Ordinary Ethics in the Age of AI

Trust. Transparency. Fairness. Ethical principles and the experts who speak for them drive the work of AI ethics, preparing the ground for national policy, corporate decisions, and technology design. In this essay I propose “ordinary ethics” as a distinct and complementary approach to principle- and expert-led ethics. Drawing on scholarship from Science Technology and Society (STS) and moral anthropology, I show how “ordinary ethics” allows analysts to study what makes an ethical life and how people navigate living it in the thick of daily life with technology. Following STS scholarship in co-production, I describe four sites—discourses, identities, representations, and institutions—where ethically significant reconfigurations occur as people work through the encounter of novel epistemic and technological capabilities with existing values, norms, and forms of life. I analyze examples of how people make sense of AI at each site today and show how this analysis deepens the understanding of what the principles stand for and help protect in today's advanced digital societies. As we look at these principles through the lens of ordinary ethics, we see them less as firm guidelines for how to act than as an invitation to examine together—with interdisciplinary scholarship, from perspectives of different societal stakeholders, and from within democratic deliberation. This suggests that the promise of ethics in the age of AI requires taking back a bit of power into ordinary life, for ordinary people, such that questions of what we value as societies and how to creatively keep and grow these values in contexts of daily life with powerful new technologies become a key element of the collective response.