IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 74

Technological Stewardship and Responsible Innovation
SOI that the project team members believe are
so important that they wish to preserve them in
society?
Figure 1. VBE's three-layered value
ontology (CC BY-ND 4.0 SSP & MTS).
Material value ethics and moral
philosophy are the roots of VBE
Going back to the location-tracking system,
two critical questions arise: First, how does VBE
ensure that a value strategy is really ethical? Especially
when, for the reasons mentioned above, one
does not initially resort to predefined, institutionally
approved lists of values or established norms.
And second: Does the value elicitation phase of
IEEE 7000 deprioritize such a recognized value
as privacy behind a rather practical value such as
customer " helpfulness " ? The following sections will
answer these questions.
Use of moral philosophies for the exploration of
values
When eliciting values with IEEE 7000, at least
three recognized moral theories are foreseen to
guide organizations in grasping various ethical perspectives
on an SOI. With the concrete SOI and its
context in mind, three questions are asked, which
are derived from the moral philosophies of utilitarianism
[19], virtue ethics [20], and duty ethics [17].
These moral frameworks were shown (in accompanying
IEEE 7000 case studies) to complement each
other in the kind of values they are able to see [21].
* Utilitarianism: what human, social, economic, or
other values are affected, positively or negatively,
by the SOI if that system were used at scale?
* Virtue ethics: what is the long-term impact of the
SOI on the personal character of the affected
stakeholders if that system were used at scale?
* Duty ethics: what personal maxims or value priorities
does the project team see affected by the
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These three questions are elaborated not only by
the project team directly responsible for building the
SOI, but by a broad group of critical stakeholder representatives.
The discourse between stakeholders
as well as their selection should meet requirements
such as those envisioned by Habermas [22] in his
discourse ethics. Furthermore, if a culture in which
the SOI is to be used has a specific ethical orientation
embedded in it that goes beyond these three ethical
theories, then IEEE 7000 standard encourages a
fourth question for that culture, which is grounded
in its respective philosophical or spiritual tradition.
Examples may be Confucian, Buddhist, or Japanese
Shinto traditions.
The result of such a morally guided reflection on
values is that even for simple SOIs, a relatively broad
spectrum of values is identified. Across three case
studies, we empirically observed that each stakeholder
identified an average of 16-19 values [23].
For a Viennese telemedicine startup, innovation
management students identified a total of 54 unique
value violations that could arise from the platform,
as well as 63 positive values promoted [23]. This
large spectrum of values, both positive and negative,
makes one aware of how ethically fine-grained and
sensitive technology cases are when scrutinized in
this way.
To cope with this complexity, VBE structures the
values it finds. Core values are those that are repeatedly
described and seem to carry special stakeholder
weight. They are typically intrinsic, which means
that they are desired for their own sake, leaving little
doubt as to what they are good for [24]. Complementary
are the value qualities instrumental to them.
These also result first from the stakeholder dialogs.
For example, if a stakeholder is concerned about the
privacy of his voice assistant, he might say that he
does not want the voice assistant's speech protocols
to be sold or that there should be no unauthorized
recording, that data security must be guaranteed,
and so on. Such stakeholder statements demonstrate
the contextual " qualities " of the core value
(privacy), which are seen empirically and should
therefore be respected in the SOI's dispositions (Figure
2, top cluster).
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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