A collaboration between UNHCR’s Ethics Office and Innovation Service revealed some interesting insights about anticipating ethical decision-making.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist
Let’s try an experiment. You’re walking down the street and you find a wallet on the ground. No one else is around, so you aren’t being watched. Do you know how you’d act? Stop and think about that for a moment before you read on.
Chances are you’d probably check if there was any identification in the wallet and try to return it to the owner, or at least bring it to a police station. That’s a fairly straightforward example of being able to tell right from wrong.
But now picture another scenario. What if there was no identification in the wallet? No ID card, no credit cards — just cash. Would you still bring the wallet to the authorities? Would you take the money and drop the wallet on the ground where you found it? Or would you simply put the wallet back on the ground and leave the decision to someone else? Stop and think about that scenario now, because it’s a bit more complicated. You could take the money and no one but you — and your conscience — would be any the wiser. Does a different set of circumstances change the way you might behave?
These are both pretty simple ethical dilemmas, and personnel at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) are faced with far more challenging ethical decisions nearly every day. Are they contracting with suppliers in good faith? Are they treating displaced people fairly and honestly? Are they making their best effort to protect the natural environment in settlements? Are they acting professionally in their interactions with colleagues?
It’s one thing to know right from wrong, and the ability to do so is a priority for UNHCR. That’s why UNHCR’s Ethics Office provides tools to help personnel make values-based decisions about their work and interactions with others. There’s also UNHCR’s Code of Conduct, which the Ethics Office holds dialogues about on a regular basis.
But the Ethics Office wanted to do even more, which is why it began thinking about the future of ethics in recent years. On its own and in partnership with UNHCR’s Innovation Service, the team there sought to learn if there were any ways to predict future ethical dilemmas — and, therefore, future ethical behavior — much as other units work to predict weather events or societal challenges that can impact UNHCR’s work and the people it serves.
In collaboration with the Innovation Service, the team initially built a website to source future ethical dilemmas. But Associate Ethics Officer Maren Stöber admits it didn’t really take off.
“People were confused,” she explains. “People felt that we already have so many priorities and challenges in the here and now, why would we be talking about the future?”
Can past behavior predict future action?
But Stöber and her collaborators were undeterred. One idea that came up was that of ethics and predictive technology, which uses past data to identify patterns and make predictions about future events. They used their imaginations — an important aspect of innovation — to envision what an ethics machine that could anticipate people’s behavior might look like.
“We looked at some of the psychological research on decision-making,” she says. “In the present, we already think about questions like, ‘How do we function as humans?’ and ‘How do we interact?’ and ‘Why is it so hard to predict good decision-making?’ — even if we leave out predictive technology and artificial intelligence.”
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has its own ethical dilemmas, says Giulia Balestra, former research officer with the Innovation Service, who was one of the project collaborators.
“The question for me is not, ‘Can we predict ethical decision-making?’ but instead ‘Should we do it?’” Balestra says. “We have to think about the consequences when we deploy technologies — and even the intended consequences. That being said, I think a machine that comes up with potential ethical questions and would maybe encourage conversations that aren’t already happening could have its place, sort of like virtual reality-type training with an educational purpose.”
But because innovation isn’t only about technology, brainstorming about the idea of a predictive ethics machine led to other ideas. Although Stöber shares some of the same concerns about the use of data and its impact on privacy — especially when people don’t know that the information is being collected or how it’s being used — she sees value in exploring the idea of applying predictive ethics to help guide decision-making.
“People aren’t necessarily very good at making ethical decisions or predicting their own ethical behavior,” she says. “We always think we’re going to be a lot more ethical than we actually are.”
There are also contextual factors, says Senior Ethics Assistant Andrea Almeida. This is one area where Almeida thinks predictive ethics could be useful, although she is as concerned as her colleagues about the ethics of using data on people to monitor or anticipate their behavior.
“Why is it that good people do bad things?” she says. “People are under a lot of pressure to get things done or maybe they’re on an insecure contract or far away from their families without a great support system. So that’s where predictive ethics could come into play, in looking at risk factors in people’s specific situations.” That information could then be used to re-examine the system that might be creating those risk factors.
But it remains a slippery slope. The Ethics Office has been focused in recent years on being more proactive rather than reactive in helping people make better decisions. However, having the data about people’s past behavior or circumstances can be both positive and negative.
“We have ethical dilemma case data from previous investigations that we could use to predict future behavior. … But what do we do if we think an individual or the organization itself is about to make a bad decision?” Stöber says. “You can’t hold a person accountable for potential future behavior, can you? And when it comes to organizational ethical dilemmas, who takes responsibility for that?”
Can predicting the future also inform the present?
Even today, there are ethical issues that are very hard to measure or govern, Stöber adds, such as microaggressions. Unless someone is obviously harassing or abusing someone, some actions are too subtle to be investigated.
However, having the ability to anticipate future unethical behavior could be an advantage in the present. “If we think about the future, what does it tell us about what we might be able to do better today?” Stöber says.
Although the project yielded as many questions as it did answers — which the Ethics Office continues exploring — it provided something rare in the humanitarian setting.
“Especially in humanitarian organizations where there is always this sense of urgency and responding to emergencies, there isn’t that much time to really reflect,” Balestra says. “So our work around predictive ethics was slightly unconventional, in terms of thinking about the future to inform things we’re doing now.”
It also brought to light a very important consideration, especially if the Ethics Office were ever to decide to apply predictive ethics.
“In the Ethics Office, we speak a lot about giving people the opportunity to come forward and raise concerns when they have them, or to ask questions about an ethical decision they have to make,” Almeida says. “We have to make sure there isn’t a culture where there would be repercussions for something someone might say. There has to be a more open culture for new ideas and open dialogue.”
Ultimately, Stöber adds, predictive ethics doesn’t have to be about big technology at all. Instead, it comes down to using data to inform better future decision-making — especially when, so often, personnel have to make ethical decisions in emergencies.
“There’s so much we already know about past scandals or behavior or why good people have done bad things, based both on psychology and our own investigations,” she says. “We could use that information to set up systems that can help us be better prepared. We could take a moment to reflect on how we end up in difficult situations, and use them to start learning today how to be more ethical tomorrow.”
The Potential and Pitfalls of Predictive Ethics was originally published in UNHCR Innovation Service on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
