7 Conclusion and Glossary
This chapter is in-progress.
7.1 Concluding Remarks
A common question people ask about technology and ethics is something along these lines: “does ethics need to change? The world is so different with X, Y, and/or Z, do we not need different approaches compared to the old-school?”
There has also been an analogous question in computer science education when it comes to programming languages: “do we need to teach students this new programming language?”
One goal of this mini-book is to defend the answer to such questions as “no, not really.” Basic ethical principles (and ethical dilemmas) remain stable, regardless of the new tools and technologies that surround them. To practice ethics in data science involves many of the same kinds of decisions required to practice ethics in any other profession: e.g., consider the potential consequences of your decisions, listen to concerns shared by others, make changes slowly and carefully, respect the dignity of each human being, and so on.
One of my professors in grad school, Pablo Boczkowski, used to frame it this way: an old play can be performed on many new stages. In the context of technology, the old plays are often the enduring questions of humanity, related to our identity, our purpose, our origins, etc. Ann Taves has summarized these “enduring questions” as follows (Taves 2020):
- REALITY (ontology): What is ultimate reality? What exists? What is real?
- ORIGINS (cosmology): Where did it come from? How did we get here? (Where is “here”?) Where are we going?
- KNOWLEDGE (epistemology): How do we know this (about ourselves and reality more generally)?
- SITUATION: What is the situation in which we find ourselves? (Who are “we”?)
- GOAL (axiology): What is the good (the goal) for which we should strive?
- PATH (praxeology): What do we need to do to reach the goal? What path should we follow? How do we ensure that we are on the path?
Paul Gauguin offered an even shorter version in the title of his painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2025), as shown below.
Such questions are remarkably persistent across human history, and they overlap substantially with ethics.
To use the theatrical metaphors, the axiological question (“what is the good toward which we strive?”) can be thought of as a play that has been performed, or perhaps improvised, across many moments of history. The person asking this question may be holding an iPhone 17 Pro, an iPhone 3G, a palm pilot, a rotary desk phone, a quill pen, a papyrus scroll, a clay tablet, or nothing at all. These are merely different stages upon which people act.
In 2025, I watched Sarah Snook play 26 different characters in a rendition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was a decidedly modern translation, as the stage used multiple massive LCD screens and technologies that would not have been dreamed of when the 1890 novella was written (Onions 2025).
And yet, it was the same play, the same story conceived in December, 1887 when Oscar Wilde visited South Kensington and came up with the original idea of the play.
More TK.
7.2 Glossary
- Common knowledge
- Shared awareness about what other people know. That is, not just knowing a proposition, but also awareness that others know that proposition too. Often conflated with mutual knowledge. (Source: Vanderschraaf and Sillari 2023)
- Consent
- Permission that is freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. (Source: Lee and Toliver 2017)
- Data
- Multiple datum.
- Data triangulation
- TK
- Data visceralization
- an attempt to make data sensory, bodily, or experientially felt in some way. (Source: MIT Media Lab 2014; Wernimont 2022)
- Datum
- A single data point, such as a number or symbol.
- Disparate impact
- TK (Barocas and Selbst 2016)
- Documentation debt
- TK
- Ethics
- Acting well in the world. (Source: Burton et al. 2023)
- Mutual knowledge
- A proposition is mutual knowledge among people when each person knows that proposition. (Source: Vanderschraaf and Sillari 2023)
- Proxy
- TK (Barocas and Selbst 2016)
- Situated knowledge
- TK (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020)
- Tech Debt
- TK
- Worldview
- TK (Taves 2020; Romeijn 2025)