Ethics Canvas
The Ethics Canvas lays a project out across nine boxes, who and what it touches, how it changes their behaviour, relations, worldview, and group conflicts, and what you'll do to resolve the harm, so an ethical judgement is visible on one page instead of sitting in one person's head.
A grid of nine labelled boxes fills the page, each one waiting for a different piece of the judgement.
Reach for this when…
- A decision feels uncomfortable but nobody can say exactly why.
- Two people on the team are quietly opposed for different, unstated reasons.
- You need to show your reasoning to a board or regulator, not just your conclusion.
How to run it
- Name the activity or product precisely, not the general topic around it.
- List the individuals and groups it could affect, including people not in the room.
- Work through each impact box in turn: behaviour, relations, worldviews, and group conflicts.
- Check the harder risks: product or service failure and problematic use of resources.
- Use the 'What can we do?' box to record what you'll do to resolve the worst impacts, and who owns that.
A worked example
Situation. Mathieu Blanchard runs Ponts Verts, a small agricultural NGO in Lyon, France, deciding whether to sell farmer data to a fertiliser distributor for extra funding.
Applied. He worked through the canvas and found farmers were the individuals most affected, the fertiliser distributor was the organisation with the biggest stake, and the change in individual relations, the trust between Ponts Verts and the farmers who report data to it, was the impact that mattered most.
Result. The board turned down the data sale and negotiated a smaller, unrestricted grant instead. The reasoning was on paper, so the next data request got the same scrutiny automatically.
The catch
The canvas is thorough, nine boxes catch impacts a five-minute conversation would miss, but that thoroughness is also the trap: filling in every box can feel like due diligence even when nobody has weighed which impacts actually matter most. It also only works if someone is willing to write down the uncomfortable answer, which is exactly what makes it worth doing.
A canvas filled in after the decision is already made is a justification document, not an ethics tool.
Origin: Wessel Reijers and David Lewis, ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin & Dublin City University