Ethical Interaction Theory

The first chapter asked: “How should you live your life?” The final chapter of the book asks a slightly different, but related, question: “Who should decide how you live your life?” These two questions take on additional importance due to increases in the ability to track behavior and manipulate decisions via advances in science and technology. We attempt to give some evidence-based, theoretically grounded insight into how to manage the development of decision technologies, including choice architectures, in the face of value diversity. To illustrate, we center on some potential trade-offs between two values that have been prominent and well-represented cross-culturally and in many professional and personal contexts: autonomy and beneficence. The resulting Ethical Interaction Theory provides a framework designed to offer techniques to quantify and compare ethical risks and benefits associated with the development of interactive systems (e.g., ethical policy analysis). We contextualize this approach by comparing two different kinds of choice architecture strategies—nudging and strategies that promote representative understanding. Based on these analyses, we offer a heuristic checklist to use when comparing different prescriptive interventions designed to help people make better decisions.