IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2019 - 37

modes, means, and ends of actions [9]. Technical systems or objects can "carry" values when they possess
respective value "dispositions" or affordances [44]. Such
affordances can be of technical nature and therefore
engineered into systems or/and can be of an organizational nature.
For the context of sustainable development, Kates
et al. [1, p. 7] specify that values "invoke feelings, define
or direct us to goals, frame our attitudes, and provide
standards against which the behavior of individuals and
societies can be judged." Similarly, in psychology, values are considered as a concept that represents desirable behaviors, end states, or trans-situational goals;
values are shared by culture, ranked differently by individuals, and can be the source of a person's self-esteem
[14]-[16]. The relative importance of values depends on
the person's culture, their socioeconomic status, and on
the practical context [16], [17]. These definitions suggest
that stable long-term goals (or trans-situational goals)
can be conveyed as values. It is not surprising then that
important catalogs for sustainable development, such
as the benchmark goals of the Millennium Declaration,
are expressed as values [1]. Furthermore, the goal of
sustainable development is often defined through the
values that represent or support it [1], [18]. For instance,
values like respect for nature or shared responsibility
are typically part of the sustainable development definition. Some values are so important that they have even
been presented as rights; for instance the values
embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
[33], such as equality, freedom, and security. Sustainability frameworks typically recognize these rights as
fundamental values to respect.
Important to note is that values do not come in isolation: "Values condition each other, in that it is not possible to grasp some value without having grasped some
others" [44, p. 79]. Against this background, our effort to
create a value collection below is marked by broader values that are accompanied by a spectrum of related values, which describe more specific aspects. For instance,
the value of "security" can have specific aspects
described by other values such as "national security"
or "food and water security." Broader values that are
accompanied by related values are called "overarching
values" from here on. They are overarching, because they
serve as an umbrella to multiple values that are instrumental to them. Furthermore, to achieve our goal to support sustainable IS development, we group the value
collection according to Penzenstadler and Femmer's five
dimensions of sustainability as depicted in Figure 1.

Method and Sources
We initially conducted a literature overview, looking for
highly cited contributions, which explicitly present
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value lists and include the keywords "value sensitive
design," "sustainable software development," or "software engineering ethics." Based on major contributions, we then used a snowball procedure to identify
other cited value sources from such fields as design,
engineering, psychology, philosophy, ethics, sustainability, and human rights. Additionally, we included
value lists from well-known political and non-governmental institutions that care about sustainability. Finally, we reached out to standardization bodies and
entities that are engaged with ethics of AI and therefore
publish related value lists.
Every source enlisting values, goals, or principles
was treated as equally relevant and therefore included.
Taken together, we identified 27 sources explicitly presenting values. The Appendix contains a summary and
short description of these sources, roughly categorized
according to the disciplines from which they originate.
Five mentioned aspects were not included as these are
not values but broader concepts (industry, innovation,
and infrastructure [30], sustainable economic activity
[27], [30], sustainable development [52], and trade
unions [33]). The stated values, goals, and principles
add up to 360.

Technical systems or objects can
"carry" values when they possess
respective affordances.

There is much literal and conceptual overlap
among the found values, which is due to the fact that
some value sources are derived from each other.
Also, as shown above, values are interlinked entities.
Concerning the literal congruence, a word count analysis revealed that many values are frequently mentioned literally, some even several times. For instance
in the sources "freedom" came up as a value eighteen times, "security" seventeen times, "health" and
"equality" nine times each, and so forth. We used
such literally repeating values as overarching values
and as a starting point for clustering the other literal
and conceptual congruent values. In doing so, we
extracted 31 categories, which now represent these
broad value concepts, which are called "overarching
values" in Table 1. If an overarching value is directly
mentioned in a source, it is mentioned as such. Any
other value with conceptual congruence was associated

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