A value is something a person or group holds to be important. Ethics is the reasoning about what to do when two values want opposite things. Students lose marks by using them as if they were synonyms.
Two values pulling on one decision — and the point at which ethics begins.
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Five lines values and ethics help us draw
Right or wrong
Is it acceptable to read a partner's messages without asking?
Fair or unfair
Should an exam app flag students whose webcams are in darker rooms more often?
Just or unjust
Is it just to deny benefits on the say-so of a risk score nobody can question?
Legal or illegal
Is scraping public photos to train a face database allowed by data protection law?
Proper or improper
Is it proper for a teacher to follow pupils on social media?
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Privacy, safety, freedom, fairness, openness — everyone is in favour of all of them. That is why listing values is worth so little: the disagreement is never there.
Where there is no argument
- Privacy matters
- Children should be safe
- People should be treated fairly
Where the argument actually is
- Which gives way when they collide
- Who decides that, and how
- Who carries the cost of the choice
The sentence that fixes most ethics answers: “Both sides value safety and privacy; they disagree about which gives way here.” Write that and the rest of the answer has somewhere to go.
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Real-world examples you can name
Apple v the FBI over the San Bernardino iPhone — February–March 2016
The FBI asked a court to compel Apple to write software that would disable the passcode limits on a locked iPhone. Apple refused, arguing that such a tool could not be confined to one device. The case ended when the FBI paid a third party to unlock the phone, leaving the legal question unresolved.
Who it affected: Every user of encrypted devices, and investigators who cannot read them.
Chile's neurorights amendment — constitutional amendment October 2021
The first country to write protection of brain activity and mental integrity into its constitution, ahead of the technology that would threaten them, prompted by consumer devices that read neural signals.
Who it affected: Chileans, and legislators elsewhere watching whether pre-emptive rights work.
Neither side is the villain: In Apple's 2016 dispute with the FBI over the San Bernardino iPhone one side valued the safety of people at risk and the other valued the security of everyone else's phone.
An answer that makes one side careless has stopped doing ethics and started taking a side.
Can ethics be coded into AI, and is it universal?: MIT's Moral Machine experiment (published in Nature, 2018) collected about 40 million choices from people in 233 countries and territories on who a self-driving car should spare. Preferences differed clearly between regions. Coding one set of choices into a car means choosing whose values count, so a single universal digital ethics is hard to build.
Values and ethics are studied by ethics, philosophy, world religions, law and public policy.
How this is tested — every ethics question in this subject is a collision between two values that both matter. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part b: explain an ethical concern about a system
- Part c: evaluate an ethical dilemma
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q2: explain the value a source is defending
- Q4: synthesise sources that disagree about which value wins
The trap: listing values: Naming privacy and safety is the setup. The answer is which one gives way, for what reason, and at whose cost.
Distinguish between a value and ethics.
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Explain one ethical issue raised by scanning private messages for harmful images.
Model answer plan
See the answer broken into clear points, with guidance on how each point earns marks.