Abstract for: Questioning Forrester’s Ethics: Historical Case Analysis of Ethical Dilemmas in Modeling & Simulation

Students, educators, practitioners, and policymakers in system dynamics face ethically complex challenges in the problems they attempt to model and simulate. Differing ethical perspectives ask how modelers should behave, what rules they should follow, and how results, regardless of intent, should be considered. We propose a case method for ethical analysis of modeling & simulation efforts to facilitate this exploration. We test the method with two cases: Forrester’s 1968 Urban Dynamics and his 1971 presentation to Churches on the role of humanitarian food aid. Both of these spawned additional work from within and support and criticism from outside, the field for years and decades to follow. Our analysis shows that the case method can yield important points of reflection, such as the impact of erasing Black populations from Urban Dynamics or countenancing a tradeoff value between current and future human lives in the Churches Presentation. However, boundary selection and tradeoff analysis are not historically isolated events. Our case analysis shows how interactions within a system of ethical dialogue can advance the field’s treatment of these questions, which, rather than being isolated from historical cases, are as relevant to today’s modeling questions as ever.