Many people argue that Facebook’s study of how the emotions of it’s users changed depending on the emotional content of messages in their facebook feed wouldn’t have been approved by the average ethical review board because facebook didn’t seek informed consent for the experiment.
A slightly strong form of this argument is that the study is unethical because the users didn’t consent to being manipulated and studied in this fashion, and that an ethical review board would have noticed this and nixed it. Which is to say, a slightly stronger argument focuses on the ethics issues which might have been averted, rather than on what an ethics review board would conclude, as the former is an argument in its own right where the latter is an argument from authority.
I don’t see an ethical lapse here; when Facebook modulates the content of messages without performing an experiment, informed consent doesn’t enter into it. If you can do a thing ethically, calling your act an experiment, or paying attention to how people react, doesn’t create an additional ethical burden.
Nor does calling your actions an experiment absolve you of ethical burdens, either. Information is valuable, and from a utilitarian perspective the information may outweigh the costs, but the utilitarian obligation to maximize doesn’t end at the point where the scales first begin to tip.
Not all; presumptively, it is possible to give informed consent. But unless the testers do give informed consent, under this principle, yes, it would be unethical.
(I do not agree with this principle for the reasons I already cited: experimentation doesn’t confer unique ethical qualities to behavior, the ethical qualities are inherent in the behavior itself, and the general rules about experimentation were exported from medicine where the behaviors involved do have more questionable ethics.)
If you can do a thing ethically, calling your act an experiment, or paying attention to how people react, doesn’t create an additional ethical burden.
It doesn’t follow that if doing X doesn’t make anyone worse off, we should allow X. This fails to consider the impact of incentives. It may be that if we permit X, X would be better for everyone in the current situation, but permitting X also affects the balance of what situations exist to begin with, leading to everyone being worse off overall.
A slightly strong form of this argument is that the study is unethical because the users didn’t consent to being manipulated and studied in this fashion, and that an ethical review board would have noticed this and nixed it. Which is to say, a slightly stronger argument focuses on the ethics issues which might have been averted, rather than on what an ethics review board would conclude, as the former is an argument in its own right where the latter is an argument from authority.
I don’t see an ethical lapse here; when Facebook modulates the content of messages without performing an experiment, informed consent doesn’t enter into it. If you can do a thing ethically, calling your act an experiment, or paying attention to how people react, doesn’t create an additional ethical burden.
Nor does calling your actions an experiment absolve you of ethical burdens, either. Information is valuable, and from a utilitarian perspective the information may outweigh the costs, but the utilitarian obligation to maximize doesn’t end at the point where the scales first begin to tip.
That makes all A/B testing unethical.
Not all; presumptively, it is possible to give informed consent. But unless the testers do give informed consent, under this principle, yes, it would be unethical.
(I do not agree with this principle for the reasons I already cited: experimentation doesn’t confer unique ethical qualities to behavior, the ethical qualities are inherent in the behavior itself, and the general rules about experimentation were exported from medicine where the behaviors involved do have more questionable ethics.)
It doesn’t follow that if doing X doesn’t make anyone worse off, we should allow X. This fails to consider the impact of incentives. It may be that if we permit X, X would be better for everyone in the current situation, but permitting X also affects the balance of what situations exist to begin with, leading to everyone being worse off overall.