IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 73

* a commitment to quality;
* dedication to ethical values from the top of the
organization;
* a commitment to allocate sufficient time and
resources for ethical requirements definition.
Guided by a new professional called a " value
lead, " a fine-grained value structure of the future system
of interest (SOI) is developed with stakeholders.
Value leads " contribute subject matter expertise and
facilitative skills, bridging the gap between engineering,
management, and ethical values in a constructive
way " [14, p. 33]. They are not " the person in
charge of ethics " [14, p. 33], because VBE foresees
that all innovation team members, product managers,
system developers, and management co-operate
to design a system. But value leads know how to run
organizations through this new form of supplemental
system development life cycle. They should have
substantial ethical knowledge, know the conceptual
and technical details of widely accepted value principles
(like privacy, transparency, etc.), understand
material value ethics and moral philosophy well
enough to apply them in VBE projects and make
them fruitful for system development, of which they
should have a good grasp.
Value leads must ensure that organizations are
not primed by any existing value-principle lists. The
voice assistant example shows that the context and
nature of this system imply the recognition of many
values not included in any of the globally accepted
value-commitment-lists (e.g., closeness, compassion,
personal robustness, discipline, etc.). This discrepancy
between that which is ethically essential
for a SOI in a context and that which is globally and
generically listed as essential is significant. Moreover,
value-lists can " prime " value elicitation. A
group of students at WU Vienna analyzed an indoor
location-tracking system for a fashion retailer targeting
senior customers. One student group identified
privacy as the most important ethical challenge of
this tracking system. Before their analysis, they had
read a value-principle list including privacy. In contrast,
a control group of students that did not read
the list but physically visited the fashion store to talk
to the elderly customer stakeholders learned something
else. They discovered that the most essential
core value the location tracking system could offer is
" helpfulness, " that is, helpfulness for the customers
in getting service on the spot. They also learned that
September 2022
the value of privacy becomes secondary for seniors
at the moment where these get a value like helpfulness
back in exchange for sharing their location
data.
The core value of " helpfulness " could be actualized
in this case through various value qualities, such
as quick and convenient access to sales associates,
improved orientation in the store, or time savings.
The first phase of VBE is all about understanding this
physical deployment context and what stakeholders
might value in technology. Note that in describing
the value sphere VBE benefits from a value ontology
and very precise vocabulary for value elicitation that
becomes apparent in this example. A core value is
a high intrinsic value " that is identified as central in
the context of an SOI " (p. 17) [10], [14], whereas
a value quality (also called value " demonstrator " in
IEEE 7000) is " a potential manifestation of a core
value, which is either instrumental to the core value
or undermines it " (p. 23). A core value (like helpfulness)
can actualize through a value quality (like
convenient service access) when there is a respective
value disposition (feature) built into a system. A
value disposition, such as a mobile retailer app with
a big green " help button " for fashion customers to
summon staff (and that uses the location data) is a
" system characteristic that is an enabler or inhibitor
for one or more values " (p. 23) at the level of the
digital thing.
This three-layered value ontology underlying VBE
and IEEE 7000 is depicted in Figure 1. It is derived
from Scheler's [9] opus magnum, " Formalism in Ethics
and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. " It considers
everything surrounding us--other people, nature,
technology, relationships, or activities--as potential
carriers of value. Things like a voice assistant or a
location tracking application can become bearers
of value if they embed technical configurations that
enable these. The configuration of the voice assistant
dialog, for example, is the prerequisite for either
the value of compassion to be revealed to a user or
the value of toughness. For the senior in the fashion
store, the value of " helpfulness " may unfold when
she looks at the location app on her smartphone
and sees a big green button that allows staff to be
summoned. Thinking about " value bearers, " " value
dispositions, " " core values, " and " value qualities "
allows us to think about a system design from the
beginning in a value strategy and thereby ethical
way.
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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