Discursive digital ethics: From explicability to participation

Abstract

This article is intended to present a proposal for dialogic digital ethics on a critical reading of the European Commission’s independent high-level expert group’s document Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI (2019). These would be digital ethics with a normative horizon for action and criteria for justice based on dialogue and possible agreement between all agents involved and affected by the digital reality. The aim is to show that the participation of all parties involved is not merely advisable but morally required as part of the Commission’s effort to generate common European willingness and governance to deal with the fourth industrial revolution now going on. The acknowledgement of equal dignity implied by people-centric artificial intelligence (AI) is utterly unthinkable without this possibility of equal participation. Without it, trust cannot be generated or guaranteed. As we intend to show, the new principle of explicability plays a decisive role in this objective as a principle with a moral as well as an instrumental. To this purpose, this study is structured in three parts. First, it will argue the proposal of a dialogic digital ethics in charge, as applied ethics, of making explicit the ethical bases that underlie the trust in Artificial Intelligence, in its decisions, practices and institutions. From this ethical framework, secondly, the European Guidelines will be analyzed, highlighting the need to justify and enhance the participation of all parties involved. This justification will be based on the Kantian principle of publicity. Finally, from this proposal of a discursive digital ethics, an ethical infrastructure capable of integrating all institutional design and all algorithmic development with this moral requirement of free and equal participation of all those affected and involved will be proposed. The principle of explicability thus becomes a basic principle to guarantee this moral knowledge for decision-making and the creation of spaces of trust “within” the institutions that make up the socio-technical system of Artificial Intelligence.