Practical Geospatial Ethics: Concerns, Codes, and Cases

Abstract

This paper is one of a diverse set of contributions to a special issue of Cartographic Perspectives focused on cartographic ethics. Throughout it situates cartography within a broader geospatial context and discusses ethics in relation to professional practice in that field. First the paper considers the nature of ethical concerns expressed within the industry, government, and academic sectors of the geospatial enterprise, and speculates on how those concerns have evolved since CP first addressed ethics in the early 1990s. Second, it considers the roles of professional ethics codes and how relevant codes and rules relate to evolving ethical concerns. Thirdly, the paper highlights characteristics of ethics case studies, and the utility of formal case study analysis. It suggests how practitioners’ stories about ethical challenges can be adapted to “actionable” case studies that can be used to hone geospatial professionals’ and organizations’ ethical problem-solving abilities. The paper concludes with arguments that case studies may be key to elevating ethics within cartography and geospatial curricula in higher education, as well as in training large language model AIs to provide reasonable ethical advice to human mapmakers and users.