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CDEF: Ethical Decision-Making Frameworks and Case Analysis

CDEF · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Ethical Decision-Making Frameworks and Case Analysis

Scope

This domain tests process: can you structure an ethical decision reproducibly, surface the right stakeholders, and justify a recommendation without collapsing into intuition?

Frameworks to know

  • Principlism as a balancing checklist (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice) - it does not rank the principles for you.
  • Value sensitive design (Friedman): identify stakeholders, values and harms iteratively across conceptual, technical and empirical phases.
  • Responsible innovation (Stilgoe, Owen, Macnaghten): anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, responsiveness.
  • Ethical matrix (Mepham): rows for stakeholder groups, columns for consequences, rights and duties - it forces coverage rather than resolving conflict.
  • Precautionary principle and proportionality: where harms are uncertain and potentially irreversible, act before certainty; proportionality then tests whether the measure matches the risk.
  • Rest's four components: moral sensitivity, judgement, motivation and character - explaining why good people fail, not only why systems do.
  • Moral intensity (Jones): magnitude of consequences, social consensus, probability of effect, temporal immediacy, proximity and concentration of effect.

A workable case method

  1. State the decision to be made and who decides.
  2. List facts and flag unknowns - do not fill gaps with assumptions.
  3. Map stakeholders, including those absent from the room: data subjects, downstream users, future cohorts.
  4. Name the values and duties in tension.
  5. Generate at least three options, including the status quo and a do-not-deploy option.
  6. Test each against the frameworks and the law, and check reversibility.
  7. Decide, document the reasoning and dissent, and set review triggers.
  8. Build contestability and monitoring in from the start.

Worked example

A city proposes predictive policing on historical arrest data. Facts: arrests correlate with patrol patterns as much as with crime. Stakeholders include residents of over-policed districts, officers, the city council and civil liberties groups. Options: deploy as proposed; deploy with safeguards on patrol allocation but no individual targeting; do not deploy and fund community alternatives. The ethical matrix shows the largest burden falling on the least powerful group, who are also absent from the decision. A defensible recommendation rejects individual-level targeting, requires published evaluation, and creates a standing review with community representation.

Traps

Jumping to a solution before naming the decision; treating a two-option framing as complete; ignoring the least powerful stakeholder because they are not in the room; treating documentation as an afterthought rather than part of the decision; expecting a framework to resolve conflicts mechanically.