Can we assess the morality of our UX?

Morality is a combination of personal and social standards. It allows us to behave acceptably in society. What morality really means is something philosophers and the like have been reflecting on for ages. Writer and scientist Jonathan Haidt is among them. I discussed his Moral Foundations Theory in my article “<a href="https://medium.com/p/9a57e332b6c1" rel="noopener">A moral divide: why progressives and conservatives don’t get each other.</a>” I have a few problems with Haidt’s model, but I will not explore these in this article. I will, instead, discover how we can use his model to identify the moral choices we make when designing digital products. I will do this by going through the five foundations Haidt uses to identify morality: <ul> <li>Care / Harm How much do we take the suffering of others into account?</li> <li>Fairness / Cheating How much is proportionality, merit, and being ‘just’ important to us?</li> <li>Loyalty / Betrayal How many obligations do we have to our group, family, or country?</li> <li>Authority / Subversion How much do we need to obey and respect hierarchy, parents, police, etc.?</li> <li>Sanctity / Degradation How important is it to control our desires and have virtues of chastity?</li> </ul> The purpose of this article is not to identify the balance between capitalistic and moralistic values. I will use Haidt’s moral model to explore if we can use his standards to assess the morality of our products. <h1>1. Care / Harm</h1> Our moral compass is primarily guided by whether our actions cause harm to others. Almost all of us score high on this care foundation. As a result, as a society, we find it immoral to harm someone. But despite this perceived importance of not hurting people, we design apps that cause financial, emotional, or even physical harm. How much we are willing to accept this depends on our — let’s call it — digital morality. We can lay out a few examples that illustrate the principle of care. <h2>Uber / Bolt / Grab / Etc.</h2> How acceptable is it that a food delivery app designs screens that put so much stress on the delivery people that they are willing to cycle through red lights to make sure the customer has a pizza on time? Is it OK to penalise the delivery person if the pizza arrived a few minutes late because traffic lights were causing a delay? Safe Work Australia analysed <a href="https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-12/Gig%20Riders%20-%20Platforms%20fact%20sheet_Dec21.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">the state of this industry</a> and noticed: <ul> <li>Unsafe systems of work, for example unrealistic delivery times leading to unsafe riding.</li> <li>Economic pressures that may encourage workers to take unnecessary risks.</li> <li>Violence, aggression and harassment including from customers and others.</li> </ul> Next to the food delivery option of Bolt, Uber, etc., taxi-hailing apps have additional moral choices to make. <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/can-we-assess-the-morality-of-our-ux-82d20124497e">Learn More</a>