A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Applied ethics for professionals
Johannesburg / The advent of digital ICT has raised a range of privacy problems that previously did not
occur, owing to the scope and volume of data that can be collected, as well as the
processing capacity of the application. These digital privacy problems are arguably
not easily addressed within any particular traditional macroethical framework. We
may therefore need to find an alternative approach.
One such approach is proposed by Luciano Floridi, who has devised “Information
Ethics” - a macroethics for the identification, clarification and solution of digital
ethical issues. While IE is useful in that it highlights questions of digital agency, it will
be demonstrated that it is flawed when applied to problems of privacy posed by
digital ICT. IE, however, points us in the right direction: An object-oriented ethics may
be able to address the issue of digital agents.
In this essay I develop an argument for the moral intentionality of digital agents, based
on the concepts of emergent value and indirect intentionality, that can underpin an
object-oriented ethical approach to digital privacy for both digital and human agents.
Using Nissenbaum’s concept of contextual spheres, I provide normative guidelines for
evaluating the competing interests of agent-objects in various digital spheres.
A brief evaluation of the approach, by way of an example, shows that the object-oriented
LoA that I am proposing can be adopted for digital privacy problems. In such
cases, and for the specific purpose of weighing up the competing rights and values of
the agents and patients, we can treat all agents (human and non-human) as both
intentionality and real. This provides a reading of the case that goes beyond the
consequentialist or ownership-based approaches, and arguably gets closer to the
heart of the issue.
Where the approach is still open, however, is that we still have to justify and balance
these interests. There is no simple formula to apply. A need for practical wisdom or
Phronesis, in the form of a judicious weighing of moral interests, continues to apply to
digital problems posed by ICT. / GR2017
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/21975 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Whittaker, Louise |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (v, 53 leaves), application/pdf |
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