Dimensional Metaethics

Summary

Dimensional metaethics is a procedure that sees "what is good" about a system as related to the value of a number of different social dimensions. As such, it first advocates that designers of systems describe different dimensions that they think are relevant to their system's design and use. The next step is then for the designers to list their assumptions about values along these dimensions. Lastly designers are asked to vary these assumptions and to speculate or (even better) to observe the resulting changes in ethical acceptability.

References

1. Reynolds, C. and Wren, C. (2006) Worse Is Better for Ambient Sensing. Workshop on Privacy, Trust and Identity Issues for Ambient Intelligence, In conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 7 - 10, 2006, Dublin, Ireland. [PDF]
2. Reynolds, C. and Picard, R. (2005) Evaluation of Affective Computing Systems from a Dimensional Metaethical Position. 1st Augmented Cognition International Conference, In conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. July 22 - 27, 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. [PDF]
3. Reynolds, C. (2005) Adversarial Uses of Affective Computing and Ethical Implications, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D.Thesis, September 2005. [PDF]