Abstract

The paper examines four key concepts of digital and AI ethics, which make normative (“ought”) claims: “transparency,” “explainability,”“interpretability,” and “trust.” The idea is that with the help of these concepts, digital transformation should be “responsibly” shaped, and there is even an aspiration to establish an independent digital ethics. The analysis in this paper questions approaches of this type. It elaborates differences between the tradition of philosophical appeals to responsibility and the digital-ethical buzzwords. The concept of responsibility may be a vague concept and have traits of a mere moral-ethical signalling. However, its digital-ethical lookalikes are not even normative; they stand for technical quality criteria or product features of a descriptive nature. The phrase “digital ethics” is used misleadingly to suggest the existence of an ethical dimension.