Module 02 / 14 · Phase 1 — Foundations

2. Ethical frameworks as tools, not doctrines

This week in the arc

Coming from

Week 1 took your certainty apart. You could feel a violation but couldn’t always argue why — you lacked a shared vocabulary.

Going to

Week 3 — consent, where these tools meet the first piece of real machinery: the agreements we’re all asked to click.

Core

Last week ended in a specific kind of frustration: you knew something was wrong and couldn’t say why in terms anyone else had to accept. This week hands you four tools for exactly that. They are lenses, not doctrines — you don’t pick one and pledge allegiance. You learn to hold a case up to each and see what it reveals.

Each lens asks a different question:

Consequences — What are the outcomes: who is helped, who is harmed, and by how much?
Duty and rights — What do we owe people regardless of outcome: were they used merely as a means to someone else’s end?
Virtue — What does this practice make of us: what kind of institution, profession, or person does it cultivate?
Justice — How are the benefits and burdens distributed, and who holds power over whom?

Alongside the lenses, one more tool — not another way to judge, but a way to locate. Data moves through a lifecycle: it is collected, stored, processed, analyzed, used, retained, and disclosed. When a harm appears, naming which stage it lives in sharpens everything the lenses then ask. It’s the vocabulary the privacy field uses, and we’ll tag every case with it from here on.

The point is not to find the one right lens. It is to notice that the lenses sometimes disagree — and that the disagreement is information, not a failure. Reasoning well without certainty is the skill this course is built on.

Cases — tagged by category, name the kind before you react

The hospital that shared 1.6 million patients' records one situation, four lenses

An NHS hospital trust handed the records of 1.6 million patients to a Google-owned AI company to build a tool that flags acute kidney injury early — a genuine, life-saving aim. Patients were not meaningfully asked, and the UK regulator later found they hadn’t been properly informed. We run this one case through all four lenses and watch it change shape each time.

Reading

Required Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity” Washington Law Review, 2004

Recommended Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy — any chapter on a framework you feel shaky on

Discussion

When you called something a 'privacy violation' last week, which lens were you actually using — even without a name for it?
Can an action have good consequences and still wrong the people involved? What would that look like?
Is there a lens you already distrust? Why — and is the distrust about the lens, or about where it leads?