The ethics of dietary apps: Technology, health, and the capability approach

Summary

Dietary apps are said to promote better eating habits, improve dietary knowledge, and awareness about nutrition. However, their use has also raised a number of ethical and social issues related to their impact on individual freedoms, for creating power asymmetries, restricting end-users from expanding their knowledge of health, nudging individuals, and even having harmful effects on people's health. This paper will use the capability approach methodology to explore some of the most common criticisms directed against dietary apps to identify what steps need to be taken to ensure individuals' freedoms are protected, and their health is ensured. While dietary apps democratise nutritional information, they must be developed and used in an ethically satisfactory way, that is respectful of environmental, social and individual differences among users (conversion factors). This paper will demonstrate that while some types of nudging within dietary apps are acceptable (because they are often used as a kind of ‘extended will’), app companies should not nudge individuals in agency-infringing, manipulative, or forceful ways (for their own economic benefit). Altogether, this paper will provide a user-centric methodology (the capability approach) to demonstrate how food technologies should incorporate and consider the end-user in their development and use.