🗽What are Ethical Principles

It's worth asking: what is ethics?

Some people see ethics through the lens of morality, of right and wrong and perhaps include the ultimate reward or punishment. Some see ethics more concretely as our duty to each other, a social construct that we expect and expend on behalf of others. But the simplest definition is this:

Ethics is the set of rules we adopt to get the most positive reuslts we intend and avoid the negative outcomes.

If someone's goal is to never harm others, their ethical framework should include clear definitions of 'harm' and 'others" and the best approaches to avoid doing harm to others. If someone's goal is to be trusted, then their ethical framework should prohibit actions which cause distrust (e.g., always tell the truth, identify any conflicts of interest) and encourage ones that build trust.

The ethical principles for the USA are laid our in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. The Statue of Liberty lays out some of our common ethical principles, in poetic form, around how this country is built from refugees fleeing oppression elsewhere. The Hippocratic Oath for medicine lays out clear ethical principles to avoid harming people.

So ethics helps us form a set of rules or guidelines for how to proceed into the unknown future, only knowing for sure where we came from. We can consult our principles whenever something new occurs. We can imagine how our current rules can help resolve the novel question, or add new rules to adapt. But by thinking things through more carefully, we can be more confident of a steady course to the end results we hoped for. Is there any better way?

In the case of the Metaverse and the XR Guild's adopted principles, our goal is to benefit society with helpful technology, like AR, VR, and the Metaverse, and minimize harm. We know that technology is never neutral, because it's applied by people who have diverging ethics and agendas -- and even one critical omission due to expedience can be devastating to safety. But if we can coordinate and better stick to our common ethical principles, designed around the most beneficial uses and to help limit the bad ones, we will more likely achieve the best outcomes together.