Pervasive digital systems challenge our understanding of technology on people, societies and the environment. While they come with a promise of making our lives easier, they have raised ethical questions. Pervasive digital systems also influence democratic societies, putting the resilience of liberal democracy to the test. Yet, we lack deep understanding of these impacts, how to study them, and how we – as complex societies – can steer the development of pervasive digital systems towards an ethical direction.

To address this challenge, this dissertation takes a critical stance in order to 1) develop a research approach for studying ethical and societal impacts of pervasive digital systems, 2) shed light on the ethical direction in development and deployment of pervasive digital systems, and 3) increase understanding of how the ethical dimensions influence the fundamentals of democratic societies. The dissertation takes artificial intelligence (AI) as a contemporary example and studies the AI ethics discourse in the context of European AI regulation. It draws from John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness to evaluate the implications of AI from the perspectives of ethics and democratic resilience. It uses critical-political discourse studies as a research approach for empirical analyses.

As a result, this dissertation offers a research approach to study ethical and societal impacts of pervasive digital systems. It introduces a set of ethics guidelines for AI systems, as well as a framework for providers on ethical questions they need to consider beyond EU AI Act compliance. It also proposes a framework for the basic structure of society with which to steer the development of pervasive digital systems towards supporting, rather than eroding, democratic resilience.

This dissertation is thus a significant contribution to both Information Systems (IS) theory and practice. It builds on seminal works in critical IS research and advances the study of sociotechnical ISs, all while offering frameworks for practitioners to take the research into practice. By virtue of grounding the empirical studies on moral and political philosophy, this research strengthens the ethical rigour of IS ethics research and works towards a more holistic understanding of ethics of digital ecosystems.