Constructing a Mutually Supportive Interface between Ethics and Regulation

When the word ‘ethical’ becomes synonymous with specious, you know that something is amiss. With each data governance scandal, with each creation of a corporate ‘ethics board’, ‘ethical standards’ seemingly lose a few more feathers, to the point of generating instant suspicion when invoked in any official report. We argue that a key challenge in this regard is to more precisely define the ethics-regulation interface. In order to do this, we first provide an overview of existing attempts at developing ethical frameworks for data intensive technologies. The then turn to the case of healthcare ethics in the UK, to show what a case of a successful process of refinement of the ethics-regulation interface could look like. The third and final section develops the concept of an ethics- regulation interface for data intensive technologies, which would allow for a cross-fertilisation between the political, ethical and legal approaches.