Who Needs Ethics Anyway?

‘They just get in the way,’ he explained.

‘In the way of what?’ I asked.

‘Of discovery, of finding out new ways of doing things, and improving results.’

We are subjects to our own reality. We see the world through the history that we know, the narrative we’ve created from stories we’ve heard and seen, and of our own experiences. Where we struggle is the person on the other end.

You see, language is a proxy to our thoughts. It’s incomplete when it comes to all that we think. We can think non-verbally, in pictures, emotions, or even recall bits from our other senses. The smell of a long-forgotten recipe can take us back to a time we forgot, to a memory buried somewhere between cinnamon rolls and pecan pie. This can all happen without language. When we learn language, we form an internal narrative, or as the fancy kids might say, it shapes our theory of mind. Language certainly helps us create a nuanced memories, but it certainly isn’t all we use to think.

All of this makes it harder for us to fully realize someone else’s perspective. Sure, we sit and talk about different experiences and realities, but rarely do we get the whole sense of it. I spent years interpreting, being the voice and body that expressed a vast number of experiences – death and dying, birth, terminal diagnosis, rehabilitation and recovery – and I saw so much of life without the filter we often have. Movies can transport us, show us other worlds, and make us experience what others know. It’s still a proxy for reality.

We are limited in our ability to share our experience. It’s why we often seek camaraderie with people who share our experiences. We form relationships that bypass the need to explain things, with culture acting as a shorthand in communication and social dynamics. In short, we suck at being vulcans. We can’t touch others like Spock and know someone’s being.

So, why does this matter? When we make decisions about the world and society, we have 3 primary tools

1. Values
2. Ethics
3. Laws

Sure, we could throw a number of other words into this constellation, but these are the 3 you’ll find cited a lot of places. Most of us are fairly familiar with concepts like values and laws, but we’ll look at these anyway.

Values

These are personal and happen mostly internally. They come from culture, religion, families, and our own experiences. It’s why we decide to eat meat, not eat meat, or only eat meat we kill. In short, at some point, we gave an idea or topic a think and made a decision. We get pretty irate when people step on these. Neurobiologically, values get embedded in our thought process and can send all kinds of hormones raging through our system. They are as close to a part of us as our own blood.

We may call values beliefs and express them as mores, taboo, and support them through ritual. As humans, we like a certain amount of ritual. They make sticking with our values much easier.

Laws

When humans glom up into groups, we make all kinds of rules so we don’t end up killing each other. We do this with our kids so the 3-year-old doesn’t bash a playmate and with our spouse so we don’t season with arsenic. These can look as simple as ‘share the toy’ or ‘clean up after yourself’ to the random laws we still have about patent leather shoes and skirts or the rules around investing. When we write them down and have a process around it, they generally get called laws. When we verbally agree, they’re often rules.

We like rules, despite how much we complain about them. Violate one, and someone may scream, ‘rules are rules!’ Linguistically, this sentence achieves nothing, but culturally, it has an effect. Laws and rules are codified attempts to proscribe behavior – as a group, we decided we had a certain set of values and these laws (or rules) help us live together. We may decide, as a group, to ban meat consumption or meat killed in a certain way. Or, we may decide that gets to be a personal decision, which leads us to…

Ethics

If laws are most closely associated with a society and values are personal, ethics live in that grey space in between. We use them a lot professionally, which is where you hear the term ‘ethics violation’ most often in the news. We also hear this when someone works somewhere that they get to make decisions for others, or at least influence them significantly. People like doctors, lawyers, and – yes – even interpreters have a Code of Ethics. People who can do immense harm in the course of their work usually do. They also have Standards of Practice. These go hand in hand. Ethics provide an overriding value and preferred idea for decision-making, and standards are the rituals that support it. These rituals change over time as the ethic gets reinterpreted to match what’s seen.

So, we know ethics are generally work-related, but they can also come into play when acting as power of attorney. When we make decisions about others, we have to put ourself aside, which – from my rambling earlier – we know is hard. We know what we know in the context of our perception. We typically struggle when it comes to understanding someone else. In a lot of ways, we don’t stray too far from our 4-year-old self. Ethics are what make us realize that while we don’t eat meat, others do, and that each person has to make that decision.

We’re typically very optimistic about ourselves, our capabilities, and what we can so. We see the best in our creations. Frankenstein shows us this, as does Jurassic Park. Sure, we’re sitting, watching, and thinking this is a bad idea the whole time, but that’s exactly the point – we don’t see the Frankenstein part of our creations….which leads us back to data ethics, specifically.

Franken-Proofing our work

When we work in fields that deal with data, it’s easy to forget that most of our data points ultimately tie back to human lives. How we interact with those lives depends on our data, the purpose, and what we make. Ethics act as guardrails. Yes, they slow us down so we don’t go off the cliff. Yes, they prevent us from doing certain things until we think, we interact with the lives that may be affected, and we make sure to address this in our own work.

Yet, we rarely learn about these. You see, ethics aren’t simply values, but the philosophy of them. It helps us step out of our 4-year-old self and look at others and their rights. They force us to create processes or to ‘show our work’ for the mathy types. Showing our work is painful. It’s slow. But, it helps make sure we got all the steps and made our best effort to consider others.

I studied ethics as part of my interpreting degree. We wrote a number of papers, read some books, and then had to practice and defend what we did. We did internships where people watched us. Some of us went on to get certified, where we committed to uphold a set of ethics and adhere to values. I went on to manage a team of interpreters and had to train, guide, and facilitate ethical review. A part of my training included defending a Code of Ethics.

As data workers, we come from a vast array of disciplines. Ethics may or may not be trained, or may only be touched on superficially. Many of us, in our jobs, are treated as workers or as hands that do. We create dashboards or transport data. We find correlation or related patterns. We draw conclusions and share them. We have an influence, whether we know it or not. We are minds that think and practice professionals that are starting to have this conversation.

I’m presenting on Data Ethics this year at the Tableau Conference. Beware, a whole host of posts will likely follow.

A special shout-out to Michael Cisneros and Mark Bradbourne who suffered through some of these conversations…especially Mike for lending some of these examples. And to my anonymous encounter who kicked off this post.