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Three things digital ethics can learn from medical ethics

Nature Electronics volume 2, pages 316–318 (2019)Cite this article

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Ethical codes, ethics committees, and respect for autonomy have been key to the development of medical ethics — elements that digital ethics would be advised to emulate.

The past decade has been rife with data misuse, hacks, and corporate wrongdoing. As people have become more aware of the ways in which tech companies abuse their power, a ‘techlash’ has ensued, combined with calls for more ethics1,2. But efforts to respond to this demand have been fraught with hollow promises, oversights, and mistakes3 that have attracted further criticism against both tech companies and the professed limits of ethics. It is perhaps no surprise that the first experiments in digital ethics have misfired; the discipline is relatively new, and most of the endeavours behind digital ethics have been made by computer engineers, lawyers, journalists, or businesspeople with little or no background in ethics4. Given this context, and in order to suggest a way forward for digital ethics, it is helpful to look to another field within practical ethics that has a longer history — medical ethics.

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Acknowledgements

The work of the author has been supported by a Wellcome Trust grant (203132/Z/16/Z).

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  1. Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Faculty of Philosophy, Christ Church, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Carissa Véliz

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  1. Carissa Véliz
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Correspondence to Carissa Véliz.

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Véliz, C. Three things digital ethics can learn from medical ethics. Nat Electron 2, 316–318 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-019-0294-2

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