Professional ethics, in general, deals with justified moral values that govern the work of professionals. Profession is an expertise who is committed to promote a distinctive public good, such as learning or education. Professionals are committed to special duties to make services available, maintain confidentiality, secure informed consent for services, and be loyal to clients, employers, and others with whom one has fiduciary relationship. Professional ethics deals with theoretical issues which seek to understand how the justified moral values governing professionals (...) are linked to wider values. It also deals with practical issues as to how to apply duties in particular contexts. Professional values include principles of obligation and rights, virtues, personal moral ideals as manifested in the great lives. Given such a Western idea of professional ethics, it is indeed fascinating to trace professional ethics in the Upaniṣads. The Upaniṣadic sages since time immemorial have shown the path to peace and progress for all humanity, not only by laying down theoretical ideals or speculation, but by actually applying truths in their practical life. They have demonstrated the practical application of the ethical ideals or moral values in the personal and professional life and proved that self-realization alone can not only save man from misery but promote to the state of highest bliss. The standards laid down by them have been followed practically by people even today. Gītoponiṣad states that whatever action is performed by the great is imitated by the common people; whatever standard is set by him is followed by them. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad prescribes professional values to the extent that not he who has not ceased from evil conduct can obtain Him by knowledge. Good conduct as a value is thus emphasized here. In Taittirīya Upaniṣad, for instance, the teacher prescribes certain values in the form of commandments: speak the truth and practice virtue. Thus, it is evident that the Upaniṣadic teacher is not only concerned about the intellectual progress of the student but also its personal and professional life as well. The paper is a humble attempt to explore the roots of professional ethics in the Upaniṣadic ethics. (shrink)

In the past few years, the ethical ramifications of AI technologies have been at the center of intense debates. Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding how a morally responsible practice of data science can be promoted and which values have to shape it. In this context, ethics and moral responsibility have been mainly conceptualized as compliance to widely shared principles. However, several scholars have highlighted the limitations of such a principled approach. Drawing from microethics and the virtue theory tradition, (...) in this paper, we formulate a different approach to ethics in data science which is based on a different conception of “being ethical” and, ultimately, of what it means to promote a morally responsible data science. First, we develop the idea that, rather than only compliance, ethical decision-making consists in using certain moral abilities, which are cultivated by practicing and exercising them in the data science process. An aspect of virtue development that we discuss here is moral attention, which is the ability of data scientists to identify the ethical relevance of their own technical decisions in data science activities. Next, by elaborating on the capability approach, we define a technical act as ethically relevant when it impacts one or more of the basic human capabilities of data subjects. Therefore, rather than “applying ethics”, data scientists should cultivate ethics as a form of reflection on how technical choices and ethical impacts shape one another. Finally, we show how this microethical framework concretely works, by dissecting the ethical dimension of the technical procedures involved in data understanding and preparation of electronic health records. (shrink)

A recent article by Herzog provides a much-needed integration of ethical and epistemological arguments in favor of explicable AI in medicine. In this short piece, I suggest a way in which its epistemological intuition of XAI as “explanatory interface” can be further developed to delineate the relation between AI tools and scientific research.