The Price of Everything

Some years ago a friend sent me a paper that has stayed with me, though not for the reasons its authors might have hoped. In The Return on Investment in AI Ethics, Bevilacqua, Berente, Domin, Goehring, and Rossi propose a holistic return on ethics framework for organisations that wish to quantify what they get back when they spend on behaving well. It is a serious piece of work, carefully argued and admirably candid about the difficulty of its own enterprise. I recommend it. I also think it answers the wrong question—or rather, that the question it answers so diligently is one no manager or board member in a healthy organisation should feel the need to ask.The difficulty it addresses is real enough. Traditional return on investment is calculated on revenue and cost, on the things that present themselves obligingly for counting. The returns to ethical conduct—reputation, trust, the loyalty of staff who would rather work for a firm they need not be ashamed of—are intangible, indirect,…