Relational Ethics

The Relational Ethics initiative begins from the assumption that ethics is prior to principles.

Our work aims to outline an ethics for data-centric technologies that better articulates the relational nature of data, technology and humans in their worlds. The relational character of this ethics is twofold.

First, we conceive of ethics first and foremost as an attuned responsivity between human persons.

Second, this ethics is always done within a web of relations more commonly called society, and these relations are always characterized by power differentials established through cultural, political, and economic histories.

The relational ethics initiative takes this twofold understanding of ethics as its starting point for asking the question of ethics prior to principles in emerging data-centric worlds. The relational ethics approach developed through this initiative will be the basis for the other research initiatives at the Center for Data Ethics and Justice.