For the purposes of this session, I define ethics as the moral principles that an individual aims to follow in practice to the best of their ability, research, and foresight.
Ethics are not just a list of universal standards that can be found in a research methods textbook, or the entirety of the Institutional Review Board's protocols, or that which is legal under the current political regime where one is located. Ethics are about being caring and sensitive towards the ways in which what an individual does and does not do affects other people, foremost, and perhaps also ecosystems, and trying one's best to not only not cause harm to them but ideally also actively do good (or even take an activist approach!).
Practicing good ethics is in part acting on one's moral instincts, but it is also about stopping to question those instincts, to research histories and effects, and to empathize and communicate with individuals and communities.
Projects or research that engage with the digital—i.e. that examine, use, or create digital tools or platforms.
Situated ethics refers to the notion that a person's understandings of and commitments to ethics or morality are greatly linked to their own experiences, positionalities, and political orientations, as well as the particular context in which that person is putting such ethics into practice (see Helen Simons and Robin Usher, Situated Ethics in Educational Research, 2000). "Situated ethics" draws on Donna Haraway's concept of Situated Knowledges (1988), which argues that all ideas, whether in science, the humanities, or personal convictions, are created from and are inherently representative of the conceptualizer's particular situated standpoint.
As Haraway eloquently argues:
"I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word objectivity to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late industrial, militarized, racist and male dominant societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s. I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges." (Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 1988, page 581)
Situated ethics thus argues that ethical concerns will vary amongst people, disciplines, projects, tools, and contexts depending on the particular situated perspective of that person, group, or project.
Thinking through how ethical ideas and practices, or lack thereof, are situated may prompt questions such as: How were computers developed? By whom? Where? Why? As Meredith Broussard argues in Artificial Unintelligence (2018), a "particular strain of white, male bias," to which I'd add United States and Euro-centric, runs deep in tech (page 79).