Persuasive Technology and Moral Responsibility Toward an ethical framework for persuasive technologies

How to deal with ethical issues surrounding persuasive technologies? Despite the obvious good intentions behind technologies like the FoodPhone (helping to fight obesity), the HygieneGuard (motivating people to wash their hands after using the toilet), and the EconoMeter (helping people to drive their cars more economically), ethical questions abound. Persuasive technologies can have undesirable consequences, employ problematic methods of persuasion, or persuade users to do things which cannot be morally justified. Moreover, the very practice of technological persuasion can raise moral questions in itself, because it might be seen as a threat to human autonomy, a source of moral laziness, or an anti-democratic force in society which lets designers rather than representatives of the people steer our behavior. This paper will address the ethical aspects of persuasive technologies and their designs in three steps. First, it will localize the most important points of application for moral reflection during the design of persuasive technologies. By integrating the concept of ‘persuasive technology’ with the concept of ‘technological mediation’, as developed in theoretical frameworks from the field of persuasive technology and from the philosophy of technology, it will be possible to identify three such points of application. Second, this paper will deal with the process of moral reflection itself. A method will be elaborated to facilitate moral decision-making during the design of persuasive technologies, using the points of application identified in section 2. Third, the paper will discuss a number of ethical issues which are a bit more external to the practice of designing persuasive technologies, and which mainly concern the moral acceptability of specific persuasive technologies and of the phenomenon of persuasive technology as such.