Aiming at the good life in the datafied world: A co-productionist framework of ethics

Abstract

This article proposes an ethical framework to navigate life in the datafied world that combines the relational ethics approach of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur with the idiom of co-production from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Mainstream data and computing ethics approaches, which tend to view ethics itself as a technology to produce particular outcomes, fail to adequately consider the context of the datafied world for ethics. The datafied world is a condition in which data and computing technologies form the ineluctable infrastructure for daily life, structuring social order, forming power relations, and supporting visions of desirable futures. I argue that the datafied world is not just a background upon which ethics unfolds, rather it demands a novel framework for ethics that understands the contexts of data and computing technologies and their consequences for human action. The idiom of co-production suggests how action gets tied to visions of the good in the datafied world. In particular, it draws attention to the evolution of these actions in the identities, institutions, representations, and discourses of the social world, creating specific forms of life and meaning in datafied societies.