Ethics consultation for integrating ethics in technology readiness levels (TRL)

Integrating ethics aims at an ethical co-design of technology by focusing on socio-technical contexts and establishing ethical perspectives in development processes. This paper introduces a format of ethics consultation as a mode of collaboration for integrating ethics. The idea follows the concept of 'ethics as a service' by providing ethical guidance for potential clients involved in research and development of emerging technologies. It provides an alternative to the approach of embedded ethics, where ethicists join interdisciplinary teams as partners. Ethics consultation provides context-sensitive, constructive and normative knowledge by identifying ethical 'blind spots' in legal regulation or empirical research. Furthermore, the concept of Technology Readiness Levels can guide ethics consultation towards integrating ethics as it enables a differentiated view of the development phases and thus allows specific ethical interventions depending on the stage of development. We illustrate the concept with reference to the ongoing project rokit about robots in public spaces.