Ethics in a Digital World - a summary of all papers
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Course
Ethics in a Digital World (E_BA_EDW)
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
This document summarizes the 10 papers that served as exam material for the course “Ethics in a Digital World” in the 22/23 academic year of the Digital Business & Innovation (MSc) course. The summary has an active form of writing and is therefore easy to read.
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Ethics in a Digital World (E_BA_EDW)
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Ethics in a Digital World
Summary of all papers
Table of contents
1. Normative Ethics........................................................................................3
Values.......................................................................................................................... 3
Norms.......................................................................................................................... 3
Virtues......................................................................................................................... 4
Utilitarianism................................................................................................................... 4
Jeremy Bentham.......................................................................................................... 4
Mill and the freedom principle.....................................................................................5
Criticism of utilitarianism.............................................................................................5
Kantian theory................................................................................................................ 6
The first categorical imperative...................................................................................6
The second categorical imperative..............................................................................6
Criticism....................................................................................................................... 6
Virtue Ethics.................................................................................................................... 6
Aristotle....................................................................................................................... 7
Criticism of virtue ethics.............................................................................................. 7
Distribution of responsibility........................................................................................... 7
Passive responsibility................................................................................................... 8
Active responsibility..................................................................................................... 8
Causes of the problem of many hands.........................................................................8
Distributing responsibility............................................................................................ 9
Responsibility and the law.............................................................................................. 9
Corporate liability and corporate social responsibility..................................................9
Responsibility in organizations........................................................................................9
2. Ethics or excellence? Conscience as a check on the unbalanced pursuit of
organizational goals.....................................................................................10
Three symptoms of the hazard: fixation, rationalization and detachment....................10
Convergence of the three symptoms.........................................................................10
Teleopathy.................................................................................................................... 10
Avoiding the hazard...................................................................................................... 10
3. New Corporate Responsibilities in the Digital Economy..............................11
CSR Foundations and Digital Technology......................................................................11
The internet and CSR.................................................................................................... 12
Established Discourses on Responsibility in the Digital Economy..................................12
New Areas of Responsibility in the Digital Economy......................................................12
Digital commodities, contractual agreements, and issues of ownership....................12
Exploitation of Immaterial Labour and Fair Distribution of Rewards...........................12
Access and Equality................................................................................................... 13
Labour, Use of Low Cost, and/or Artificial Intelligence................................................13
4. The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits....................13
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,5. The ethical debate about the gig economy: A review and critical analysis. . .14
Ethical debate relating to the new organization of work...............................................15
Ethical debate relating to the new nature of work........................................................15
Ethical debate relating to the new status of workers....................................................15
Misclassification: technological transformation and regulatory gaps.........................15
Discriminatory effects on gig workers........................................................................16
6. The ethical dangers and merits of predictive policing.................................16
Hypothetical Use Case: Predictive Crime Analytics for Policy Planning.........................17
7. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king: Knowledge brokerage in
the age of learning algorithms......................................................................17
Prior research on knowledge brokers............................................................................17
Brokering Learning Algorithms......................................................................................18
Findings........................................................................................................................ 18
Algorithmic Broker Acting as Messenger....................................................................18
Algorithmic Broker Acting as Interpreter....................................................................19
Algorithmic Broker Acting as Curator.........................................................................19
Discussion..................................................................................................................... 19
Creating New Knowledge Boundaries Through Algorithmic Brokerage Work.............20
Becoming Influential Curators Through Algorithmic Brokerage Work.........................20
8. Societal and ethical issues of digitization..................................................20
Societal and ethical issues............................................................................................ 21
Privacy....................................................................................................................... 21
Autonomy.................................................................................................................. 22
Security...................................................................................................................... 23
Balance of Power....................................................................................................... 24
Human dignity........................................................................................................... 25
Justice........................................................................................................................ 26
9. The ethics of crashes with self-driving cars: a roadmap, I...........................26
What to do about unavoidable crashes?.......................................................................27
The need for “ethics settings”...................................................................................27
An applied trolley problem?.......................................................................................27
Empirical ethics.......................................................................................................... 27
Traditional ethical theories........................................................................................28
10. The ethics of crashes with self-driving cars: A roadmap, II........................28
What should happen after a crash?...............................................................................28
Lessons from the literature........................................................................................28
Potential responsibility gaps and retribution gaps.....................................................28
Agency and human-robot collaborations....................................................................29
Crash-avoidance strategies...........................................................................................29
A duty to switch over to self-driving cars?.................................................................29
Responsible human-robot coordination within mixed traffic......................................29
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, 1. Normative Ethics
Royakkers
Three most important ethical theories: consequentialism, duty ethics and
virtue ethics.
Ethics is the systematic reflection on what is moral
Morality is the totality of opinions, decisions, and actions with which people
express what they think is good or right.
The study of ethics can be both of a descriptive or prescriptive nature.
Descriptive ethics is involved with the description of the existing morality,
including the description of customs and habits, opinions about good and evil,
responsible and irresponsible behaviour, and acceptable and unacceptable
action. Prescriptive or normative ethics takes matters a step further. Descriptive
ethics can discuss the morality without passing judgement. Normative ethics
judges morality, and considers the following main question: Do the norms and
values actually used conform to our ideas about how people should behave?
Central question to Normative Ethics: “What is a right opinion, decision, or
action?” To answer this question a judgement has to be made. This is a
normative judgement, as it says something about what ‘correct behaviour’ or a
‘right way of living’ is. Normative judgements are value judgements but not
factual judgements. Descriptive judgements are related to what is actually
the case, what was the case, or what will be the case. They are true or false.
The distinction between descriptive and normative judgements is not always
that easy. The statement ‘taking bribes is not allowed’ can be both a normative
and descriptive judgement.
Norms, values and virtues are the points of departure, respectively, for the
three primary normative theories.
Values
Values help us determine which goals or states of affairs are worth striving for.
Moral values are related to a good life and a just society, and have to be
distinguished from the preferences or interests of individual people. Moral values
are lasting convictions or matters that people feel should be strived for
in general and not just for themselves to be able to lead a good life or to
realize a just society. Think about justice, health, happiness and charity.
An intrinsic value is an objective in and of itself. An instrumental value is a
means to realizing an intrinsic value. For Scrooge McDuck (Dagobert Duck), the
value of money is intrinsic. For Mother Theresa, money was an instrumental
value to realize a higher end: helping the poor.
Norms
Norms are rules that prescribe what concrete actions are required,
permitted, or forbidden. Values are translated into rules, so that it is clear in
everyday life how we should act to achieve certain values. Think of our traffic
system to achieve safety, or specific laws to achieve peace. The difference
between values and norms can be described as follows. Values are abstract or
global ideas or objective that are strived for through certain types of behaviour; it
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