Prototype Ethics

Abstract

Real-world technology research involves testing technologies in natural and uncontrolled environments that are (or resemble) the intervention's use setting. As research with technologies under real-world conditions has become a pervasive phenomenon in our public streets, homes, shops, jobs, and social media, scholars have drawn attention to its ethical concerns and the absence of research ethics governance, such as ethics guidelines and independent oversight. In the absence of research ethics for real-world research, scholars have evaluated various real-world research examples with existing research ethics principles and norms and have called for codes of ethics. However, this scholarship faces at least two shortcomings. First, this scholarly attention is fragmented across different disciplines, potentially at the expense of common ethical concerns and guardrails that should be applied to all real-world research formats, irrespective of their domain. Second, it is unclear whether existing research ethics norms – developed for (predominantly) controlled (human subject)scientific research – can capture the full range of ethical challenges shared by all research in the real world, potentially overlooking ethical concerns outside the proverbial lab. In this thesis, I provide a comprehensive analysis of real-world research to address these two gaps. I ask in which ways common ethical challenges emerge in research under real-world conditions, and in what ways research ethics principles and norms fail to account for these ethical challenges. I argue that real-world research shares common ethical salient characteristics, such as ‘coupling’ options to subjects, that need research ethics governance, but that the content of this research ethics governance cannot be wholly based on existing research ethics principles and norms. This is because real-world research raises novel ethical challenges, and existing research ethics norms, such as informed consent or the right to withdraw, cannot be upheld without severely altering the practice. This thesis, thus, lays the groundwork for an ethics of real-world research by developing its philosophical foundations and identifying common challenges to research under real-world conditions that such an ethics should take into account.