The Opposing Side Is Not the Enemy: From Socio-Technical Debates to Ethico-TechnicalDeliberations in Security, Privacy, and AI

Debates in security, privacy, and artificial intelligence are

frequently characterized by persistent disagreement and apparent dead-

lock. Despite decades of progress driven by the socio-technical paradigm,

many ethically charged long-running controversies, such as governmental

surveillance have not seen much convergence and are being joined by new

dilemmas from the AI domain, such as AI mental health support. This

paper argues that a key reason for deadlocked debates is the treatment

of ethics as an implicit, secondary, or purely normative concern, rather

than as an integral and researchable component of system design.

To address this issue, the paper proposes extending the socio-technical

paradigm to an ethico-technical paradigm. In this new framing, ethi-

cal assumptions, value trade-offs, and normative goals are made explicit

alongside technical and socio-technical constraints. Using case studies

from security and privacy (the Crypto Wars) and AI (LLM-based mental-

health counselling), the paper illustrates how ethical disagreements are

often conflated with technical or empirical disputes, leading actors to

talk past one another.

The ethico-technical paradigm also advocates a shift from adversarial de-

bates (aimed at convincing an adversary) toward structured deliberations

(aimed at jointly reasoning through options to reach a well-considered

decision).

By explicitly acknowledging pluralism in ethical reasoning and integrat-

ing ethical, behavioural and system research, this approach aims to en-

able more constructive deliberation, clearer design requirements, and ul-

timately more ethically robust security, privacy, and AI systems that can

achieve broader consensus.