Three of the major issues in information ethics—intellectual property, speech regulation, and privacy—concern the morality of restricting people’s access to certain information. Consequently, policies in these areas have a significant impact on the amount and types of knowledge that people acquire. As a result, epistemic considerations are critical to the ethics of information policy decisions (cf. Mill 1978 [1859]). The fact that information ethics is a part of the philosophy of information highlights this important connection with epistemology. In this paper, I illustrate how a value-theoretic approach to epistemology can help to clarify these major issues in information ethics. However, I also identify several open questions about epistemic values that need to be answered before we will be able to evaluate the epistemic consequences of many information policies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/105254 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Fallis, Don |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Journal Article (On-line/Unpaginated) |
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