IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 44

Feature
The first stage is the conceptual and context
exploration stage. Here, a concept of operations is
described. This includes the intended purposes and
behaviors of the SoI and how the SoI and its behaviors
are to be controlled. In addition, the stakeholders
of the SoI, those that will have a right or interest
in the SoI or will be affected by it in some nontrivial
way, for good or ill, are identified. Example stakeholders
include the owners, operators, purchasers,
and users of the SoI and those impacted by its social
(including privacy), security, health and safety, or
environmental effects.
The second stage is a process for identifying and
organizing the values impacted positively or negatively
by the SoI. As the stakeholders are those whose
values are potentially impacted by the SoI, the viewpoints
of the stakeholders are essential in order to
enumerate all of those values. It would seem best to
involve representatives from similarly situated stakeholders
to have them identify values relevant to the
SoI for themselves. Unfortunately, this will be impossible
in many design efforts because of the need to
maintain confidentiality about the SoI, for example,
for business competitive or intellectual property
protection reasons. In these cases, personas, that is,
archetypical descriptions of stakeholders and their
values, need to be developed or advocates for stakeholder
groups consulted with confidentiality assured
by contract or other agreement with them. Once the
relevant values of the stakeholders are enumerated,
conflicting values identified, and the conflicting values
prioritized.
In the third stage, ethical value requirements
(EVRs) are created. These requirements state system
features and behaviors needed to ensure that the SoI:
* provides (or in some cases, does not reduce) the
realization of positive values identified in the previous
stage;
* prevents (or in some cases, does not increase)
the realization of negative values previously
identified.
Some such requirements may be contradictory in
whole or in part. When this happens, prioritization
of the requirements or rethinking the prioritization of
the values that drive them may be required.
In the fourth stage, system design is done according
to all requirements, including the EVRs. As EVRs
are a relatively new concept to most design and
implementation teams, novel and creative design
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features may be needed to satisfy these requirements.
So, design methodologies for satisfying EVRs
are not given in P7000. In the case of IT systems,
some design patterns have emerged for responding
to certain kinds of EVRs, such as requirements for
maintaining privacy of users and others [5].
MVE summary
Today, discussions not only about ethics, but also
about setting strategy for a firm, of updating the pedagogical
style of an academic department, or even
about politics are frequently based on the notion of
human values held by those working in or affected
by these firms or institutions or the citizens of the
polity. It is argued, for example, in the introduction
of [16], that this sort of values orientation was initiated
about a century ago by Scheler's MVE [10].
MVE is an attempt to answer the ancient question
" How shall we live? " It teaches that all answers to
that question, however mutually incompatible and
culturally influenced, must be based on right knowledge
of values themselves [11, Ch. 1].
In MVE, values do not exist apart from the world
as platonic forms (hence the term material, that is,
nonformal). Values are felt by persons and borne
by-realized in-persons, their relationships, and
things. Values and their relations are given a priori
to their being felt. For example, someone must recognize
something as beautiful, it having engendered
feelings akin to admiration or of preference over
something ugly, before beginning to examine why it
is beautiful. So, it is meaningful to talk of a realm of
values which comprises values, their qualities, and
relations between these.
These feelings can be discerned, named, and
reflected upon. Such activities yield judgments
about which values are positive values, realizations
of which in thoughts, deeds, or creation of things are
called good. Likewise, negative values (or disvalues)
have realizations that are called evil. These feelings
and the (consciously acknowledged or not) processing
of them are the basis of individual conscience.
We feel that good realizations ought to be and evil
ones ought not to be. Values are thus real to the
extent that they have an effect through moral agency
of persons [17]. The feelings values produce are conditioned
by the culture and experience of each person,
but all " drink from the same well of values " [11,
Ch. 1], avoiding moral chaos but not disagreement
[11, Ch. 3].
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

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