Ethics and border control technologies

Abstract

The two terms 'ethics' and 'morals' are sometimes used interchangeably in everyday language, but they are not synonymous. The concepts, originating from the Greek ethos and the Latin mores, respectively, both mean something like habit or custom. While the term 'morals' refers to de facto habits, customs and traditions, 'ethics' refers to a systematic reflection, a philosophical critique, and an evaluation thereof. Ethics is understood for the purpose of this Chapter, in the context of border control, as a synonym for moral philosophy, which is a branch of philosophy that deals, roughly, with a rational and practical reflection on what conduct is good or bad and right or wrong.If ethics is defined as a systematic reflection on moral issues raised by emerging technologies, the purpose of this Chapter is to provide a toolkit to guide such systematic ethical reflection in the context of border control. In particular, the Chapter provides assessors with a list of recurring arguments (and recurring fallacies against which to evaluate them) that will allow them to assess the ethics component of the benchmark in the integrated impact assessment process. Thus, the structure of the Chapter is as follows: In the next sub-sections, some further introductory notions on ethics (its importance for society, historical development and literature overview) will be provided, including its importance in the assessment process and the actors involved in it. Section 5.1.2 will provide assessors with the key concepts to conduct the ethics steps of the impact assessment process accor-This is an open access chapter licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 International License.

Ethics reviews in the European Union. Implications for the governance of scientific research in times of data science and Artificial Intelligence

“…Instead, ethics reviewers are limited by pre-filled issues and questionnaires established in abstracto by a group of ethics experts or policymakers. 111 Conducting reviews in these settings may end up supporting the funding and increasing deployment and social acceptance of new AI technologies, such as in the field of border control, 112 instead of questioning it on a more fundamental level. 113 From an epistemic perspective, ethics has crept into several domains, from social sciences to data science research, including data protection and privacy issues and, more recently, AI technologies.…”