Values, choices, responsibilities: thinking beyond the scholarly place of ethics for the GIScience and technology profession and GIScience

Abstract

To help ethical issues gain traction in geographic information technology education, this article proposes that the education of GIScience and technology professionals go beyond abstract scholarly ethics to applied approaches based on practical wisdom. The main point for educators made in this paper is that applied ethics' focus on values, choices, and responsibilities helps students and professionals understand the significance of knowledge and science, their potential contributions, and possible roles – values, choices, and responsibilities. An interpretation of Aristotle's practical wisdom as moral skills and moral wills provides the foundation for developing pedagogical strategies including Davis' seven-step approach.

Keywords::

• ethics
• applied ethics
• GIS
• GIScience
• professionalization
• case study

Acknowledgments

A number of people have been patient listeners and thoughtful raconteurs in developing my thinking about teaching of geographic information-related ethics. Rodolphe Devillers coordinated AAG meeting sessions on ethics in 2013 where I first presented the concepts developed in this paper. Dawn Wright has for years been key in collaborations and facilitating the ethics and geographic information science sessions at AAG conferences and at UCGIS meetings. Both Dawn Wright and David DiBiase played important roles in creating the gisprofessionalethics.org case study resource. Chuck Huff and Mike Davis should be acknowledged for their inspiring engagement with professional ethics that opened many doors to considering ethics beyond the bookish canons of philosophy, and Werner Kuhn, Christoph Brox, and Christian Kray for their willingness to discuss ideas for expanding the teaching of geographic information ethics. Students at the University of Minnesota, University of Münster, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and Warsaw University of Technology engaged me with the teaching and offered thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this and related material on GIS and GIScience ethics. I also want to acknowledge Ken Foote for editorial help in fine-tuning the Practical Ethics chapter in Practicing Geography, a precursor to this paper. This paper reflects ongoing considerations of ethical, moral, and location privacy issues in geographic information science and propose a pedagogical approach for the classroom that will certainly evolve. For the positions, exposition, claims, and conclusions, I remain solely responsible.

Additional information

Funding

Some of the work discussed here has been supported by the US National Science Foundation.