Abstract
Current developments in governance and policy setting are challenging traditional top-down models of decision-making. Whereas, on the one hand, citizens are increasingly demanding and expected to participate directly on governance questions, social networking platforms are, on the other hand, increasingly providing podia for the spread of unfounded, extremist and/or harmful ideas. Participatory deliberation is a form of democratic policy making in which deliberation is central to decision-making using both consensus decision-making and majority rule. However, by definition, it will lead to socially accepted results rather than ensuring the moral acceptability of the result. In fact, participation per se offers no guidance regarding the ethics of the decisions taken, nor does it provide means to evaluate alternatives in terms of their moral “quality.”
This article proposes an open participatory model, Massive Open Online Deliberation (MOOD), that can be used to solve some of the current policy authority deficits. MOOD taps on individual understanding and opinions by harnessing open, participatory, crowd-sourced, and wiki-like methodologies, effectively producing collective judgements regarding complex political and social issues in real time. MOOD offers the opportunity for people to develop and draft collective judgements on complex issues and crises in real time. MOOD is based on the concept of Ethics by Participation, a formalized and guided process of moral deliberation that extends deliberative democracy platforms to identify morally acceptable outcomes and enhance critical thinking and reflection among participants.
- Stuart Armstrong, Anders Sandberg, and Nick Bostrom. 2012. Thinking inside the box: Controlling and using an oracle AI. Minds Mach. 22, 4 (2012), 299--324. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Getachew Assefa and Björn Frostell. 2007. Social sustainability and social acceptance in technology assessment: A case study of energy technologies. Technol. Soc. 29, 1 (2007), 63--78.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Arthur Benz, Ioannis Papadopoulos, and others. 2006. Governance and Democracy: Comparing National, European and International Experiences. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Jonathan Bishop. 2014. Representations of ‘trolls’ in mass media communication: A review of media-texts and moral panics relating to ‘internet trolling’. Int. J. Web Based Commun. 10, 1 (2014), 7--24. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Olivier Boissier, Grégory Bonnet, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, Catherine Tessier, and Robert Voyer IMT. 2015. A roadmap towards ethical autonomous agents. (2015).Google Scholar
- Jean-Franois Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, and Iyad Rahwan. 2016. The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles. Science 352, 6293 (2016), 1573--1576.Google Scholar
- Nick Bostrom. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Julien Boudry. Condorcet. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from https://github.com/julien-boudry/Condorcet.Google Scholar
- Robert O. Briggs, Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten, and Gert-Jan de Vreede. 2005. Toward a theoretical model of consensus building. In Proceedings of the Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS’05).Google Scholar
- Joanna J. Bryson. Patiency is not a virtue: AI and the design of ethical systems. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Series (AAAI’16).Google Scholar
- Joanna J. Bryson, Philip P. Kime, and C. H. Zúrich. 2011. Just an artifact: Why machines are perceived as moral agents. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 22, 1(2011), 1641. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Taya R. Cohen and Lily Morse. 2014. Moral character: What it is and what it does. Res. Org. Behav. 34 (2014), 43--61.Google Scholar
- Nicolas Cointe, Grgory Bonnet, and Olivier Boissier. Ethical judgment of agents’ behaviors in multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 1106--1114. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Robert Alan Dahl. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. Yale University Press. 111--112.Google Scholar
- Ernest Davis. 2015. Ethical guidelines for a superintelligence. Artif. Intell. 220 (2015), 121--124. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tweede Kamer der Staten Generaal n.d.Burgerinitiatief. Retrieved July 7, 2016 from https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerleden/commissies/ver z/burgerinitiatieven.Google Scholar
- Bozdag E. and J. van den Hoven. 2015. Breaking the filter bubble: Democracy and design. Ethics and Information Technology 17, 4 (2015), 249--265. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Naomi Ellemers, Stefano Pagliaro, and Manuela Barreto. 2013. Morality and behavioural regulation in groups: A social identity approach. Eur. Rev. Soc. Psychol. 24, 1 (2013), 160--193.Google ScholarCross Ref
- James D. Fearon. 1998. Deliberation as discussion. Deliberative Democracy 44 (1998), 56.Google Scholar
- Leon Festinger. 1962. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Vol. 2. Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
- James S. Fishkin. 2011. When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
- Gerd Gigerenzer. 2010. Moral satisficing: Rethinking moral behavior as bounded rationality. Topics in Cognitive Science 2, 3 (2010), 528--554.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jim Giles. 2005. Wisdom of the crowd. Nature 438, 7066 (2005), 281.Google ScholarCross Ref
- L. Glenna. 2010. Value-laden technocratic management and environmental conflicts: The case of the new york city watershed controversy. Sci. Technol. Hum. Values 35, 1 (2010), 81--112.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Peter H. Ditto. 2011. Mapping the moral domain.J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 101, 2 (2011), 366.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Habermas. 1995. Reconciliation through the public use of reason: Remarks on john rawls’s political liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy 92, 3 (1995), 109--131.Google Scholar
- A. Hirschman. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
- Jeroen van den Hoven, Dirk Helbing, Dino Pedreschi, Josep Domingo-Ferrer, Fosca Gianotti, and Markus Christen. 2012. FuturICT-The road towards ethical ICT. The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, 1 (2012), 153--181.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nicole M. A. Huijts, Cees J. H. Midden, and Anneloes L. Meijnders. 2007. Social acceptance of carbon dioxide storage. Energy Policy 35, 5 (2007), 2780--2789.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dariusz Jemielniak. 2014. How to Fix Wikipedia’s Bureaucracy Problem: Ignore All the Rules. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_t ense/2014/06/wikipedia_s_bureaucracy_problem_and_how_to_f ix_it.html. -->Retrieved May 20, 2017 from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/06/wikipedia_s_bureaucracy_problem_and_how_to_fix_it.html.Google Scholar
- Aniket Kittur and Robert E. Kraut. 2008. Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through coordination. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. ACM, 37--46. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mark Klein. 2012. Enabling large-scale deliberation using attention-mediation metrics. Comput. Support. Coop. Work 21, 4--5 (2012), 449--473. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Christoph Carl Kling, Jérôme Kunegis, Heinrich Hartmann, Markus Strohmaier, and Steffen Staab. 2015. Voting behaviour and power in online democracy: A study of liquidfeedback in germany’s pirate party. arXiv Preprint arXiv:1503.07723 (2015).Google Scholar
- Bertram F. Malle. 2015. Integrating robot ethics and machine morality: The study and design of moral competence in robots. Ethics and Information Technology. 1--14. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David C. Parkes and Lirong Xia. 2012. A complexity-of-strategic-behavior comparison between schulze’s rule and ranked pairs. In Proceedings of the 26th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’12). American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Rawls. 1995. Political liberalism: Reply to habermas. The Journal of Philosophy 92, 3 (1995), 132--180.Google Scholar
- Lambèr Royakkers and Sjef Orbons. 2015. Design for values in the armed forces: Nonlethal weapons and military robots. Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design: Sources, Theory, Values and Application Domains. 613--638.Google Scholar
- Markus Schulze. 2011. A new monotonic, clone-independent, reversal symmetric, and condorcet-consistent single-winner election method. Soc. Choice Welfare 36, 2 (2011), 267--303.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amartya Kumar Sen. 1999. Democracy as a universal value. J. Democr. 10, 3 (1999), 3--17.Google ScholarCross Ref
- I. Van de Poel. Forthcoming. A coherentist view on social acceptance and moral acceptability of technology. In The Empirical Turn Revisited, P. Vermaas, M. Franssen, and P. Froes (Eds.). Springer, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
- Ilse Verdiesen, Martijn Cligge, Jan Timmermans, Lennard Segers, Virginia Dignum, and Jeroen van den Hoven. 2016. MOOD: Massive open online deliberation platform a practical application. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Ethics in the Design of Intelligent Agents. 6--11.Google Scholar
- Sheng Kung Michael Yi, Mark Steyvers, Michael D. Lee, and Matthew J. Dry. 2012. The wisdom of the crowd in combinatorial problems. Cogn. Sci. 36, 3 (2012), 452--470.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Measuring Moral Acceptability in E-deliberation: A Practical Application of Ethics by Participation
Recommendations
Direct democracy catalysed by resident-to-resident online deliberation
ePart'11: Proceedings of the Third IFIP WG 8.5 international conference on Electronic participationIn the context of local civic governance, much of the interest in e-Participation concerns the extent to which online media might overcome the limitations of geography and scale, and so allow local interests to be better represented in institutionally ...
Measuring Online Deliberation in Local Politics: An Empirical Analysis of the 2011 Zurich City Debate
Administrations increasingly use the internet to improve citizens' participation in political processes. While research on online political communication and e-democracy is growing, we still have little empirical evidence on the quality of online ...
Should e-government design for citizen participation?: stealth democracy and deliberation
dg.o '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Digital government researchCyberoptimists have heralded an age of citizen engagement enabled by electronic technologies that allow widespread citizen input in government decision making. In contrast, influential political scientists maintain that the preponderance of citizens ...
Comments