Globally, information technology (IT) is now ingrained in every aspect of people's existence. Internet, web, mobile phone applications, cloud computing, digital assistants, smartphones, and personal computers are just a few examples of the different shapes that technology can take. The list is constantly expanding as new technological advancements permeate every aspect of daily living. Multiple examples of it can be found in highly multiplayer online games, and new modes of interaction are being made possible by new technologies. IT is a system that accounts for, communicates with, combines, or arranges information at its most fundamental level (O'Brian, 2010). The project's focus is on using technology as an instrument for education.
Unfortunately, a comprehensive and difficult philosophical formulation is not readily available. Claude generated a landmark mathematical theory if communication by taking his experiences in telephone technologies and worked how numerical design recitation of syntactical information can be turned into a signal transmitted in a manner to mitigate noise. This concept describes the way IT works, but still, there is a broader concern to resolve to trace the effect of information technologies on moral values.
John Locke, an English philosopher in the 16th century, suggested that people communicate to acquire information about each other which in turn assist to meet our demands. Locke perception remains prevalent in the manner information communication technology is structured presently. Some ideas like perception are indivisible. The mind receives them passively or can act on simple ideas in the following ways. By combining various into one complex design, by comparing with each other and by abstracting multiple ideas from setting in the one that happens. With such operations, the mind can furnish itself with a probable unlimited complex ideas stock. This is significant in handling the information. IT has major complex ideas that need a leaner to incorporate ideas in the various ways.
The move from one set of prevailing information technologies to another is continuously morally incompatible. Socrates was a bit contentious to writing, and he never wrote anything down himself as he lived in the era of transition from oral tradition to writing down words into scrolls and books. Socrates argued against writing because his student Plato ignored him and wrote down in a dialogue known as Phaedrus. Socrates talks about a fable of an Egyptian God named Theuth who issues king Thamus the gift of writing, but the king was not pleased with the present. Socrates was adroit at quoting lines from poems and epics then placed them into conversations, fears that those who depend on writing will not be capable of genuinely comprehending and live by the words. Socrates believed that there is something immoral or false about writing. Books can offer information, but they cannot give you the wisdom you require to comprehend that information genuinely.
Contrariwise, in an oral tradition, you do not merely consult a library, you lived in a manifestation of information you know in your heart. Socrates believed reading a book is nowhere near as insightful as conversing with its author. Socrates criticism of writing is humorous at first glance, but the temptation to use recall and call it memory is getting more ubiquitous in the present information technologies. For instance, why learn anything when information is just an internet search away? To avoid Socrates fears, information technologies must do more than merely offering access to information but must also assist in fostering wisdom and understanding (Sandel, 2014).
We are currently in a world rich in data and the technology to record and store massive amounts of this information which is rapidly growing. The primary moral concern here is that when we gather, store and access data it is done in a just manner that anybody can see as fair and in the parties involved best interest. In such actions, Immanuel Kant Rule deontology can be applied. Kant believed that if everybody followed the absolute importance, we would have a moral system based on two paramount principles of universality and impartiality. The system will treat every person equally since the same rules will apply universally to all individuals. Kant believed it is morally wrong to engage in various actions and if one is obliged to carry out different action, then each moral agent is likewise obligated to perform that operation (Valentini, 2012).
Everybody generates massive amounts of information daily that could be recorded and stored as user data to be availed later when required. Kant significant guiding questions are “What can I know?"; "What must I do?” and "What may I hope?” Nonetheless, moral enigmas ascend when third parties do that collection, storage and use of our information with no acquaintance or done with only implied consent. The control information is power, and social institutions that have traditionally exercised power are corporations, banks, government agencies, healthcare officials, libraries, universities and religious organizations. The entities have access to stored information that offers them a particular amount of power over their clients and constituencies. Currently, every person has access to more of stored data without the need of using the traditional mediators of that information, the thus greater individual share of social power (Lessing, 2014).
One of the high values of current information technology is that it makes the recording tranquil and several cases it is done automatically. Presently, a growing number of persons enter biometric information like exercise patterns, calorie intake and blood pressure into applications structured to assist them to accomplish a healthier lifestyle. Such type of data collection could become more automated soon. There are present applications that employ the GPS tracking available in numerous phones to track the length and duration of a user walk or run.
When searching on the internet, the browser software records all sort of data on our visits to countless websites, which can, for example, make web pages load quicker next time when one visit them. The websites themselves use numerous means to record information when one’s computer has accessed them and might leave information bits in the machine which the site can use next visit. Various websites are capable of detecting which other sites one visited or which pages on the websites one spend the most time on. If a person were following you around the library noting down such kind of information one might find it hostile, but such type of behavior online takes place behind the scenes and is hardly detected by the casual user. Some professionals state that IT has eradicated the private sphere. For instance, Helen (2012), observed that physical barriers and inconvenience might have discouraged all. However, the most tenacious from ferreting out information, technology makes this accessible at the click of a button or a few dollars and since the time she wrote this the data gathering has become more automated and less expensive.
The last concern in information recording is that IT is now storing user data in the cloud means that the information is stored on a device remotely located from the user and not operated or owned by the user, but the data is accessible from everywhere the user happens to be on any device that person uses. This ease of availability has the outcome of making the relationship one has to one's data more unsubstantiated due to the uncertainty about the physical location of the data. Since personal information is critical paramount to protect, the third parties that provide cloud services require comprehending with the restraint of the trust the user is placing in them. For instance, if a person loads all the life photographs to services such as Flickr and they somehow lost or deleted, this could be a tragic error that may be repairable.
Rawls principle of social justice concerns social and institutions which mainly focused on equality. According to him, the social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions; the first is that is attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. Secondly, they are to be the most significant benefit of the least-advantaged society members. Rawls realized that a community could not avoid inequalities among people. Differences result from social class things one’s inherited characteristics, personal motivation and luck. With the application of Rawls principle of inequality the morally permissible means of treating people that information technology has indulged their privacy includes. First, prevention of harm. Unrestricted access by others to individual passwords, characteristics, and whereabouts is crucial as such information can be utilized to harm the data subject in various ways. Secondly, an information equality in which people are given the excellent position to negotiate contracts on the use of their data and have means to check if partners live up to the terms of the agreement. Besides, data protection laws, regulation, and governance should be present aimed to determine fair conditions for drafting contracts on personal data transmission, exchange and offering data subjects with checks, balances and redress guarantees.
There are privacy-enhancing technologies such as software tools that offer some form of privacy for their users. They include communication anonymizing tools like Tor and Freenet. These devices permit users to anonymously browse the web (Tor) or secretly share content. They employ some cryptographic tactics and security protocols to guarantee their goal of unidentified communication. Both tools use the property that various users use the system at the same time that provides one's secrecy (Sweeney, 2002). Messages are encrypted and routed along multiple diverse computers in Tor, thus obscuring the original message sender of the word. In Freenet, the content is stored in encrypted form from all system users. However, the users do not know what kind of material is stored since they do not have the needed decryption keys and this offer plausible deniability and privacy. The system can at any time retrieve the encrypted content and send it to various Freenet users. Another option for offering obscurity is the data anonymization via specialized software. Tools are present that remove patient names and decrease age information to intervals. Such records cannot be linked to an individual while the relevant parts of their data can be utilized for scientific or other intentions.
Kant believed that if everybody followed the absolute importance, we would have a moral system. Definition of technology includes common tools and machines as well as logic, laws, and language. There is transactional relationship will all these technologies within which people construct their world. This a useful perception to take as it permits people to advance the thought that an information technology of morality and ethics is possible. Besides, it allows people to take seriously the opinion that the relations and transactions between human agents and those that exist between human and their artifacts have significant ontological resemblances. Kant theory proposes that ethics is a theory as well as practice and solving the question in ethics. Namely, the likelihood that ethics and morality are computable problems it should be possible to create an information technology that embodies moral systems as though. Taking the view seriously indicates that the very act of building information technologies is an act of creating specific ethical systems within which human and artificial agents will occasionally interact via good transaction. Information technology might be in the business of building moral systems whether they know it or not and if or not they want that responsibility (Munson, 2012).
Rawls argues that the virtue of institutions is fairness. He assumes that people have to negotiate with each other under what he calls a veil of ignorance, e.g., without knowing their social and economic positions, their special interests in the community or even their capabilities and talents. This is a situation that all participants will agree on the most basic institutional society arrangements. Rawls considers institutions of a given society to be just if they arranged according to the principles that apparently could have consented upon by rational persons in the original position. The primary development in IT realm is that they are not only the object of moral deliberations but also the starting to be used as moral deliberation tool. Since IT applications are a form of automated problem solvers and ethical deliberations are a problem solver, it is only a matter of time before electronic moral reasoning technologies would combine (Rawls, Fried, Sen & Schelling, 1987). There will be an increasing number of advances in IT in the future and ethicists require paying close emphasis on these developments as they emerge.
The alternative concept in regards to Rawls is John Harsanyi who argues that the maximum principle would results in highly irrational decisions daily. This is enough reason to reject it as the decision rule suitable for the original position. This is so because the whole point about the concept of initial position is to imagine some persons ignorant of their situations and then to accept that under these circumstances of ignorance they would act rationally. Rawls considers in the original situation nobody is assumed to know what his position would be under any particular institutional arrangement. Thus he should consider the likelihood that he may end up as the worst-off individual in the society. Accordingly, a person must assess any possible instructional framework by recognizing the interest of the worst-off person in the community (John, 2015). The strategic advantage that it considers all the members of the society without acting on the veil of ignorance. The cons are that it does not think how a person will do when one does not know the situation.
Conclusively, the primary development in IT realm is that they are not only the object of moral deliberations but also the starting to be used as moral deliberation tool. Since IT applications are a form of automated problem solvers and ethical deliberations are a problem solver, it is only a matter of time before electronic moral reasoning technologies would combine. Information protection laws, regulation, and governance should be present aimed to determine fair conditions for drafting contracts on personal data transmission, exchange and offering data subjects with checks, balances and redress guarantees. Currently, every person has access to more of stored data without the need of using the traditional mediators of that information, the thus greater individual share of social power. John Harsanyi refuse to agree with Rawls by arguing that maximum principle would results in highly irrational decisions daily. This is enough reason to reject it as the decision rule suitable for the original position. This is so because the whole point about the concept of initial position is to imagine some persons ignorant of their situations and then to accept that under these circumstances of ignorance they would act rationally. Therefore, a person must assess any possible instructional framework by recognizing the interest of the worst-off person in the community
Work Cited
John Harsanyi. The Maxim principle critique, 2015. Retrieved from: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Harsanyi1975.pdf
Lessig, L. Code and Other Values of Cyberspace, 2014. New York: Basic Books.
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Sandel MJ. Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? 1st. London: Penguin Books; 2014. Pp. 1841 208.
Valentini, Laura. Ideal vs. Non-ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map, in Philosophical Compass, 2012: 7(9): 654–664.
