Abstract
There is wide acknowledgement of the benefits we reap from information and communication technology (ICT) in many facets of our lives. But there is also an increasing concern over the negative ethical, social and environmental impacts it sometimes has. This leads many stakeholders, such as conceptual modellers, programmers, users and policy makers, to situations where they need to reason about the ethical implications raised by ICT engineering or usage. This paper offers a survey of ten ethical reasoning methods suitable for the ICT domain. We present the method metamodels we have authored and then validated through expert interviews. We also reflect about the application of such methods within conceptual modelling. We expect to pave the way for further research on reasoning about the ethical implications of ICT, in general, and conceptual models, in particular.
Sergio España is supported by a María Zambrano grant of the Spanish Ministry of Universities, co-funded by the Next Generation EU European Recovery Plan.
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We are thankful to the interviewees, for their time and for sharing their method knowledge with us. Also to the students of Responsible ICT (Master in Business Informatics, Utrecht University), for their insightful comments on some of the methods.
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España, S., van der Maaten, C., Gulden, J., Pastor, Ó. (2023). A Survey of Ethical Reasoning Methods, Their Metamodels, and a Discussion on Their Application to Conceptual Modelling. In: Almeida, J.P.A., Borbinha, J., Guizzardi, G., Link, S., Zdravkovic, J. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14320. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47262-6_2
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