Globalizing the digital: A cross-cultural framework for the ethics of operationalizing Big Data

Concerns over the ever-increasing production, availability and use of multilayered individual data in social research, business and the everyday life calls for the development of ethical and legal guidelines. In parallel to civic and governmental initiatives, Critical Data Studies offers a transdisciplinary academic platform to define a common ethical framework for computational research. Essays recently published under this label argue for lines of conduct guided by principles such as fairness and justice. Cultural and evolutionary anthropology, as well as political psychology show, however, those principles are mostly common to Northern liberal cultures. For example, Moral Foundation Theory identifies five cross-cultural grounds to ethical reasoning—Fairness, Care, Authority, In-group and Purity—the first two being associated with progressive views, and the three others with traditionalist views. In the current development of Critical Data Studies, the framing of research ethics by fairness and justice therefore risks to maintain, if not increase, the hegemony of Northern researchers on scientific productivity in Big Data research. In this poster, I present a novel framing of Big Data ethics, one that considers the cross-cultural diversity of human morality. My objective is to lay out a shared ground to an urging global approach to knowledge production. First, I review existing ethical framework of Big Data research and classify each proposal according to the Moral Foundation Theory. Second, I identify commonalities and gaps of proposed framework and articulate possible extension of each framework using the missing moral foundations as guiding principles. Finally, I propose a synthetic framework of Big Data ethics. The poster highlights the unbalance of ethical considerations in Big Data research, and in scientific production in general. The proposed framework points at ethical stances that could become major concerns in future research using Big Data for social research: Political or economic definition of scientific objectives, applications and limitations (authority); Exclusion of individuals, groups and communities in the production, publication and application of research findings (in-group); Constrains on inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations, research topics, methods of analysis, epistemic positioning and ontological grounds (purity).

Moral, Ethics and Geography: An Empirical Perspective on Political, Economical and Sociability Behaviors

Shin Alexandre Koseki

Ethics and morality as objects of research remain important blind spots of geography. Despite their recent attempts to reconcile the discipline’s take on ethics, geographers hardly ever investigate the individual and social production of moral and ethical systems and practices. Instead, they engage in research work in which they use shared ethical beliefs to frame spaces of injustice, practices of care, and environmental hazards. Following Durkheim’s normative stance on the social sciences, Western human geographers have reduced their research scope to comply with the moral and ethical beliefs of their scientific community. Morality is however not only limited to questions of justice/injustice and care/harm. Recent research developments in psychology and anthropology shows human morality as set of adaptive mechanisms to be much broader than the academic “Rawls vs Gilligan”—justice vs care—and to span across other normative categories. In this paper, I expose recent developments on the study of morality and ethics in psychology and anthropology, following primarily two evolutionary research strands: Moral Foundation Theory and Evolutionary Values Theory. I then describe three studies in which I begin to question both social and individual production of normative and moral systems, and their spatial correlates, using methods from political, cultural and urban geography. I finish on a theoretical opening linking contemporary French geography to John Silk’ original preoccupation on “caring at a distance,” and describe how care, but also justice, authority, in-group and purity can be part on a novel geographical inquiry on ethics.

2016

Moral Matrices

Shin Alexandre Koseki

In this dissertation, I address the political and moral geography of Swiss federal participatory votes for the period between 1981 and 2014 to re-investigate some of the fundamental questions left open in urban sciences: how and why socio-ethical, moral and political values differ across gradients of urbanity. To do so, I deploy a set of interdisciplinary analyses, and bridge between the epistemological positions, theoretical frameworks and methodologies of axiomatic political geography, political moral psychology, and cognitive and evolutionary anthropology. In this setting, I produce a simple yet powerful conceptual model that ties people's conceived aspirations, perceived affordances and developed capabilities in order to explain the ideological variations I find across the Swiss territory. In the first study, I investigate the spatial resonance of political cohesion as a socio-ethical manifestation of collective cooperation. I use inferential statistics, geometric data analysis and cartographic mapping and find political behavior aligns with the gradients of social urbanity and the degree of integration of Swiss communes residents in the globalization process. In the second study, I turn to the geography of political preferences and unveil the existence of fifteen moral constituencies across local communities. To do so, I make the innovative use of a measure of political agreement and disagreement, which I combine to network analysis. I find Swiss local communities split in four ideological components that comprise a set of political clusters. With those results, I offer an alternative explanation to the paradoxical cohesion of Swiss society by pointing out the role of the urban networks in securing national unity. Looking at the evolution of local communities' political agreement/disagreement, I also show that the Swiss political landscape has undergone a major restructuring over the last thirty years. Ideological clusters went from a highly fragmented and region-based system to a triptych partitioning opposing mostly city dwellers and linguistic minorities to suburbs, and to the country-side. This shift was accompanied with an overall increase in political agreement at the national level. In the third study, I examine the role of moral emotions on communes vote outcomes. I use the theoretical and methodological framework of Moral Foundation Theory and bind vote outcomes to the lexicometric assessment of moral values in the official arguments presented to voters. To do so, I digitally record all Official Vote Leaflets produced by the Swiss Federal Chancellery between 1981 and 2014; translate the Moral Foundation Dictionary into French; and combine both data in a content analysis. Using multiple binomial regression, I find the moral content of the argument predicts part of vote outcomes for certain communes. Finally, I produce a series of moral maps, which I qualitatively access to picture the relationship that prevails between space, ethics and politics.

EPFL2017

The Influence of Urban Spatial Practices on Moral Schemes: Analyzing the Cognitive Construction of Spatial Globalization Through Experimental Moral Philosophy

Shin Alexandre Koseki

In French analytical geography, globalization is the emergence of the World as a spatial entity by which the planetary extension become one space. Taking a cognitive perspective, I suggest that globalization is by extension the process by which the individuals construct and tighten inter-spatial relations, from the spaces in which they live to other spaces, either physically or socially distant. In other words, globalization is the process by which otherness is neither ignored nor dissolved, but acknowledged and taken in account in the daily life; affecting spatial practices and spatial actions. Based on this premise, I pose that the analysis of moral schemes of daily organizational processes can inform us on the cognitive construction of the globalization of space. To do so, I engage in an ethnographic fieldwork on affectively constituted social networks. The fieldwork comprises observations of micro-political relations using “friendship as a method”; interviews on spatial practices, political behaviors and moral tendencies; and experimental moral questionnaires. I then look at possible relationships between the spatial practices of the interviewed individuals and their cognitive construction of inter-spatial relations and spatial otherness, in order to observe if these can relate to their moral schemes regarding social otherness. I hypothesize that the city, as a social condenser, promotes—through divergent spatial practices—different relationships to the social and spatial otherness in comparison to the suburban, rural or alpine lifestyles, and that these relations can be indicators of a given level of urbanity.

2013

Moral Matrices

Shin Alexandre Koseki

EPFL2017