The Journal of Prompt-Engineered (Moral) Philosophy Or: Why AI-Assisted Ethics Research Requires Process Transparency

TL;DR

This paper argues that AI-assisted ethics research requires process transparency grounded in agent integrity, proposing a documentation framework to enhance reproducibility and normative assessment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel transparency framework based on five elements to operationalize meaningful human control in AI ethics scholarship.

Findings

Developed a documentation-adequacy framework with five transparency elements.

Demonstrated the framework through a self-archived full documentation record.

Argued for transparency as a means to assess agent integrity and normative commitments.

Abstract

Existing AI disclosure mandates in scholarship require that AI assistance be reported but leave transparency philosophically unspecified: they fix the duty without explaining what the duty serves. We argue that ethical inquiry is essentially contested at two independent levels -- about what it is, and about what it demands of the inquirer -- defeating output-only evaluation and welfare-economic dismissal of the transparency question, and, by extension, reproducibility framings imported from the empirical sciences. The transparency duty is grounded instead in agent-integrity: the legibility, before a community of inquiry, of the identity-constituting commitments that the author's mode of philosophising expresses. Because the standards for evaluating such work are not communally settled, the achievable goal for transparency is not evaluation against agreed criteria but tracking -- accumulating the evidentiary record that lets each tradition assess the work on its own terms and makes future normative judgments possible. We develop a documentation-adequacy framework that operationalises Meaningful Human Control through five transparency elements -- declaration, navigation, documentation account, process documentation, and development records -- demonstrated by the paper itself, whose full documentation record is archived at a persistent identifier. The framework is a first iteration subject to revision, not a settled standard.