Tech Ethics Animated: Moral Distance and the Ethics of Care

Tech Ethics Animated is a series of short animated videos from the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center (ND TEC) intended to unpack central concepts and concerns in technology ethics for a broad audience without an extensive background in the field.

A delivery driver unexpectedly gets fired over email—not by a person, but by a bot following an algorithmic rating of his performance. Traditional approaches to ethics, including those that have been applied to AI ethics, might argue there’s nothing wrong with this practice. However, they fail to address the problem of moral distance, or how individuals behave unethically towards those who are not seen. This video proposes the ethics of care—an approach to ethics based not on adhering to inviolable impartial principles but rather paying attention to people’s vulnerabilities and needs—as an alternative when examining artificial intelligence.