Digital Ethics and Information Justice
Apply ethical frameworks to digital information issues — access, privacy, intellectual property, and the ethics of information sharing.
Digital information raises ethical questions that law does not fully resolve. Ethical frameworks — consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics — provide tools for reasoning through these questions.
Ethical Frameworks Applied to Information
- Consequentialism: Judge actions by their outcomes — does sharing this information produce more good than harm?
- Deontology: Judge actions by their adherence to duties and rights — do I have a duty to share this? Does the subject have a right to privacy?
- Virtue ethics: What would a person of good character do? What does this action say about who I am?
- Care ethics: What are my responsibilities to those affected by my information choices?
The Ethics of Information Access
Is access to information a right? If so, what follows? The open access movement argues that publicly funded research should be publicly available. The digital divide raises questions about whether internet access should be a public utility. These are ethical questions with significant policy implications.
Aaron Swartz, a digital rights activist, was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for downloading academic articles from JSTOR, arguing that publicly funded research should be freely available. His case raised fundamental questions about information access, intellectual property, and the ethics of civil disobedience in the digital age.
No single ethical framework provides all the answers. Apply multiple frameworks to information ethics questions and consider where they agree and disagree. Where they converge, you have stronger grounds for a conclusion.
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3 questions · Grade 11 level