In 1992 in Orlando, Florida, 5% of the drivers were black or Hispanic, but they accounted for 70% of those who were stopped and searched.

Hate Crimes: “A hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin

After the bombings in London in July 2005, there were several attacks on mosques and single individuals of Muslim religion.

Gender Discrimination (or Sexism):

• Women’s career opportunities

• Women’s wages

• “honor killings” (5,000 females every year)

• Sexual harassment (it does not apply to women only!)

KANT:

The Formula of the Universal Law

THE HUMANITY FORMULA

THE AUTONOMY FORMULA

THE KINGDOM OF ENDS FORMULA

Consequentialism is a teleological theory focusing on the consequences of those actions

Psychological Egoism:

Selfish: people act for their own narrow and short-range interest

Self-interested: people act for their broad and long-term self-interest

But in order to show that psychological egoism is true, it should be shown not only that often we act for the sake of our own self-interest, but that we do it always

• Ethical Egoism is a normative theory about what people ought to do: an action is morally right if it maximizes one’s self-interest

• Three different versions:

• Individual Ethical Egoism: it states that everyone ought to act in my own best interest

• Personal Ethical Egoism: it states that I ought to act in my own self interest, but that I make no claims about what anyone else ought to do

Universal Ethical Egoism: it states as its basic principle that everyone should always act in his or her own best self-interest

Information, computer and roboethics

Information ethics: is the main field of which computer ethics is a subfield

Robert Wiener (1948): Cybernetics à second industrial revolution: the automatic age

The effects of information technology on life, health, happiness, abilities, knowledge, freedom security, and opportunities.

Physical structure of human being and the potential for learning and creativity

Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it

• The mechanical fluidity of the human being provides for his almost indefinite intellectual expansion

• The purpose of human life: to flourish as the kind of information organisms that humans naturally are

For human beings to flourish they must be free to engage in creative and flexible actions:

• Great Principles of Justice:

1. The Principle of Freedom: “the liberty of each human being to develop in his freedom the full measure of the human possibilities embodied in him.”

2. The Principle of Equality: “the equality by which what is just for A and B remains just when the positions of A and B are interchanged.”

3. The Principle of Benevolence: “a good will between man and man that knows no limits short of those of humanity itself.”

4. The Principle of Minimum Infringement of Freedom: What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary infringement of freedom

Methodology:

1. Identify an ethical question or case regarding the integration of information technology into society. Focus: technology-generated possibilities

2. Clarify any ambiguous or vague ideas or principles that may apply to the case or the issue in question.

3. If possible, apply already existing, ethically acceptable principles, laws, rules, and practices (the “received policy cluster”) that govern human behavior in the given society.

4. If ethically acceptable precedents, traditions and policies are insufficient to settle the question or deal with the case, use the purpose of a human life plus the great principles of justice to find a solution that fits as well as possible into the ethical traditions of the given society.

Walter Maner (1976): Computer ethics

Wholly new ethics problems that would not have existed if computers had not been invented

Deborah Johnson (1985): Textbook Computer Ethics à not ethically new problems, but a new twist given by computers to traditional problems

James Moor (1985): What is Computer Ethics?

• Computers as logically malleable à no laws or standards of good practice à policy vacuums and conceptual muddles

Core human values (life, health, happiness, security, resources, opportunities, and knowledge) without which a community cannot survive

+ combining deontology and consequentialism à constraints on consequentialist evaluations (for ex. I can try to realize the goals of core human values, but I have to rule out those actions.

Gotterbarn (1991) à Computer Ethics: Responsibility Regained

Developing a professional ethics of responsibility for those involved with computers

Krystyna Górniak-Kocikowska (1995): The Computer Revolution and the Problem of Global Ethics

“Górniak hypothesis”: computer ethics will evolve into a global ethic applicable in every culture on the earth (replacing “local” ethical systems)

Luciano Floridi (1995): Information Ethics

• Everything that exists as ‘informational’ objects or processes

Informational systems as such, rather than just living systems, are raised to the role of agents and patients of any action, with environmental processes changes and interactions equally described informationally

Everything that exists is an informational object or process à the INFOSPHERE

Damages to the infosphere: ENTROPY à an evil that should be avoided or minimized

Everything in the infosphere has at least a minimum worth that should be ethically respected: a right to persist in its own status and a constructionist right to flourish

Work place

• Computers pose a threat to traditional jobs

But generating new kind of jobs (hardware engineers, software engineers, system analysts, webmasters…)

• Problems for health and safety

COMPUTER CRIME

• VIRUSES (not working on their own, but inserted in computers or programs)

• WORMS (moving from machine to machine across networks)

• TROJAN HORSES (appear as one sort of program and doing damages behind the scenes)

• LOGIC BOMBS (activated only when there are particular conditions)

• BACTERIA OR RABBITS (multiply rapidly and fill up computers’ memories)

+ The issue of HACKERS: benevolent defenders of the freedom of cyberspace or criminals?

PRIVACY AND ANONIMITY

• Big Brother Government collecting data on citizens (from the novel 1984 by George Orwell)

• Data-mining

• Data-matching

• Redefinition of privacy: from control over personal information to restriction of access to personal information + an idea of privacy in public spaces