Ethics of GIS
Authors: Thatcher Jim , Dalton Craig M. 
Published: May 2024

In a field as topically diverse and complex as Geographic Information Science/Systems (GIS), discussions of ethics are both inevitable and highly contextual. Over the decades since the formalization and valorization of GIS within the academy, discussions around ethics for GIS and the ethical practice of GIS have spanned the discipline and involved topics ranging from the exploitation of Indigenous peoples to creating inclusive maps of queer spaces. While these conversations too often arose in response to existing questionable practices, there is also a strong tradition of scholars and practitioners seeking to build an ethics of GIS based in ethical practice, one to inform future and current actions as much as it might critique existing initiatives. Discussions of ethics in GIS have traditionally remained somewhat distinct from larger philosophical works in the area and have tended to center around the application of ethical frameworks to specific GIS practices. For example, Nancy Obermeyer Obermeyer 2009, cited under the Limits Formal Ethics Codes: Scandal and New Approaches) has written “Virtue Ethics for GIS Professionals” Maria Styblińska (Styblińska 2008, cited under Introductory Texts) applied deontological approaches in “The Ethical Concerns about GIS,” and Renee Sieber (Sieber 2006, cited under Ethical GIS and Mapping Practice) provides a framework for considering some of these approaches in an article titled “Public Participation Geographic Information Systems: A Literature Review and Framework.” The present article is divided into three larger sections that approach existing scholarship on ethics and GIS from different directions as follows: The first, introductory section introduces the ethical debates around GIS by highlighting its potential for good and ill. Echoing the article by J. B. Harley (Harley 1991, cited under Introductory Texts), “Can There Be a Cartographic Ethics?,” these introductory pieces demonstrate that “ethics cannot be divorced from questions of social justice” (p. 15). The second section puts conversations around ethics and GIS in roughly chronological historical context. Beginning in the mid-20th century with some of the consequences of spatial science and GIS practiced with minimal ethical questioning, it moves through the emergence of ethically based criticisms to GIS in the late 1980s and the development of formal ethical codes by professional organizations, before finally highlighting newer critiques and deficiencies in ethical practices around GIS and spatial science. The subsection includes a major ethical scandal involving US researchers and participatory mapping in Mexico as well as attempts to formulate ethics in GIS through new kinds of reflective, self-conscious practice. The third section is thematic in structure. First, three subsections engage specific debates in GIS and mapping involving ethical questions and their implications: the epistemological and ontological foundations of maps and GIS; the nature of geographic data; and the economic aspects of GIS, geospatial data, and location surveillance. The last two sections focus on ethical GIS in practice, including both the long history of social justice work in critical approaches, like counter-mapping, and more recent moves by mainstream GIS practitioners to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The penultimate subsection focuses on teaching, including ways of engaging with ethics through actual GIS projects rather than abstract code. The final subsection provides examples of GIS projects conducted with ethics and justice explicitly in mind.