In certain respects, ethics can be regarded like the air that we breathe: they surround us, whether recognised or not, influencing our decisions, relationships, and institutions. In an upcoming book chapter (Huggett, forthcoming a), I perhaps rather boldly argue that there is no such thing as a coherent digital ethics in archaeology. I’m not suggesting that digital archaeologists are acting unethically. It’s more that digital ethics have a somewhat ethereal quality and are rarely made explicit, let alone comprehensively debated, and, where they are discussed (e.g., Colley 2015; Dennis 2020), this is often at a human rather than technological level (see the Computer Applications in Archaeology ethics policy, for instance). The absence of a more expansive digital ethics could lead us to over-estimate our ethical performance and that of our technologies, and make us blind to our – and their – ethical failings.
Ethical principles are a part of both everyday life and archaeological practice. They are assimilated through education, training, and practical experience, but they do not require to be written down to govern what passes as normative behaviour. The absence of a codified ethics therefore cannot be used to infer a lack of ethics although codification can provide guidance and reassurance. However, ethical expectations are not universal and differences between cultures and contexts can result in misunderstanding and offence. Nor is there a uniform strategy to ethics, as is demonstrated by the number of different approaches to ethics. For instance, utilitarian ethics emphasise the consequences of actions, whereas deontological approaches are concerned with duties and rules of behaviour, while virtue ethics emphasise the moral characteristics of individuals and groups rather than their specific actions. The reasoning involved in arriving at an ethical determination therefore can be quite different and may be more or less helpful in different circumstances. Consequently, Beever et al. (2020, pp. 37–39), for example, propose a pluralistic approach which considers the perspective of multiple ethical theories for a more practical, robust, and inclusive approach to decision-making. In archaeology, Carman (2024, p. 176) and González-Ruibal (2018, p. 355), for example, similarly propose pragmatic rather than instrumental approaches to ethics.
