  This article introduces the special issue "Technology Ethics in Action:
Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives". In response to recent
controversies about the harms of digital technology, discourses and practices
of "tech ethics" have proliferated across the tech industry, academia, civil
society, and government. Yet despite the seeming promise of ethics, tech ethics
in practice suffers from several significant limitations: tech ethics is vague
and toothless, has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology
design, and is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives. These limitations
suggest that tech ethics enables corporate "ethics-washing": embracing the
language of ethics to defuse criticism and resist government regulation,
without committing to ethical behavior. Given these dynamics, I describe tech
ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central debate is not whether
ethics is desirable, but what "ethics" entails and who gets to define it.
Current approaches to tech ethics are poised to enable technologists and
technology companies to label themselves as "ethical" without substantively
altering their practices. Thus, those striving for structural improvements in
digital technologies must be mindful of the gap between ethics as a mode of
normative inquiry and ethics as a practical endeavor. In order to better
evaluate the opportunities and limits of tech ethics, I propose a
sociotechnical approach that analyzes tech ethics in light of who defines it
and what impacts it generates in practice.
