IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 42

Feature
Material Value Ethics
in a Model Process for
Values-Based Design
Lee Barford
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557 USA
 Over recent years, it has become increasingly
apparent that engineering activities must proceed
with consideration of the human values that
they potentially affect. The pervasiveness of communication
and information technology (CIT) systems
in nearly every aspect of work and personal life gives
the system providers influence over human thought,
feeling, and behavior with a magnitude not widely
foreseen until a few years ago. Increasingly complex
software, including applications of artificial intelligence
that is poorly explainable, are integrated with
the physical world through sensors, actuators, control
systems, and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled
products. Such systems can pose direct threats to
the physical safety of human beings and can negatively
impact the environment. The design, deployment,
and operation of transportation systems and
chemical, nuclear, and other dangerous industrial
plants have always required attention to human values
such as safety in addition to economic values.
However, recent events such as the Boeing 737 Max
crashes and data breaches of financial information
impacting broad swathes of nations' populations
have brought public attention to the importance
of including human values such as safety and privacy
in the design, test, and deployment of CIT and
hybrid software/control/actuation systems. This is
especially the case for autonomous systems that can
operate without-or can override-human decisions
and control inputs [1].
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3101830
Date of current version: 2 September 2021.
42
0278-0097/21©2021 IEEE
Ian Barbour, in his groundbreaking 1989-1991
Gifford Lectures [2], proposed that the public ethical
evaluation of new technologies and their applications
needs to be based on evaluating their impact
on (possibly conflicting) human values and not on
the more well-known schools of virtue, deontological,
and utilitarian ethics. In the last decade, it has
been recognized that ethical evaluation of technologies
and systems after they designed-or worse, after
they are operational-is insufficient because technological
artifacts do not just affect human values:
they embody them [3]. As embodiments of human
values, they must be designed with affordances
built-in that tend to align their behavior and use with
human values.
Value-based ethical reflection by the builders of
technological systems can assist them in identifying
the need for and designing in such affordances [4].
Software development processes have been developed
and tested that ensure that human values are
taken into account in the CIT system design [5]. Typical
design processes emphasize one kind of value,
financial in the case of for-profit business, national
security in the case of defense-focused engineering,
health in the case of medical engineering, and so
on. Systems are designed that cause harm to other
human values, yet this is not foreseen. The intent
of value-based design (VBD) is to open the design
team up to consideration of the range of human values,
reducing such occurrences. Case studies suggest
that such ethical design thinking should begin
early in system design, taking place at least during
requirements
engineering
[6],
[7]. One model
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

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