Category
Business & technology ethics
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Is the ban on riba about bad outcomes, or about the form a transaction may take?
I do tax returns for small businesses in Surrey, British Columbia, and many of my clients are Muslim. Several of them won't take a conventional loan. One explained that it's not because the interest rate is too high; it's that a guaranteed…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies146 views -
Whoever deploys an automated decision system should answer for its harms, fault or no fault
Take the standard case. A bank uses an automated system to assess loans. A creditworthy applicant is refused. The refusal rests on correlations in the training data that no engineer chose and nobody can fully reconstruct. Who answers for it? The engineers…
Started by Hamza Qureshi7 replies229 views -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
I teach classical Chinese to teenagers who spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies199 views -
What did Milton Friedman actually argue in his 1970 essay on business and profit?
I founded a startup in Mumbai, burnt out, and I'm now reading my way back. In every business-ethics discussion I've been in, someone quotes Friedman's line that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, and everyone either nods or…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies102 views