Digital Ethics by Process? Technical conflicts and policy ethics committees in Europe [1]

The paper examines the work of (policy) ethics committees in Europe. The different mandates and outputs of the various working groups are discussed. The committees‟ work sometimes does not fulfil the principle “ethics by design”, although exactly this is required by technology design. Ethics by design as a principle for the institutional design of policy ethics committee should be provided for as an indispensable minimum organisational standard.


Rise of (digital) ethics
Spotlight on ethics: In 2019, "digital ethics" was declared to be one of the ten most important technology trends. [2] No question: ethics has a momentum, as also proved by the circumstance that the initiative Algorithm Watch compiled over 80 papers with guidelines for a wide range of actors (including companies, associations, non-governmental organisations, civil society, science) in the last year on the topic of "AI ethics" alone. [3] Against the backdrop of the plethora of questions implied by mechanisation and digitalisation, policy has newly discovered ethics as a challenge management tool.
"Rediscovered" would be more accurate, as a "higher moral need" in view of modern technologies (cf. Höffe, 1993) has been long discussed, along with the role of ethics (cf. Wiener, 1963;cf. Weizenbaum, 1978;1987;1988) [4]. Almost 20 years ago, Rafael Capurro, who introduced and shaped the term "Digitale Ethik" (digital ethics) (cf. Capurro, 2009) [5] in the German-speaking world, wrote: Modern science and technology challenge basic philosophic assumptions and provoke thus directly or indirectly a crisis, or at least a basic insecurity, with regard to moral standards that were either sanctioned by law or remained tacit moral presuppositions. The rise of ethics within the political arena may be interpreted as a symptom of a moral crisis within modern societies (cf. Capurro, 2005) The new trend in politics of "placing more emphasis on ethics" (Wischmeyer & Herzog, 2019) is neither entirely new nor singular. Ethical questions are known in many scientifically and technologically complex areas. [6] Ethicisation of technological conflicts shoulders) (cf. Jonas, 1984) and therefore permissible exploration of the subject area. More simply put, and to attempt and image from sport: the use of committees is merely the legislative warm-up phase [12] and is an integral part of the political process, in that ethical committees (pre-) structure the debate without prejudicing results (cf. Dederer, 2013).

Ethics and law
If each individual guideline, declaration or recommendation of the various ethics committees seems discussion-worthy in its own right, the more exciting question of whether there are contradictory statements in the interplay of various papers and how to deal with these has rarely been asked [13]. It seems worthwhile to compare the respective mandate, the way of working and the results of the various committees in order to work out commonalities in such a way that possible disharmonies in the guidelines canon of the working groups coordinated across levels.
To ask specifically: If an ethics committee deployed to tackle a particular question recommends particular legislative measures after ethically reflecting on the implications of a socio-technical system, the (admittedly naive) expectation would be that a committee deployed differently but with one eye on the same subject matter could come to a completely different result. This is certainly the case if one The irrelevance of a synoptic view of the variety of committees currently to be observed can be justified by merely referring to the fact that recommendations (by whichever ethics council) are non-binding and the question of mutual congruence therefore does not arise. Soloists alone don"t make an orchestra. But nonbindingness now works like this. If an expert committee appointed under public

HLEG and Ethics Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence
The In the HLEG"s Ethics Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence [20], 7 central principles are formulated for designing AI systems so as to be "trustworthy".
According to the document, the foundation should initially be a triad formed of legality, compliance with ethical principles and robustness, whereby the latter is addressed not only from a technical but also a societal perspective. In this context, the authors also present their basic understanding of the relationship between law and ethics, and much of the document is given over to which ethical principles can be derived from fundamental rights (which in this direction is quite notable) and where ethics has a supplementary function going beyond law.
In parallel to the guidelines, the HLEG also presented a definition of artificial intelligence which will be useful for interdisciplinary discourse

EDPS and report of the Ethics Advisory Group
Long before the HLEG was mandated, the European Data Protection Supervisor

Ethics committee and ethics by design
What is left in the synopsis?

Disunited in diversity
The ethics committees described turn out to be disunited in diversity. This is true not only as regards specific discrepancies in content, but also:  It would be beneficial, though difficult to formulate generally, the negative dimension of a minimal consensus, namely as regards the setting of external boundaries for permissible appointment of experts close to politics, the state, or business in ethics committees in the area of IT governance. In view of the approach of the various ethics committees, finally, one could ask whether the consensus principle which their work has often been based on is adequately conducive to the task of (in-depth) ethical reflection in the area of technological conflicts. Of course, in light of the results-oriented approach needed in the political framework, one cannot afford as much dissent as may be possible in (purely) academic discourse. Nevertheless, an explicitly documented "agree to disagree" within a policy ethics committee may be a valuable finding.

Ethics by design
Ethics by design as an orientation framework for a minimal consensus: A muchdiscussed subfield of Digital Ethics is currently "ethics by design". Just like the approach of value sensitive design, this fundamentally addresses those who have influence on the development of products and services. Ethical reflection is required across the whole product lifecycle, including the early conception phase.
[27] Developers should ask themselves, for example, what will happen with their product (with consumers, but also persons who cannot or do not want to use the product), and what consequences its spread in society will have. Ethics by design has a product dimension (acceptance, sustainability of the product) and a process dimension (inclusion of all stakeholder directly and indirectly affected by the product). In its process dimension, ethics by design maps considerations which could be explained from the perspective of discourse ethics (cf. Alexy, 1987) or the principle of protection of fundamental rights by organisations and procedures. [28] Ethics by design cannot only be about participative, inclusive product development, which primarily addresses commercial enterprises. The principle of including ethical reflection as early as possible, namely in its process dimension, should apply all the more to the institutional design of policy ethics committees. Bibliography moratorium", the "Ethics Committee for Secure Energy Supply" was founded in 2011.
[7] Bogner understands ethicisation to mean "the problematisation of research and technologies as well as processing and regulation of these conflicts in ethical categories".
[8] "Technological Governance" can be defined by analogy to the term "Internet Governance" as the sum of principles, norms, rules, decision-making processes and programmes which all refer to the development of and interaction with technology, and which are worked out and applied by various actors (governments, the private economy and civil society). On "Internet Governance" see: Keber, 2011 [9] Along with the dogmatically dubious construction of "soft law", there should also be "soft ethics". see : Floridi, 2018 [10] For an in-depth treatment, see: Schliesky, 2019 [11] As an example, Horst Dreier warned of a "de-parliamentisation of political decisions" at the public meeting of the Nationaler Ethikrat, or National Ethics Council) (forerunner of the Deutscher Ethikrat, or German Ethics Council) in 2007. For evidence and more details, see : Zotti, 2009 [12] "Legislation preparatory to ethical discourse" in the systematisation according to Sommermann, 2003 [13] The initiative "Linking Artificial Intelligence Principles (LAIP)" aims to identify commonalities from numerous international documents from a wide range of actors (research institutes, government organisations and industry) around the topic of Artificial Intelligence and its connection to universal principles. [25] EDPS "ethics dossier" available at: https://edps.europa.eu/dataprotection/our-work/ethics_en [26] Ethics Advisory Group Report of 25/01/2018, https://edps.europa.eu/dataprotection/our-work/publications/ethical-framework/ethics-advisory-group-report-2018_en [27] A subfield of ethics by design is privacy by design, which was set down as a binding legal principle in Article 25 GDPR in the form of "data protection by design". See Keber & Keppeler, 2018 [28] Cf. for example BVerfG, Resolution of 20 December 1979 = BVerfGE 53, 30 (KKW Mülheim-Kärlich); BVerfG, Decision of 15 December 1983 = BVerfGE 65, 1 (census). [29] For information on this policy ethics committee, see https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/centre-for-data-ethics-andinnovation Informatio 26 (1), 2021(1), , pp. 216-229 ISSN: 2301(1), -1378 [30] According to the details on the website (Fn. 51), the basis for the CDEI"s recommendation are as follows: "Our evidence base is informed by a landscape summary […]; an open call for evidence; a UK-wide programme of public engagement; and a regulatory review of eight regulators. We have consulted widely in the UK and internationally with academia, civil society, regulators and the government. We have also held interviews with and received evidence from a range of online platforms in addition to advertising companies and industry bodies." [31] Preparatory materials as well as the final report with recommendations can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cdei-review-of-onlinetargeting

Author contribution
The entirety of this manuscript was prepared by Tobias Keber.

Editor's notes
The editor responsible for the publication of this article was Rafael Capurro.