Procurement is where ethics is actually decided
Ethical review usually arrives after the contract is signed, the integration is built and the alternative has been discarded. By then it can describe problems but not prevent them.
Ask an institution where its ethical decisions about technology are made and you will usually be directed to a committee. Follow the actual sequence of events and you will arrive somewhere else: a procurement process that closed months earlier, run by people who were not asked an ethical question and would not have been resourced to answer one.
By the time a system reaches ethical review, the contract is signed, the integration is partly built, the staff have been reassigned, and the alternatives have been discarded. Review at that point can document concerns. It cannot realistically stop anything, and everyone involved knows it.
Why upstream review is cheap
The cost of changing a decision rises steeply with time. At specification, a requirement is a sentence. At procurement, it is a contract clause. At integration, it is a change request. After deployment, it is a withdrawal, a remediation programme and possibly litigation.
The same question costs a sentence before procurement and a programme afterwards.
Five clauses worth having
- Audit access. A contractual right for an independent third party to examine the system, exercisable without the supplier’s consent to the choice of auditor.
- Performance disclosure in the deployed population. Not the vendor’s published benchmark, but measured performance here, reported at defined intervals.
- Override preservation. A commitment that human override remains functional, with the override rate reported and its decline treated as a finding rather than a success.
- Exit. Data export in a documented format, and a stated cost and timeline for discontinuation, agreed before dependency exists.
- Change notification. Notice before material changes to a system already in use, with a defined period in which the buyer may withdraw.
The institutional obstacle
None of these clauses is exotic and none is expensive to include at tender. The obstacle is that procurement teams are measured on cost and delivery time, and every clause above is a negotiation that lengthens both. Until an institution’s procurement function is measured on the durability of what it buys, ethical review will continue to arrive after the decision it was meant to inform.
