.g., 70.000 €)
  • Scenario: an employee (Markus) makes 160 €.

  • Is that fair? Who agrees/disagrees? Why?

    • Merit
    • Contract
    • If the other team members earn a decent / living wage

If necessary:

  • Give a hypothetical example of standardized skill tests showing that the team members perform on par

  • Merit: who disagrees? (Sandell: fiction of merit: backdoors, e.g., university admission, …, role of chance)

  • Outcomes are an important concept - How would you maximize utility outcomes?
  • economic utility (performance and returns that will be spread among the team):

  • happiness: maybe distribute compensation more fairly.

  • Contract: should it matter whether he/she has bought a house?

  • Would you agree that the excessive compensation results from fair conditions? If the employer had to hire under pressure? If today’s team members were not part of the discussion?

  • What are the employers duties? Pay salaries stated in the contract.

  • Should women soccer players receive the same compensation / bonus as men? (equal pay)

Utilitarianism

cost-benefit:

  • Classical example: Gladiator games
  • Common in ethics of autonomous/self-driving vehicles

Deontology

  • Medical context: mandatory vaccination (or ventilators during covid)

Example of bad intentions accidentally leading to good consequences

  • Manipulating Task Ratings (using fake accounts to increase one’s own rating and rate others poorly) with the goal of gaining a (monetary) advantage
  • By chance: same worker contributes to classifying a public health dataset, which leads to a breakthrough in understanding a public health issue, potentially saving lives and improving health outcomes for many people.

Analysis:

  • Deontological Perspective: The worker’s initial actions of manipulating ratings and undermining competitors are considered morally wrong because they involve deceit and unfair practices.
  • Consequences: The positive outcome is the high-quality work on a critical task that leads to significant public health benefits. In this scenario, the worker’s unethical behavior of manipulating the crowdsourcing system (bad intentions) results in a situation where their skills can be applied to produce a highly beneficial outcome (good consequences). From a deontological standpoint, the emphasis would remain on the immoral nature of the worker’s actions rather than the beneficial result. This example underscores the ethical dilemmas that can arise in crowdwork, where the morality of actions is distinct from their outcomes.

Virtue ethics

Leading with Integrity in a Virtual Team (even under pressure)

Workplace surveillance

Revisit the team, which has transitioned into remote work over the pandemic.

Indicate whether you agree whether the following steps are ok:

  • The manager looks at the teams status to see who is working. is that ok?
  • He takes notes when someone is not available.
  • He writes a script to systematically monitor the times of availability
  • He uses a new employee-insights feature that provides regular screenshots
  • He uses ML to analyze the screenshots and automatically sanctions/fires employees

Argument: utility, duty, virtue?

Twists:

  • performance is declining significantly
  • overemployment

Ethics of surveillance: under which circumstances is surveillance ok, are there circumstances under which someone should never be under surveillance?

Bentham’s Panopticon: focus on prisons (utilitarian) George Orwell 1984 (Dystopie): extended to society (a feature of totalitarian regimes)

Surveillance poses a threat to privacy. 1890: Privacy as the “right to be let alone” (legal context, by Warren and Brandeis) privacy of the individual and security of the community may need to be balanced

Cause of surveillance matters: for security, for mutual benefit (loyalty cards/smart toll cards in transport), or for personal gains Consent is important (but may not always be considered necessary)

Today/In practice, justifications for surveillance often include both consequentialist and deontological considerations

  • Utilitarian/consequentialists: Justification for large-scale surveillance: consequentialist appeal to the greater good. (everyone accepts a small inconvenience (privacy) but the company can reduce moral hazard dynamics)
  • Deontologists: resist the justification for overriding the rights of the few by the interest of the many. Compelling justifications (judges) and limited scope would be required.

Cambridge analytica (misusing massive Facebook data in the election)

  • surveillance is hidden (resembling totalitarian tendencies of Orwell)

Platforms and crowd-worker exploitation

  • overall utility: honest or even hard feedback can have positive effects (for clients and workers). If a few workers fail, the overall utility may still be positive.
  • duty to fulfill contracts/terms-of-service? duty as an employer?

Summary

  • cases: thinking in scenarios (testing whether our justification holds even in extreme cases)
  • three ethical theories
  • focus on individual liberty (negative/positive liberty)
  • communitarian approaches: civic goods (like open software) can be corrupted when introducing market mechanisms (e.g., )

Circumstances matter:

  • It matters how decisions are implemented
  • Intentions and communication matter
  • The act itself can affect the actors/resources

Outlook

Summary:

  • hist.+org. Entwicklung
  • Skill classifications, GTD (with cognitive principles)
  • PIME and second-brain approaches
  • Excellence: theory of embodied cognition + Influences
  • Remote work: effects, role of trust and conflict, Gitlab examples
  • Communication: MST, model of situational awareness
  • Git: manipulating branch trees and areas
  • OpenSource work principles (Raymond) + collaboration game (control and coordination in operations)
  • Entrepreneurial work: contexts and procedures (power of platform owners)
  • Sourcing knowledge intensive services: boundaries, challenges, process
  • Futures of work summaries + substitution and disaggregation
  • Ethics: examples and theories

Erinnerung: Evaluation läuft.

  • Die Veranstaltung ist komplett neu entstanden.
  • Die Unterlagen sind noch nicht vergleichbar mit Kursen, die es schon Jahrelang gibt.
  • Und auch in den Sessions hat einiges gut funktioniert und andere Punkte werden im nächsten Jahr anders aussehen.
  • Es soll für Sie kein Nachteil sein, dass Sie die ersten Teilnehmenden in der Veranstaltung waren.

Next session:

  • Probeklausur
  • Fragen / Schwerpunkt für die Wiederholungssession (Ihre Inhalte)