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, ethical 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 debates (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 integrating ethical, behavioural and system research, this approach aims to enable more constructive deliberation, clearer design requirements, and ultimately more ethically robust security, privacy, and AI systems that can achieve broader consensus.