On a scale of 1 to 10,000, how ethical is your company? How biased is it?
These are trick questions, as without a means of measuring the answers can only be subjective. Bear in mind, “Ethics” as I use the term can be expressed as (Ethics * Bias = Morals). Because of this many companies focus on their own subjective and shifting morals, as no debiasing is required.
Racism, Sexism, and virtually every other “ism” used to arbitrarily divide any group of people into hierarchical sub-categories is a direct cognitive bias in action. Morals are indirect cognitive bias in action, which makes them a more watered-down but also more prolific version of the same. While some companies now have much-needed ethics-focused roles or departments none of these companies have yet produced a means of measuring or optimizing for ethical value, at best they’ve just found new ways to re-inject bias back into the same systems.
