## 1. Introduction



Information technology is ubiquitous in the lives of people across the
globe. These technologies take many forms such as personal computers,
smart phones, internet technologies, as well as AI and robotics. In
fact, the list is growing constantly and new forms of these
technologies are working their way into every aspect of daily life.
They all have some form of computation at their core and human users
interface with them mostly through applications and other software
operating systems. In some cases, such as massive multiplayer online
games (see section 3.1.1 below), these
technologies are even opening up new ways for humans to interacting
with each other. Information technologies are used to record,
communicate, synthesize or organize information through the use of
computer technologies. Information itself can be understood as any
useful data, instructions, or meaningful message content. The word
literally means to "give form to" or to shape one's
thoughts. A basic type of information technology might be the
proverbial string tied around one's finger that is used to remind, or
inform, someone that they have some specific task to accomplish that
day. Here the string stands in for a more complex proposition such as
"buy groceries before you come home." The string itself is
not the information, it merely symbolizes the information and
therefore this symbol must be correctly interpreted for it to be
useful. Which raises the question, what is information itself?


 Unfortunately there is not a completely satisfying and
philosophically rigorous definition available, though there are at
least two very good starting points. For those troubled by the
ontological questions regarding information, we might want to simply
focus on the symbols and define information as any meaningfully
ordered set of symbols. Mathematicians and engineers prefer to focus
on this aspect of information, which is called "syntax"
and leave the meaningfulness of information or its
"semantics" for others to figure out. Claude E. Shannon
working at Bell Labs in the forties produced a landmark mathematical
theory of communication (1948). In this work he utilized his
experiences in cryptography and telephone technologies to work out a
mathematical formulation describing how syntactical information can be
turned into a signal that is transmitted in such a way as to mitigate
noise or other extraneous signals which can then be decoded by the
desired receiver of the message (Shannon 1948; Shannon and Weaver
1949). The concepts described by Shannon, (along with additional
important innovations made by others who are too many to list),
explain the way that information technology works, but we still have
the deeper questions to resolve if we want to thoroughly trace the
impact of information technologies on moral values. Some philosophers
noted the fact that information technologies had highlighted the
distinction between syntax and semantics, and have been vocal critics
about the inability of technologies to bridge the gap between the two
concepts. Meaning that while information technologies might be adept
at manipulating syntax, they would be incapable of ever understanding
the semantics, or meanings, of the information upon which they
worked.


One famous example can be found in the "Chinese Room
Argument" (Searle 1980) in which the philosopher John Searle
argued that even if one were to build a machine that could take
stories written in Chinese as input and then output coherent answers
to questions about those stories, it would not prove that the machine
itself actually understood what it was doing. The argument rests on
the claim that if you replaced the workings of the machine with a
person who was not a native Chinese speaker who would then
painstakingly follow a set of rules to transform the set of Chinese
logograms input into other output symbols. The claim is that that
person would not understand the input and also would not know what the
system is saying as its output, it is all meaningless symbol
manipulation to them. The conclusion is that this admittedly strange
system could skillfully use the syntax of the language and story while
the person inside would have no ability to understand the semantics,
or meaning, of the stories (Searle 1980). Replace the person with
electronics and it follows that the electronics also have no
understanding of the symbols they are processing. This
argument, while provocative is not universally accepted and has lead
to decades worth of argument and rebuttal (see the entry on
 the Chinese room argument). 


Information technology has also had a lasting impression on the philosophical
study of logic and information. In this field logic is used as a way to
understand information as well as using information science as a way
to build the foundations of logic itself (see the entry on 
logic and information).


The issues just discussed are fascinating but they are separate
arguments that do not necessarily have to be resolved before we can
enter a discussion on information technology and moral values. Even
purely syntactical machines can still impact many important ethical
concerns even if they are completely oblivious to the semantic meaning
of the information that they compute. 



The second starting point is to explore the more metaphysical role that
information might play in philosophy. If we were to begin with the claim
that information either constitutes or is closely correlated with what
constitutes our existence and the existence of everything around us,
then this claim means that information plays an important ontological
role in the manner in which the universe operates. Adopting this
standpoint places information as a core concern for philosophy and
gives rise to the fields 
 philosophy of information
 and
 information ethics.
 In this entry, we will not limit our exploration to just the theory
of information but instead look more closely at the actual moral and
ethical impacts that information technologies are already having on our
societies. Philosophy of Information will not be addressed in detail
here but the interested reader can begin with Floridi (2010b, 2011b)
for an introduction. Some of the most important aspects of Information
Ethics will be outlined in more detail below.


## 2. The Moral Challenges of Information Technology



The move from one set of dominant information technologies to another
is always morally contentious. Socrates lived during the long
transition from a largely oral tradition to a newer information
technology consisting of writing down words and information and
collecting those writings into scrolls and books. Famously Socrates
was somewhat antagonistic to writing and scholars claim that he never
wrote anything down himself. Ironically, we only know about
Socrates' argument against writing because his student Plato
ignored his teacher and wrote them down in a dialogue called
"Phaedrus" (Plato). Towards the end of this dialogue
Socrates discusses with his friend Phaedrus the
"...conditions which make it (writing) proper or
improper" (section 274b-479c). Socrates tells a fable of
an Egyptian God he names Theuth who gives the gift of writing to a
king named Thamus. Thamus is not pleased with the gift and
replies,



> 
> 
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they
> will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is
> written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within
> themselves, but by means of external marks. (Phaedrus, section
> 275a)
> 
> 
> 



Socrates, who was adept at quoting lines from poems and epics and
placing them into his conversations, fears that those who rely on
writing will never be able to truly understand and live by these
words. For Socrates there is something immoral or false about writing.
Books can provide information but they cannot, by themselves, give you
the wisdom you need to use or deeply understand that information.
Conversely, in an oral tradition you do not simply consult a library,
you are the library, a living manifestation of the information you
know by heart. For Socrates, reading a book is nowhere near as
insightful as talking with its author. Written words, 



> 
> 
> ...seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if
> you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be
> instructed, they go on telling you the same thing forever. (Phaedrus,
> section 275d).
> 
> 
> 



His criticism of writing at first glance may seem humorous but the
temptation to use recall and call it memory is getting more and more
prevalent in modern information technologies. Why learn anything when
information is just an Internet search away? In order to avoid
Socrates' worry, information technologies should do more than just
provide access to information; they should also help foster wisdom and
understanding as well.


### 2.1 The Fundamental Character of Information Technologies



Early in the information technology revolution Richard Mason suggested
that the coming changes in information technologies, such as their
roles in education and economic impacts, would necessitate rethinking
the social contract (Mason 1986). He worried that they would challenge
privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility (PAPA) and to protect
our society we "... must formulate a new social contract,
one that insures everyone the right to fulfill his or her own human
potential" (Mason 1986 P. 11) What he could not have known then
was how often we would have to update the social contract as these
technologies rapidly change. Information technologies change quickly
and move in and out of fashion at a bewildering pace. This makes it
difficult to try to list them all and catalog the moral impacts of
each. The very fact that this change is so rapid and momentous has
caused some to argue that we need to deeply question the ethics of the
process of developing emerging technologies (Moor 2008). It has also
been argued that the ever morphing nature of information technology is
changing our ability to even fully understand moral values as they
change. Lorenzo Magnani claims that acquiring knowledge of how that
change confounds our ability to reason morally "...has
become a duty in our technological world" (Magnani 2007,
93). The legal theorist Larry Lessig warns that the pace of change in
information technology is so rapid that it leaves the slow and
deliberative process of law and political policy behind and in effect
these technologies become lawless, or extralegal. This is due to the
fact that by the time a law is written to curtail, for instance, some
form of copyright infringement facilitated by a particular file
sharing technology, that technology has become out of date and users
are on to something else that facilitates even more copyright
infringement (Lessig 1999). But even given this rapid pace of change,
it remains the case that information technologies or applications can
all be categorized into at least three different types - each of
which we will look at below. 



All information technologies record (store), transmit (communicate),
organize and/or synthesize information. For example, a book is a
record of information, a telephone is used to communicate information,
and the Dewey decimal system organizes information. Many information
technologies can accomplish more than one of the above functions and,
most notably, the computer can accomplish all of them since it can be
described as a universal machine (see the entry on
 computability and complexity),
 so it can be programmed to emulate any form of information
technology. In
 section 2
 we will look at some specific example technologies and applications
from each of the three types of information technology listed above
and track the moral challenges that arise out of the use and design of
these particular technologies. In addition to the above we will need
to address the growing use of information environments such as massive
multiplayer games, which are environments completely composed of
information where people can develop alternate lives filled with
various forms of social activities (see
 section 3.3).
 Finally we will look at not only how information technology impacts
our moral intuitions but also how it might be changing the very nature
of moral reasoning. In
 section 4,
 we will look at information as a technology of morality and how we
might program applications and robots to interact with us in a more
morally acceptable manner.


#### 2.1.1 Moral Values in Information Recording



The control of information is power, and in an information economy
such as we find ourselves today, it may be the ultimate form of
political power. We live in a world rich in data and the technology to
produce, record, and store vast amounts of this data has developed
rapidly. The primary moral concern here is that when we collect,
store, and/or access information, it is vital that this be done in a
just manner that can reasonably be seen as fair and in the best
interests of all parties involved. As was mentioned above, each of us
produces a vast amount of information every day that could be recorded
and stored as useful data to be accessed later when needed. But moral
conundrums arise when that collection, storage and use of our
information is done by third parties without our knowledge or done
with only our tacit consent. The social institutions that have
traditionally exercised this power are things like, religious
organizations, universities, libraries, healthcare officials,
government agencies, banks and corporations. These entities have
access to stored information that gives them a certain amount of power
over their customers and constituencies. Today each citizen has access
to more and more of that stored information without the necessity of
utilizing the traditional mediators of that information and therefore
a greater individual share of social power (see Lessig 1999). 



One of the great values of modern information technology is that it
makes the recording of information easy and almost automatic. Today, a
growing number of people enter biometric data such as blood pressure,
calorie intake, exercise patterns, etc. into applications designed to
help them achieve a healthier lifestyle. This type of data collection
could become almost fully automated in the near future. Through the
use of smart watches or technologies such as the "Fitbit," or
gathered through a users smartphone, such as applications that use the
GPS tracking to track the length and duration of a user's walk or run.
How long until a smartphone collects a running data stream of your
blood pressure throughout the day perhaps tagged with geolocation
markers of particularly high or low readings? In one sense this could
be immensely powerful data that could lead to much healthier lifestyle
choices. But it could also be a serious breach in privacy if the
information got into the wrong hands, which could be easily
accomplished, since third parties have access to information collected
on smartphones and online applications. In the next section
 (2.1.2)
 we will look at some theories on how best to ethically communicate
this recorded information to preserve privacy. But here we must
address a more subtle privacy breach - the collection and
recording of data about a users without their knowledge or
consent. When searching on the Internet, browser software records all
manner of data about our visits to various websites which can, for
example, make webpages load faster next time you visit them. Even the
websites themselves use various means to record information when your
computer has accessed them and they may leave bits of information on
your computer which the site can use the next time you visit. Some
websites are able to detect which other sites you have visited or
which pages on the website you spend the most time on. If someone were
following you around a library noting down this kind of information,
you might find it uncomfortable or hostile, but online this kind of
behavior takes place behind the scenes and is barely noticed by the
casual user. 



According to some professionals, information technology has all but
eliminated the private sphere and that it has been this way for
decades. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems famously announced in 1999:
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it" (Sprenger,
1999). Helen Nissenbaum observes that,



> 
> 
> [w]here previously, physical barriers and inconvenience might have
> discouraged all but the most tenacious from ferreting out information,
> technology makes this available at the click of a button or for a few
> dollars (Nissenbaum 1997) 
> 
> 
> 



and since the time when she wrote this the gathering of personal data
has become more automated and cheaper. Clearly, earlier theories of
privacy that assumed the inviolability of physical walls no longer
apply but as Nissenbaum argues, personal autonomy and intimacy require
us to protect privacy nonetheless (Nissenbaum 1997). 



A final concern in this section is that information technologies are
now storing user data in "the cloud" meaning that the data
is stored on a device remotely located from the user and not owned or
operated by that user, but the data is then available from anywhere
the user happens to be, on any device they happen to be using. This
ease of access has the result of also making the relationship one has
to one's own data more tenuous because of the uncertainty about the
physical location of that data. Since personal data is crucially
important to protect, the third parties that offer "cloud"
services need to understand the responsibility of the trust the user
is placing in them. If you load all the photographs of your life to a
service like Flickr and they were to somehow lose or delete them, this
would be a tragic mistake that might be impossible to repair.


#### 2.1.2 Moral Values in Communicating and Accessing Information



Information technology has forced us to rethink earlier notions of
privacy that were based on print technologies, such as letters, notes,
books, pamphlets, newspapers, etc. The moral values that coalesced
around these earlier technologies have been sorely stretched by the
easy way that information can be shared and altered using digital
information technologies and this has required the rapid development
of new moral theories that recognize both the benefits and risks of
communicating all manner of information using modern information
technologies. The primary moral values that seem to be under pressure
from these changes are privacy, confidentiality, ownership, trust, and
the veracity of the information being communicated in these new
ways.



Who has the final say whether or not some information about a user is
communicated or not? Who is allowed to sell your medical records, your
financial records, your email, your browser history, etc.? If you do
not have control over this process, then how can you enforce your own
moral right to privacy? For instance Alan Westin argued in the very
early decades of the advance of digital information technologies that
control of access to one's personal information was the key to
maintaining privacy (Westin, 1967). It follows that if we care about
privacy, then we should give all the control of access to personal
information to the individual. Most corporate entities resist this
notion for the simple reason that information about users has become a
primary commodity in the digital world boosting the vast fortunes of
corporations like Google or Facebook. Indeed, there is a great deal of
utility each of us gains from the services provided by internet search
companies like Google and social networks such as Facebook. It might
be argued that it is actually a fair exchange we receive since they
provide search results and other applications for free and they offset
the cost of creating those valuable serviced by collecting data from
individual user behavior that can be monetized in various lucrative
ways. A major component of the profit model for these companies is
based on directed advertising where the information collected on the
user is used to help identify advertising that will be most effective
on a particular user based on his or her search history and other
online behaviors. Simply by using the free applications offered, each
user tacitly agrees to give up some amount of privacy that varies with
the applications they are using. Even if we were to agree that there
is some utility to the services users receive in this exchange, there
are still many potential moral problems with this arrangement. If we
follow the argument raised by Westin earlier that privacy is
equivalent to information control (ibid.), then we do seem to be
ceding our privacy away little by little given that we have almost no
control or even much understanding of the vast amounts of digital
information that is collected about us.



There is a counterargument to this. Herman Tavani and James Moor
(2004) argue that in some cases giving the user more control of their
information may actually result in greater loss of privacy. Their
primary argument is that no one can actually control all of the
information about oneself that is produced every day by our
activities. If we focus only on the fraction of it that we can
control, we lose sight of the vast mountains of data we cannot (Tavani
and Moor, 2004). Tavani and Moor argue that privacy must be recognized
by the third parties that do control your information and only if
those parties have a commitment to protecting user privacy, will we
actually acquire any privacy worth having. Towards this end, they
suggest that we think in terms of restricted access to information
rather than strict personal control of information (ibid).



Information security is another important moral value that impacts the
communication and access of user information. If we grant the control
of our information to third parties in exchange for the services they
provide, then these entities must also be responsible for restricting
the access to that information by others who might use it to harm us
(See Epstein 2007; Magnani 2007; Tavani 2007). With enough
information, a person's entire identity can be stolen and used to
facilitate fraud and larceny. This type of crime has grown rapidly
since the advent of digital information technologies. The victims of
these crimes can have their lives ruined as they try to rebuild such
things as their credit rating and bank accounts. This has led to the
design of computer systems that are more difficult to access and the
growth of a new industry dedicated to securing computer systems. Even
with these efforts the economic and social impact of cybercrime is
growing at a staggering rate. In February of 2018 the cyber-security
company McAfee released a report that estimated the world cost in
cybercrime was up from $445 billion in 2014 to $608 billion dollars or
0.8 of the global GDP in 2018, and that is not counting the hidden
costs of increased friction and productivity loss in time spent trying
to fight cybercrime (McAfee 2018). 



The difficulty in obtaining complete digital security rests on the
fact that the moral value of security can be in conflict with the
moral values of sharing and openness, and it is these later values
that guided many of the early builders of information technology.
Steven Levy (1984) describes in his book, "Hackers: Heroes of
the Computer Revolution," a kind of "Hacker ethic,"
that includes the idea that computers should be freely accessible and
decentralized in order to facilitate "world improvement"
and further social justice (Levy 1984; see also Markoff 2005). So it
seems that information technology has a strong dissonance created in
the competing values of security and openness that is worked right
into the design of these technologies and this is all based on the
competing moral values held by the various people who designed the
technologies themselves. 



This conflict in values has been debated by philosophers. While many
of the hackers interviewed by Levy argue that hacking is not as
dangerous as it seems and that it is mostly about gaining access to
hidden knowledge of how information technology systems work, Eugene
Spafford counters that no computer break-in is entirely harmless and
that the harm precludes the possibility of ethical hacking except in
the most extreme cases (Spafford 2007). Kenneth Himma largely agrees
that the activity of computer hacking is unethical but that
politically motivated hacking or "Hacktivism" may have
some moral justification, though he is hesitant to give his complete
endorsement of the practice due to the largely anonymous nature of the
speech entailed by the hacktivist protests (Himma 2007b). Mark Manion
and Abby Goodrum agree that hacktivism could be a special case of
ethical hacking but warn that it should proceed in accordance to the
moral norms set by the acts of civil disobedience that marked the
twentieth century or risk being classified as online terrorism (Manion
and Goodrum 2007). 



A very similar value split plays out in other areas as well,
particularly in the field of intellectual property rights (see entry
on
 intellectual property/)
 and pornography and censorship (see entry on
 pornography and censorship).
 What information technology adds to these long standing moral debates
is the nearly effortless access to information that others might want
to control such as intellectual property, dangerous information and
pornography (Floridi 1999), as well as providing technological
anonymity for both the user and those providing access to the
information in question (Nissenbaum 1999; Sullins 2010). For example,
even though cases of bullying and stalking occur regularly, the
anonymous and remote actions of cyber-bullying and cyberstalking make
these behaviors much easier and the perpetrator less likely to be
caught. Given that information technologies can make these unethical
behaviors more likely, then it can be argued that the design of
cyberspace itself tacitly promotes unethical behavior (Adams 2002;
Grodzinsky and Tavani 2002). Since the very design capabilities of
information technology influence the lives of their users, the moral
commitments of the designers of these technologies may dictate the
course society will take and our commitments to certain moral values
will then be determined by technologists (Brey 2010; Bynum 2000; Ess
2009; Johnson 1985; Magnani 2007; Moor 1985; Spinello 2001; Sullins
2010).



Assuming we are justified in granting access to some store of
information that we may be in control of, there is a duty to ensure
that that information is truthful, accurate, and useful. A simple
experiment will show that information technologies might have some
deep problems in this regard. Load a number of different search
engines and then type the same search terms in each of them, each will
present different results and some of these searches will vary widely
from one another. This shows that each of these services uses a
different proprietary algorithm for presenting the user with results
from their search. It follows then that not all searches are equal and
the truthfulness, accuracy, and usefulness of the results will depend
greatly on which search provider you are using and how much user
information is shared with this provider. All searches are filtered by
various algorithms in order to ensure that the information the search
provider believes is most important to the user is listed first. Since
these algorithms are not made public and are closely held trade
secrets, users are placing a great deal of trust in this filtering
process. The hope is that these filtering decisions are morally
justifiable but it is difficult to know. A simple example is found in
"clickjacking." If we are told a link will take us to one location on
the web yet when we click it we are taken to some other place, the
user may feel that this is a breach of trust. This is often called
"clickjacking" and malicious software can clickjack a
browser by taking the user to some other site than what is expected;
it will usually be rife with other links that pay the clickjacker for
bringing traffic to them (Hansen and Grossman, 2008). Again the
anonymity and ease of use that information technology provides can
facilitate deceitful practices such as clickjacking. Pettit (2009)
suggests that this should cause us to reevaluate the role that moral
values such as trust and reliance play in a world of information
technology. Anonymity and the ability to hide the authors of news
reports online has contributed to the raise of "fake news" or
propaganda of various sorts posing as legitimate news. This is a
significant problem and will be discussed in section (2.2.3) below



Lastly in this section we must address the impact that the access to
information has on social justice. Information technology was largely
developed in the Western industrial societies during the twentieth
century. But even today the benefits of this technology have not
spread evenly around the world and to all socioeconomic demographics.
Certain societies and social classes have little to no access to the
information easily available to those in more well off and in
developed nations, and some of those who have some access have that
access heavily censored by their own governments. This situation has
come to be called the "digital divide," and despite
efforts to address this gap it may be growing wider. It is worth
noting that as the cost of smart phones decreases these technologies
are giving some access to the global internet to communities that have
been shut out before (Poushter 2016). While much of this gap is
driven by economics (see Warschauer 2003), Charles Ess notes that
there is also a problem with the forces of a new kind of cyber enabled
colonialism and ethnocentrism that can limit the desire of those
outside the industrial West to participate in this new "Global
Metropolis" (Ess 2009). John Weckert also notes that cultural
differences in giving and taking offence play a role in the design of
more egalitarian information technologies (Weckert 2007). Others argue
that basic moral concerns like privacy are weighed differently in
Asian cultures (Hongladarom 2008; Lu 2005).


#### 2.1.3 Moral Values in Organizing and Synthesizing Information



In addition to storing and communicating information, many information
technologies automate the organizing of information as well as
synthesizing or mechanically authoring or acting on new information.
Norbert Wiener first developed a theory of automated information
synthesis which he called *Cybernetics* (Wiener 1961 [1948]).
Wiener realized that a machine could be designed to gather information
about the world, derive logical conclusions about that information
which would imply certain actions, which the machine could then
implement, all without any direct input form a human agent. Wiener
quickly saw that if his vision of cybernetics was realized, there
would be tremendous moral concerns raised by such machines and he
outlined some of them in his book *the Human Use of Human
Beings* (Wiener 1950). Wiener argued that, while this sort of
technology could have drastic moral impacts, it was still possible to
be proactive and guide the technology in ways that would increase the
moral reasoning capabilities of both humans and machines (Bynum
2008).



Machines make decisions that have moral impacts. Wendell Wallach and
Colin Allen tell an anecdote in their book "Moral
Machines" (2008). One of the authors left on a vacation and when
he arrived overseas his credit card stopped working, perplexed, he
called the bank and learned that an automatic anti-theft program had
decided that there was a high probability that the charges he was
trying to make were from someone stealing his card and that in order
to protect him the machine had denied his credit card transactions.
Here we have a situation where a piece of information technology was
making decisions about the probability of nefarious activity happening
that resulted in a small amount of harm to the person that it was
trying to help. Increasingly, machines make important life changing
financial decisions about people without much oversight from human
agents. Whether or not you will be given a credit card, mortgage loan,
the price you will have to pay for insurance, etc., is very often
determined by a machine. For instance if you apply for a credit card,
the machine will look for certain data points, like your salary, your
credit record, the economic condition of the area you reside in, etc.,
and then calculate the probability that you will default on your
credit card. That probability will either pass a threshold of
acceptance or not and determine whether or not you are given the card.
The machine can typically learn to make better judgments given the
results of earlier decisions it has made. This kind of machine
learning and prediction is based on complex logic and mathematics (see
for example, Russell and Norvig 2010), this complexity may result in
slightly humorous examples of mistaken predictions as told in the
anecdote above, or it might be more eventful. For example, the program
may interpret the data regarding the identity of one's friends and
acquaintances, his or her recent purchases, and other readily
available social data, which might result in the mistaken
classification of that person as a potential terrorist, thus altering
that person's life in a powerfully negative way (Sullins 2010). It all
depends on the design of the learning and prediction algorithm,
something that is typically kept secret, so that it is hard to justify
the veracity of the prediction.


### 2.2 The Moral Paradox of Information Technologies



Several of the issues raised above result from the moral paradox of
Information technologies. Many users want information to be quickly
accessible and easy to use and desire that it should come at as low a
cost as possible, preferably free. But users also want important and
sensitive information to be secure, stable and reliable. Maximizing
our value of quick and low cost minimizes our ability to provide
secure and high quality information and the reverse is true also. Thus
the designers of information technologies are constantly faced with
making uncomfortable compromises. The early web pioneer Stewart Brand
sums this up well in his famous quote:



> 
> 
> In fall 1984, at the first Hackers' Conference, I said in one
> discussion session: "On the one hand information wants to be
> expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the
> right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information
> wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower
> and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each
> other" (Clarke 2000--see Other Internet
>  Resources)[1]
> 
> 
> 
> 



Since these competing moral values are essentially impossible to
reconcile, they are likely to continue to be at the heart of moral
debates in the use and design of information technologies for the
foreseeable future.


## 3. Specific Moral Challenges at the Cultural Level



In the section above, the focus was on the moral impacts of
information technologies on the individual user. In this section, the
focus will be on how these technologies shape the moral landscape at
the societal level. At the turn of the twentieth century the term
"web 2.0" began to surface and it referred to the new way
that the world wide web was being used as a medium for information
sharing and collaboration as well as a change in the mindset of web
designers to include more interoperability and user-centered
experiences on their websites. This term has also become associated
with "social media" and "social networking."
While the original design of the World Wide Web in 1989 by its creator
Tim Berners-Lee was always one that included notions of meeting others
and collaborating with them online, users were finally ready to fully
exploit those capabilities by 2004 when the first Web 2.0 conference
was held by O'Reilly Media (O'Reilly 2007 [2005]). 
This change has meant that a growing number of people have
begun to spend significant portions of their lives online with other
users experiencing a new unprecedented lifestyle. Social networking is
an important part of many people's lives worldwide. Vast numbers of
people congregate on sites like Facebook and interact with friends old
and new, real and virtual. The Internet offers the immersive
experience of interacting with others in virtual worlds where
environments are constructed entirely out of information. Just now,
emerging onto the scene are technologies that will allow us to merge
the real and the virtual. This new form of "augmented
reality" is facilitated by the fact that many people now carry
GPS enabled smart phones and other portable computers with them upon
which they can run applications that let them interact with their
surroundings and their computers at the same time, perhaps looking at
an item though the camera in their device and the "app"
calling up information about that entity and displaying it in a bubble
above the item. Each of these technologies comes with their own suite
of new moral challenges some of which will be discussed below.


### 3.1 Social Media and Networking



Social networking is a term given to sites and applications which
facilitate online social interactions that typically focus on sharing
information with other users referred to as "friends." The
most famous of these sites today is Facebook but there are many
others, such as Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, to name just a few.
There are a number of moral values that these sites call into
question. Shannon Vallor (2011, 2016) has reflected on how sites like
Facebook change or even challenge our notion of friendship. Her
analysis is based on the Aristotelian theory of friendship (see entry
on
 Aristotle's ethics).
Aristotle argued that humans realize a good and true life though
virtuous friendships. Vallor notes that four key dimensions of
Aristotle's 'virtuous friendship,' namely:
reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life, and that the
first three are found in online social media in ways that can
sometimes strengthen friendship (Vallor 2011, 2016). Yet she argues
that social media is not yet up to the task of facilitating what
Aristotle calls 'the shared life.' Meaning that social
media can give us shared activities but not the close intimate
friendship that shared daily lives can give. (Here is a more complete
discussion of Aristotelian friendship).
Thus these media cannot fully support the Aristotelian notion of
complete and virtuous friendship by themselves (Vallor 2011). Vallor
also has a similar analysis of other Aristotelian virtues such as
patience, honesty, and empathy and their problematic application in
social media (Vallor 2010). Vallor has gone on to argue that both the
users and designers of information technologies need to develop a new
virtue that she terms "technomoral wisdom" which can help
us foster better online communities and friendships (Vallor,
2016).



Johnny Hartz Soraker (2012) argues for a nuanced understanding
of online friendship rather than a rush to normative judgement on the
virtues of virtual friends.



Privacy issues abound in the use of social media. James Parrish
following Mason (1986) recommends four policies that a user of social
media should follow to ensure proper ethical concern for other's
privacy:


1. When sharing information on SNS (social network sites), it is not
only necessary to consider the privacy of one's personal information,
but the privacy of the information of others who may be tied to the
information being shared.
2. When sharing information on SNS, it is the responsibility of the
one desiring to share information to verify the accuracy of the
information before sharing it.
3. A user of SNS should not post information about themselves that
they feel they may want to retract at some future date. Furthermore,
users of SNS should not post information that is the product of the
mind of another individual unless they are given consent by that
individual. In both cases, once the information is shared, it may be
impossible to retract.
4. It is the responsibility of the SNS user to determine the
authenticity of a person or program before allowing the person or
program access to the shared information. (Parrish 2010)



These systems are not normally designed to explicitly infringe on
individual privacy, but since these services are typically free there
is a strong economic drive for the service providers to harvest at
least some information about their user's activities on the site in
order to sell that information to advertisers for directed marketing.
This marketing can be done with the provider just selling access to
users' data that has been made anonymous, so that the advertiser knows
that the user may be likely to buy a pair of jeans but they do not be
given the exact identity of that person. In this way a social network
provider can try to maintain the moral value of privacy for its users
while still profiting off of linking them with advertisers.


#### 3.1.1 Online Games and Worlds



The first moral impact one encounters when contemplating online games
is the tendency for these games to portray violence, sexism, and
sexual violence. There are many news stories that claim a cause and
effect relationship between violence in computer games and real
violence. The claim that violence in video games has a causal
connection to actual violence has been strongly critiqued by the
social scientist Christopher J. Ferguson (Ferguson 2007). However,
Mark Coeckelbergh argues that since this relationship is tenuous at
best and that the real issue at hand is the effect these games have on
one's moral character (Coeckelbergh 2007). But Coeckelbergh
goes on to claim that computer games could be designed to facilitate
virtues like empathy and cosmopolitan moral development, thus he is
not arguing against all games just those where the violence inhibits
moral growth (Coeckelbergh 2007). A good example of this might be the
virtual reality experience that was designed by Planned Parenthood in
2017, "...which focuses on the experience of accessing abortion in
America, positively influences the way viewers feel about the
harassment that many patients, providers, and health center staff
experience from opponents of safe, legal abortion" (Planned
Parenthood, 2017).



Marcus Schulzke (2010) defends the depiction of violence in video
games. Schulzke's main claim is that actions in a virtual world are
very different from actions in the real world. Although a player may
"kill" another player in a virtual world, the offended
player is instantly back in the game and the two will almost certainly
remain friends in the real world. Thus virtual violence is very
different from real violence, a distinction that gamers are
comfortable with (Schulzke 2010). While virtual violence may seem
palatable to some, Morgan Luck (2009) seeks a moral theory that might
be able to allow the acceptance of virtual murder but that will not
extend to other immoral acts such as pedophilia. Christopher Bartel
(2011) is less worried about the distinction Luck attempts to draw;
Bartel argues that virtual pedophilia is real child pornography, which
is already morally reprehensible and illegal across the globe.



While violence is easy to see in online games, there is a much more
substantial moral value at play and that is the politics of virtual
worlds. Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace describe the initial moves to
online political culture in their book, *The Second Life Herald:
The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse*
(2007). Ludlow and Wallace chronicle how the players in massive online
worlds have begun to form groups and guilds that often confound the
designers of the game and are at times in conflict with those that
make the game. Their contention is that designers rarely realize that
they are creating a space where people intended to live large portions
of their lives and engage in real economic and social activity and
thus the designers have the moral duties somewhat equivalent to those
who may write a political constitution (Ludlow and Wallace 2007).
According to Purcell (2008), there is little commitment to democracy
or egalitarianism by those who create and own online games and this needs to be discussed, if more and
more of us are going to spend time living in these virtual societies.


#### 3.1.2 The Lure of the Virtual in Game Worlds



A persistent concern about the use of computers and especially
computer games is that this could result in anti-social behavior and
isolation. Yet studies might not support these hypotheses (Gibba, et
al. 1983). With the advent of massively multiplayer games as well as
video games designed for families the social isolation hypothesis is
even harder to believe. These games do, however, raise gender equality
issues. James Ivory used online reviews of games to complete a study
that shows that male characters outnumber female characters in games
and those female images that are in games tend to be overly sexualized
(Ivory 2006). Soukup (2007) suggests that gameplay in these virtual
worlds is most often based on gameplay that is oriented to masculine
styles of play thus potentially alienating women players. And those
women that do participate in game play at the highest level play roles
in gaming culture that are very different from those the largely
heterosexual white male gamers, often leveraging their sexuality to
gain acceptance (Taylor et al. 2009). Additionally, Joan M. McMahon
and Ronnie Cohen have studied how gender plays a role in the making of
ethical decisions in the virtual online world, with women more likely
to judge a questionable act as unethical then men (2009). Marcus
Johansson suggests that we may be able to mitigate virtual immorality
by punishing virtual crimes with virtual penalties in order to foster
more ethical virtual communities (Johansson 2009). 



The media has raised moral concerns about the way that childhood has
been altered by the use of information technology (see for example
Jones 2011). Many applications are now designed specifically for
babies and toddlers with educational applications or just
entertainment to help keep the children occupied while their parents
are busy. This encourages children to interact with computers from as
early an age as possible. Since children may be susceptible to media
manipulation such as advertising we have to ask if this practice is
morally acceptable or not. Depending on the particular application
being used, it may encourage solitary play that may lead to isolation
but others are more engaging with both the parents and the children
playing (Siraj-Blatchford 2010). It should also be noted that
pediatricians have advised that there are no known benefits to early
media use amongst young children but there potential risks (Christakis
2009). Studies have shown that from 1998 to 2008, sedentary lifestyles
amongst children in England have resulted in the first measured
decline in strength since World War Two (Cohen et al. 2011). It is not
clear if this decline is directly attributable to information
technology use but it may be a contributing factor. In 2018 the
American Academy of Pediatrics released some simple guidelines for
parents who may be trying to set realistic limits on this activity
 (Tips from the American Academy of Pediatrics).


#### 3.1.3 The Technological Transparency Paradox



One may wonder why social media services tend to be free to use, but
none the less, often make fabulous profits for the private companies
that offer these services. It is no deep secret that the way these
companies make profit is through the selling of information that the
users are uploading to the system as they interact with it. The more
users, and the more information that they provide, the greater the
value that aggregating that information becomes. Mark Zuckerberg
stated his philosophical commitment to the social value of this in his
letter to shareholders from February 1, 2012: 



> 
> 
> At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people
> they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending
> people's capacity to build and maintain relationships. People
> sharing more - even if just with their close friends or families
> - creates a more open culture and leads to a better
> understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that
> this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between
> people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of
> diverse perspectives. By helping people form these connections, we
> hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think
> the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social
> graph "a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer,
> rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to
> date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share
> is a fundamental principle of this rewiring" (Facebook, Inc.,
> 2012). 
> 
> 
> 



The social value of perusing this is debatable, but the economic value
has been undeniable. At the time this was written, Mark Zuckerberg has
been constantly listed in the top ten richest billionaires by Forbes
Magazine where he is typically in the top five of that rarefied group.
An achievement built on providing a free service to the world. What
companies like Facebook do charge for are services, such as directed
advertising, which allow third party companies to access information
that users have provided to the social media applications. The result
is that ads bought on an application such as Facebook are more likely
to be seen as useful to viewers who are much more likely to click on
these ads and buy the advertised products. The more detailed and
personal the information shared, the more valuable it will be to the
companies that it is shared with. This radical transparency of sharing
deeply personal information with companies like Facebook is
encouraged. Those who do use social networking technologies do receive
value as evidenced by the rapid growth of this technology. Statista
reports that in 2019 there will be 2.77 billion users of social media
worldwide and it will grow to 3.02 by 2021 (Statista, 2018). The
question here is, what do we give up in order to receive this
"free" service? In 2011, back when there were less than a billion
social media users the technology critic Andrew Keen warned that,
"sharing is a trap," and that there was a kind of cult of radical
transparency developing that clouded our ability to think critically
about the kind of power we were giving these companies (Keen, 2011).
Even before companies like Facebook were making huge profits, there
were those warning of the dangers of the cult of transparency with
warning such as: 



> 
> 
> ...it is not surprising that public distrust has grown in the very
> years in which openness and transparency have been so avidly pursued.
> Transparency destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception and
> deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust. If we
> want to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies, rather
> than secrecy. (O'Neill, 2002) 
> 
> 
> 



In the case of Facebook we can see that some of the warnings of the
critics were prescient. In April of 2018, Mark Zuckerberg was called
before congress where he apologized for the actions of his corporation
in a scandal that involved divulging a treasure trove of information
about his users to an independent researcher, who then sold it to
Cambridge Analytica, which was a company involved in political data
analysis. This data was then used to target political ads to the users
of Facebook. Many of which were fake ads created by Russian
intelligence to disrupt the US election in 2016 (Au-Yeung, 2018).



The philosopher Shannon Vallor critiques the cult of transparency as a
version of what she calls the "Technological Transparency
Paradox" (Vallor, 2016). She notes that those in favor of
developing technologies to promote radically transparent societies, do
so under the premise that this openness will increase accountability
and democratic ideals. But the paradox is that this cult of
transparency often achieves just the opposite with large unaccountable
organizations that are not democratically chosen holding information
that can be used to weaken democratic societies. This is due to the
asymmetrical relationship between the user and the companies with whom
she shares all the data of her life. The user is, indeed radically
open and transparent to the company, but the algorithms used to mine
the data and the 3rd parties that this data is shared with is opaque
and not subject to accountability. We, the users of these
technologies, are forced to be transparent but the companies profiting
off our information are not required to be equally transparent. 


### 3.3 Malware, Spyware and Informational Warfare



Malware and computer virus threats continue to grow at an astonishing
rate. Security industry professionals report that while certain types
of malware attacks such as spam are falling out of fashion, newer
types of attacks such as Ransomware and other methods focused on
mobile computing devices, cryptocurrency, and the hacking of cloud
computing infrastructure are on the rise outstripping any small relief
seen in the slowing down of older forms of attack (Cisco Systems
2018; Kaspersky Lab 2017, McAfee 2018, Symantec 2018). What is clear is
that this type of activity will be with us for the foreseeable
future. In addition to the largely criminal activity of malware
production, we must also consider the related but more morally
ambiguous activities of hacking, hacktivism, commercial spyware, and
informational warfare. Each of these topics has its own suite of
subtle moral ambiguities. We will now explore some of them here. 



While there may be wide agreement that the conscious spreading of
malware is of questionable morality there is an interesting question
as to the morality of malware protection and anti-virus software. With
the rise in malicious software there has been a corresponding growth
in the security industry which is now a multibillion dollar market.
Even with all the money spent on security software there seems to be
no slowdown in virus production, in fact quite the opposite has
occurred. This raises an interesting business ethics concern; what
value are customers receiving for their money from the security
industry? The massive proliferation of malware has been shown to be
largely beyond the ability of anti-virus software to completely
mitigate. There is an important lag in the time between when a new
piece of malware is detected by the security community and the
eventual release of the security patch and malware removal tools.



> 
> 
> The anti-virus modus operandi of receiving a sample, analyzing the
> sample, adding detection for the sample, performing quality assurance,
> creating an update, and finally sending the update to their users
> leaves a huge window of opportunity for the adversary ... even
> assuming that anti-virus users update regularly. (Aycock and Sullins
> 2010)
> 
> 
> 

 This lag is constantly exploited by malware producers
and in this model there is an ever-present security hole that is
impossible to fill. Thus it is important that security professionals
do not overstate their ability to protect systems, by the time a new
malicious program is discovered and patched, it has already done
significant damage and there is currently no way to stop this (Aycock
and Sullins 2010).


In the past most malware creation was motivated by hobbyists and
amateurs, but this has changed and now much of this activity is
criminal in nature (Cisco Systems 2018; Kaspersky Lab 2017, McAfee
2018, Symantec 2018). Aycock and Sullins (2010) argue that relying on
a strong defense is not enough and the situation requires a
counteroffensive reply as well and they propose an ethically motivated
malware research and creation program. This is not an entirely new
idea and it was originally suggested by the Computer Scientist George
Ledin in his editorial for the *Communications of the ACM*,
"Not Teaching Viruses and Worms is Harmful" (2005). This
idea does run counter to the majority opinion regarding the ethics of
learning and deploying malware. Many computer scientists and
researchers in information ethics agree that all malware is unethical
(Edgar 2003; Himma 2007a; Neumann 2004; Spafford 1992; Spinello
2001). According to Aycock and Sullins, these worries can be mitigated
by open research into understanding how malware is created in order to
better fight this threat (2010).



When malware and spyware is created by state actors, we enter the
world of informational warfare and a new set of moral concerns. Every
developed country in the world experiences daily cyber-attacks, with
the major target being the United States that experiences a purported
1.8 billion attacks a month in 2010 (Lovely 2010) and 80 billion
malicious scans world wide in 2017 (McAfee 2018). The majority of
these attacks seem to be just probing for weaknesses but they can
devastate a countries internet such as the cyber-attacks on Estonia in
2007 and those in Georgia which occurred in 2008. While the Estonian
and Georgian attacks were largely designed to obfuscate communication
within the target countries more recently informational warfare has
been used to facilitate remote sabotage. The famous Stuxnet virus used
to attack Iranian nuclear centrifuges is perhaps the first example of
weaponized software capable of creating remotely damaging physical
facilities (Cisco Systems 2018). The coming decades will likely see
many more cyber weapons deployed by state actors along well-known
political fault lines such as those between Israel-America-western
Europe vs Iran, and America-Western Europe vs China (Kaspersky Lab
2018). The moral challenge here is to determine when these attacks are
considered a severe enough challenge to the sovereignty of a nation to
justify military reactions and to react in a justified and ethical
manner to them (Arquilla 2010; Denning 2008, Kaspersky Lab 2018).



The primary moral challenge of informational warfare is determining
how to use weaponized information technologies in a way that honors
our commitments to just and legal warfare. Since warfare is already a
morally questionable endeavor it would be preferable if information
technologies could be leveraged to lessen violent combat. For
instance, one might argue that the Stuxnet virus used undetected from
2005 to 2010 did damage to Iranian nuclear weapons programs that in
generations before might have only been accomplished by an air raid or
other kinetic military action that would have incurred significant
civilian casualties--and that so far there have been no reported
human casualties resulting from Stuxnet. Thus malware might lessen the
amount of civilian casualties in conflict. The malware known as
"Flame" is an interesting case of malware that evidence
suggests was designed to aid in espionage. One might argue that more
accurate information given to decision makers during wartime should
help them make better decisions on the battlefield. On the other hand,
these new informational warfare capabilities might allow states to
engage in continual low level conflict eschewing efforts for
peacemaking which might require political compromise.


### 3.4 Future Concerns



As was mentioned in the introduction above, information technologies
are in a constant state of change and innovation. The internet
technologies that have brought about so much social change were
scarcely imaginable just decades before they appeared. Even though we
may not be able to foresee all possible future information
technologies, it is important to try to imagine the changes we are
likely to see in emerging technologies. James Moor argues that moral
philosophers need to pay particular attention to emerging technologies
and help influence the design of these technologies early on to
encourage beneficial moral outcomes (Moor 2005). The following
sections contain some potential technological concerns.


#### 3.4.1 Acceleration of Change



An information technology has an interesting growth pattern that has
been observed since the founding of the industry. Intel engineer
Gordon E. Moore noticed that the number of components that could be
installed on an integrated circuit doubled every year for a minimal
economic cost and he thought it might continue that way for another
decade or so from the time he noticed it in 1965 (Moore 1965). History
has shown his predictions were rather conservative. This doubling of
speed and capabilities along with a halving of costs to produce it has
roughly continued every eighteen months since 1965 and is likely to
continue. This phenomenon is not limited to computer chips and can
also be found in many different forms of information technologies. The
potential power of this accelerating change has captured the
imagination of the noted inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. He has
famously predicted that if this doubling of capabilities continues and
more and more technologies become information technologies, then there
will come a point in time where the change from one generation of
information technology to the next will become so massive that it will
change everything about what it means to be human. Kurzweil has named
this potential event "the Singularity" at which time he
predicts that our technology will allow us to become a new post human
species (2006). If this is correct, there could be no more profound
change to our moral values. There has been some support for this
thesis from the technology community with institutes such as 
 
the Acceleration Studies Foundation, Future of Humanity Institute, and
 H+.[2]
 Reaction to this hypothesis from philosophers has been mixed but
largely critical. For example Mary Midgley (1992) argues that the
belief that science and technology will bring us immortality and
bodily transcendence is based on pseudoscientific beliefs and a deep
fear of death. In a similar vein Sullins (2000) argues that there is often a
quasi-religious aspect to the acceptance of transhumanism that is
committed to certain outcomes such as uploading of human consciousness
into computers as a way to achieve immortality, and that the
acceptance of the transhumanist hypothesis influences the values
embedded in computer technologies, which can be dismissive or hostile
to the human body. 



There are other cogent critiques of this argument but none as simple
as the realization that:



> 
> 
> ...there is, after all, a limit to how small things can get before
> they simply melt. Moore's Law no longer holds. Just because
> something grows exponentially for some time, does not mean that it
> will continue to do so forever... (Floridi, 2016). 
> 
> 
> 



While many ethical systems place a primary moral value on preserving
and protecting nature and the natural given world, transhumanists do
not see any intrinsic value in defining what is natural and what is not and
consider arguments to preserve some perceived natural state of the
human body as an unjustifiable obstacle to progress. Not all philosophers
are critical of transhumanism, as an example Nick Bostrom (2008) of
the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University argues that
putting aside the feasibility argument, we must conclude that there
are forms of posthumanism that would lead to long and worthwhile lives
and that it would be overall a very good thing for humans to become
posthuman if it is at all possible (Bostrom, 2008). 


#### 3.4.2 Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life



Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the many longstanding research
projects directed at building information technologies that exhibit
some or all aspects of human level intelligence and problem solving.
Artificial Life (ALife) is a project that is not as old as AI and is
focused on developing information technologies and or synthetic
biological technologies that exhibit life functions typically found
only in biological entities. A more complete description of logic and
AI can be found in the entry on
 logic and artificial intelligence.
 ALife essentially sees biology as a kind of naturally occurring
information technology that may be reverse engineered and synthesized
in other kinds of technologies. Both AI and ALife are vast research
projects that defy simple explanation. Instead the focus here is on
the moral values that these technologies impact and the way some of
these technologies are programmed to affect emotion and moral
concern.


##### 3.4.2.1 Artificial Intelligence



Alan Turing is credited with defining the research project that would
come to be known as Artificial Intelligence in his seminal 1950 paper
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence." He described the
"imitation game," where a computer attempts to fool a
human interlocutor that it is not a computer but another human (Turing
1948, 1950). In 1950, he made the now famous claim that



> 
> 
> I believe that in about fifty years' time.... one will be able to
> speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
> 
> 
> 



A description of the test and its implications to philosophy outside
of moral values can be found here (see entry on
 the Turing test).
Turing's prediction may have been overly ambitious and in fact
some have argued that we are nowhere near the completion of
Turing's dream. For example, Luciano Floridi (2011a) argues
that while AI has been very successful as a means of augmenting our
own intelligence, but as a branch of cognitive science interested in
intelligence production, AI has been a dismal disappointment. The
opposite opinion has also been argued and some claim that the Turing
Test has already been passed or at least that programmers are on the
verge of doing so. For instance it was reported by the BBC in 2014
that the Turing Test had been passed by a program that could convince
the judges that it was a 13 year old Ukrainian boy, but even so, many
experts remain skeptical (BBC 2014). 



For argument's sake, assume Turing is correct even if he is off in his
estimation of when AI will succeed in creating a machine that can
converse with you. Yale professor David Gelernter worries that that
there would be certain uncomfortable moral issues raised. "You
would have no grounds for treating it as a being toward which you have
moral duties rather than as a tool to be used as you like"
(Gelernter 2007). Gelernter suggests that consciousness is a
requirement for moral agency and that we may treat anything without it
in any way that we want without moral regard. Sullins (2006) counters
this argument by noting that consciousness is not required for moral
agency. For instance, nonhuman animals and the other living and
nonliving things in our environment must be accorded certain moral
rights, and indeed, any Turing capable AI would also have moral duties
as well as rights, regardless of its status as a conscious being
(Sullins 2006). 



AI is certainly capable of creating machines that can converse
effectively in simple ways with with human beings as evidenced by
Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, OK Goolge, etc. along with the many systems
that businesses use to automate customer service, but these are still
a ways away form having the natural kinds of unscripted conversations
humans have with one another. But that may not matter when it comes
to assessing the moral impact of these technologies. In addition,
there are still many other applications that use AI technology. Nearly
all of the information technologies we discussed above such as,
search, computer games, data mining, malware filtering, robotics,
etc., all utilize AI programming techniques. Thus AI will grow to be a
primary location for the moral impacts of information technologies.
Many governments and professional associations are now developing
ethical guidelines and standards to help shape this important
technology, on e good example is the Global Initiative on the Ethics
of Intelligent and Autonomous Systems (IEEE 2018).


##### 3.4.2.2 Artificial Life



Artificial Life (ALife) is an outgrowth of AI and refers to the use of
information technology to simulate or synthesize life functions. The
problem of defining life has been an interest in philosophy since its
founding. See the entry on
 life
 for a look at the concept of life and its philosophical
ramifications. If scientists and technologists were to succeed in
discovering the necessary and sufficient conditions for life and then
successfully synthesize it in a machine or through synthetic biology,
then we would be treading on territory that has significant moral
impact. Mark Bedau has been tracing the philosophical implications of
ALife for some time now and argues that there are two distinct forms
of ALife and each would thus have different moral effects if and when
we succeed in realizing these separate research agendas (Bedau 2004;
Bedau and Parke 2009). One form of ALife is completely computational
and is in fact the earliest form of ALife studied. ALife is inspired
by the work of the mathematician John von Neumann on self-replicating
cellular automata, which von Neumann believed would lead to a
computational understanding of biology and the life sciences (1966).
The computer scientist Christopher Langton simplified von Neumann's
model greatly and produced a simple cellular automata called
"Loops" in the early eighties and helped get the field off
the ground by organizing the first few conferences on Artificial Life
(1989). Artificial Life programs are quite different from AI programs.
Where AI is intent on creating or enhancing intelligence, ALife is
content with very simple minded programs that display life functions
rather than intelligence. The primary moral concern here is that these
programs are designed to self-reproduce and in that way resemble
computer viruses and indeed successful ALife programs could become as
malware vectors. The second form of ALife is much more morally
charged. This form of ALife is based on manipulating actual biological
and biochemical processes in such a way as to produce novel life forms
not seen in nature.



Scientists at the J. Craig Venter institute were able to synthesize an
artificial bacterium called JCVI-syn1.0 in May of 2010. While media
paid attention to this breakthrough, they tended to focus on the
potential ethical and social impacts of the creation of artificial
bacteria. Craig Venter himself launched a public relations campaign
trying to steer the conversation about issues relating to creating
life. This first episode in the synthesis of life gives us a taste of
the excitement and controversy that will be generated when more viable
and robust artificial protocells are synthesized. The ethical concerns
raised by Wet ALife, as this kind of research is called, are more
properly the jurisdiction of bioethics (see entry on
 theory and bioethics).
 But it does have some concern for us here in that Wet ALife is part
of the process of turning theories from the life sciences into
information technologies. This will tend to blur the boundaries
between bioethics and information ethics. Just as software ALife might
lead to dangerous malware, so too might Wet ALife lead to dangerous
bacteria or other disease agents. Critics suggest that there are
strong moral arguments against pursuing this technology and that we
should apply the precautionary principle here which states that if
there is any chance at a technology causing catastrophic harm, and
there is no scientific consensus suggesting that the harm will not
occur, then those who wish to develop that technology or pursue that
research must prove it to be harmless first (see Epstein 1980). Mark
Bedau and Mark Traint argue against a too strong adherence to the
precautionary principle by suggesting that instead we should opt for
moral courage in pursuing such an important step in human
understanding of life (2009). They appeal to the Aristotelian notion
of courage, not a headlong and foolhardy rush into the unknown, but a
resolute and careful step forward into the possibilities offered by
this research.


#### 3.4.3 Robotics and Moral Values



Information technologies have not been content to remain confined to
virtual worlds and software implementations. These technologies are
also interacting directly with us through robotics applications.
Robotics is an emerging technology but it has already produced a
number of applications that have important moral implications.
Technologies such as military robotics, medical robotics, personal
robotics and the world of sex robots are just some of the already
existent uses of robotics that impact on and express our moral
commitments (see, Anderson and Anderson 2011; Capurro and Nagenborg
2009; Lin et al. 2012, 2017).



There have already been a number of valuable contributions to the
growing fields of machine morality and robot ethics (roboethics). For
example, in Wallach and Allen's book *Moral Machines:
Teaching Robots Right from Wrong* (2010), the authors present
ideas for the design and programming of machines that can functionally
reason on moral questions as well as examples from the field of
robotics where engineers are trying to create machines that can behave
in a morally defensible way. The introduction of semi and fully
autonomous machines, (meaning machines that make decisions with little
or no human intervention), into public life will not be
simple. Towards this end, Wallach (2011) has also contributed to the
discussion on the role of philosophy in helping to design public
policy on the use and regulation of robotics.




Military robotics has proven to be one of the most ethically charged
robotics applications (Lin et al. 2008, 2013, Lin 2010; Strawser,
2013). Today these machines are largely remotely operated (telerobots)
or semi-autonomous, but over time these machines are likely to become
more and more autonomous due to the necessities of modern warfare
(Singer 2009). In the first decades of war in the 21st
century robotic weaponry has been involved in numerous killings of
both soldiers and noncombatants (Plaw 2013), and this fact alone is of
deep moral concern. Gerhard Dabringer has conducted numerous
interviews with ethicists and technologists regarding the implications
of automated warfare (Dabringer 2010). Many ethicists are cautious in
their acceptance of automated warfare with the provision that the
technology is used to enhance ethical conduct in war, for instance by
reducing civilian and military casualties or helping warfighters
follow International Humanitarian Law and other legal and ethical
codes of conduct in war (see Lin et al. 2008, 2013; Sullins 2009b),
but others have been highly skeptical of the prospects of an ethical
autonomous war due to issues like the risk to civilians and the ease
in which wars might be declared given that robots will be taking most
of the risk (Asaro 2008; Sharkey 2011).


## 4. Information Technologies of Morality



A key development in the realm of information technologies is that
they are not only the object of moral deliberations but they are also
beginning to be used as a tool in moral deliberation itself. Since
artificial intelligence technologies and applications are a kind of
automated problem solvers, and moral deliberations are a kind of
problem, it was only a matter of time before automated moral reasoning
technologies would emerge. This is still only an emerging technology
but it has a number of very interesting moral implications which will
be outlined below. The coming decades are likely to see a number of
advances in this area and ethicists need to pay close attention to
these developments as they happen. Susan and Michael Anderson have
collected a number of articles regarding this topic in their book,
*Machine Ethics* (2011), and Rocci Luppicini has a section of
his anthology devoted to this topic in the *Handbook of Research on
Technoethics* (2009).


### 4.1 Information Technology as a Model for Moral Discovery



Patrick Grim has been a longtime proponent of the idea that philosophy
should utilize information technologies to automate and illustrate
philosophical thought experiments (Grim et al. 1998; Grim 2004). Peter
Danielson (1998) has also written extensively on this subject
beginning with his book *Modeling Rationality, Morality, and
Evolution* with much of the early research in the computational
theory of morality centered on using computer models to elucidate the
emergence of cooperation between simple software AI or ALife agents
(Sullins 2005). 



Luciano Floridi and J. W. Sanders argue that information as it is used
in the theory of computation can serve as a powerful idea that can
help resolve some of the famous moral conundrums in philosophy such as
the nature of evil (1999, 2001). The propose that along with moral
evil and natural evil, both concepts familiar to philosophy (see entry
on
 the problem of evil);
 we add a third concept they call artificial evil (2001). Floridi and
Sanders contend that if we do this then we can see that the actions of
artificial agents



> 
> 
> ...to be morally good or evil can be determined even in the
> absence of biologically sentient participants and thus allows
> artificial agents not only to perpetrate evil (and for that matter
> good) but conversely to 'receive' or 'suffer
> from' it. (Floridi and Sanders 2001)
> 
> 
> 



Evil can then be equated with something like information dissolution,
where the irretrievable loss of information is bad and the
preservation of information is good (Floridi and Sanders 2001). This
idea can move us closer to a way of measuring the moral impacts of any
given action in an information environment.


### 4.2 Information Technology as a Moral System



Early in the twentieth century the American philosopher John Dewey
(see entry on
 John Dewey)
 proposed a theory of inquiry based on the instrumental uses of
technology. Dewey had an expansive definition of technology which
included not only common tools and machines but information systems
such as logic, laws and even language as well (Hickman 1990). Dewey
argued that we are in a 'transactional' relationship with
all of these technologies within which we discover and construct our
world (Hickman 1990). This is a helpful standpoint to take as it
allows us to advance the idea that an information technology of
morality and ethics is not impossible. As well as allowing us to take
seriously the idea that the relations and transactions between human
agents and those that exist between humans and their artifacts have
important ontological similarities. While Dewey could only dimly
perceive the coming revolutions in information technologies, his
theory is useful to us still because he proposed that ethics was not
only a theory but a practice and solving problems in ethics is like
solving problems in algebra (Hickman 1990). If he is right, then an
interesting possibility arises, namely the possibility that ethics and
morality are computable problems and therefore it should be possible
to create an information technology that can embody moral systems of
thought. 



In 1974 the philosopher Mario Bunge proposed that we take the notion
of a 'technoethics' seriously arguing that moral
philosophers should emulate the way engineers approach a problem.
Engineers do not argue in terms of reasoning by categorical
imperatives but instead they use:



> 
> 
> ... the forms If *A* produces *B*, and you value
> *B*, chose to do *A*, and If *A* produces
> *B* and *C* produces *D*, and you prefer
> *B* to *D*, choose *A* rather than *C*. In
> short, the rules he comes up with are based on fact and value, I
> submit that this is the way moral rules ought to be fashioned, namely
> as rules of conduct deriving from scientific statements and value
> judgments. In short ethics could be conceived as a branch of
> technology. (Bunge 1977, 103)
> 
> 
> 



Taking this view seriously implies that the very act of building
information technologies is also the act of creating specific moral
systems within which human and artificial agents will, at least
occasionally, interact through moral transactions. Information
technologists may therefore be in the business of creating moral
systems whether they know it or not and whether or not they want that
responsibility.


### 4.3 Informational Organisms as Moral Agents



The most comprehensive literature that argues in favor of the prospect
of using information technology to create artificial moral agents is
that of Luciano Floridi (1999, 2002, 2003, 2010b, 2011b), and Floridi
with Jeff W. Sanders (1999, 2001, 2004). Floridi (1999) recognizes
that issues raised by the ethical impacts of information technologies
strain our traditional moral theories. To relieve this friction he
argues that what is needed is a broader philosophy of information
(2002). After making this move, Floridi (2003) claims that information
is a legitimate environment of its own and that has its own intrinsic
value that is in some ways similar to the natural environment and in
other ways radically foreign but either way the result is that
information is on its own a thing that is worthy of ethical concern.
Floridi (2003) uses these ideas to create a theoretical model of moral
action using the logic of object oriented programming. 



His model has seven components; 1) the moral agent a, 2) the moral
patient *p* (or more appropriately, reagent), 3) the
interactions of these agents, 4) the agent's frame of
information, 5) the factual information available to the agent
concerning the situation that agent is attempting to navigate, 6) the
environment the interaction is occurring in, and 7) the situation in
which the interaction occurs (Floridi 2003, 3). Note that there is no
assumption of the ontology of the agents concerned in the moral
relationship modeled and these agents can be any mixture or artificial
or natural in origin (Sullins 2009a).



There is additional literature which critiques arguments such as
Floridi's with the hope of expanding the idea of automated moral
reasoning so that one can speak of many different types of automated
moral technologies form simple applications all the way to full moral
agents with rights and responsibilities similar to humans (Adam 2008;
Anderson and Anderson 2011; Johnson and Powers 2008; Schmidt 2007;
Wallach and Allen 2010).



While scholars recognize that we are still some time from creating
information technology that would be unequivocally recognized as an
artificial moral agent, there are strong theoretical arguments in
suggesting that automated moral reasoning is an eventual possibility
and therefore it is an appropriate area of study for those interested
in the moral impacts of information technologies.