Summary Ethics and Technology 1
Inhoudsopgave
Week 1.......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Kevin Macnish - Just Surveillance? Towards a Normative Theory of Surveillance...............................................2
Judith Jarvis Thomson – The Right to Privacy......................................................................................................3
Week 2.......................................................................................................................................................... 4
Anita Allen – An Ethical Duty to Protect One’s Own Information Privacy?..........................................................4
Helga Varden – Kant and Privacy.........................................................................................................................6
Week 3.......................................................................................................................................................... 8
Tony Doyle – Privacy and perfect voyeurism.......................................................................................................8
Frej Klem Thomsen – The Ethics of Police Body-Worn Cameras........................................................................10
Week 4........................................................................................................................................................ 12
Shannon Vallor - Surveillance and the Examined Life........................................................................................12
Charles Ess - Hope for a Global Ethics?..............................................................................................................14
Week 5........................................................................................................................................................ 16
Aimee van Wynsberghe – Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design.........................16
Naomi Jacobs – Capability Sensitive Design for Health and Wellbeing Technologies.......................................18
Week 6........................................................................................................................................................ 20
Peter-Paul Verbeek – Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation.............................20
Olya Kudina and Peter-Paul Verbeek – Ethics from Within: Google Glass, the Collingridge Dilemma and the
Mediated Value of Privacy.................................................................................................................................22
Week 7........................................................................................................................................................ 24
Keulartz et al. – Ethics in Technological Culture: A Programmatic Proposal for a Pragmatist Approach.........24
Mark Coeckelbergh – Technology Games/Gender Games. From Wittgenstein’s Toolbox and Language Games
to Gendered Robots and Biased Artificial Intelligence.......................................................................................26
Week 8........................................................................................................................................................ 27
Tsjalling Swierstra - Nanotechnology and Technomoral Change......................................................................27
Ike Kamphof - A Modest Art: Securing Privacy in Technologically Mediated Homecare...................................29
,Week 1
Kevin Macnish - Just Surveillance? Towards a Normative Theory of Surveillance
Surveillance has become more widely used, because it has become cheaper and because of greater
perceived threat, for example because of 9/11. This paper aims to provide a framework by which the
application of surveillance may be assessed.
Macnish uses the just war tradition to structure his ethical framework on surveillance and to
provide insights for the debate without having to reinvent the wheel. The majority of the principles
discussed are necessary for surveillance to be justified. The principle of authority isn’t necessary, but
still desirable. The just war tradition delivers all principles previously mentioned in literature in
relation to surveillance and more. Macnish is not saying that surveillance and war are similar, but
that their ethics are. These principles have to be reshaped a bit to fit the topic of surveillance. In this
paper, only surveillance without consent is considered. This is of course also the most similar to wars
situations.
Justifying the decision to carry out surveillance (to ‘go to war’)
- Just cause: surveillance shouldn’t be carried out for trivial or despicable causes, but for
example for safety, if there are reasonable grounds for suspicion
- Correct intention: the intention should be the same as the cause, not use the cause as a
smokescreen
- Proper authority, like only a (legitimate, non-corrupt) state can surveil on behalf of their
citizens, needs to deal with information correctly
- Last resort (necessity)
- Formal declaration of intent, especially in situations where surveillance is used to deter
certain forms of action, not necessarily in situations where information is to be secretly
received
- Chance of success
- Proportionality: the foreseeable damage that surveillance could incur must be in proportion
to the reason by which the surveillance is justified.
Justifying the means of surveillance
- Proportionality (again): find a response that fits the occasion.
- Discrimination: non-‘combatants’ should be immune from attack, so in the case of
surveillance, it should only be aimed at legitimate targets. However, with criminals it might
be that you only know this legitimacy through surveillance. Then, still, the likelihood of the
target being legitimate should be considered.
- (no means that are wrong in itself/mala in se)
- (benevolent treatment of prisoners)
, Judith Jarvis Thomson – The Right to Privacy
People don’t have a clear idea of what the right to privacy is. Is the right to be let alone? If you could
see into someone’s house with X-ray, the inhabitant is left alone, but we would still think his privacy
has been violated. And also, not every time you’re not left alone, this means that your privacy is
indeed violated.
Thomson shows the example of having a fight in your house and having people listening to it
because it’s loud, or because they use amplifiers to pick up small noises. In the first situation it can be
said that someone does a bad thing, but still doesn’t violate your rights. Acting in a bad way, does not
mean that a right is necessarily violated. It is also not the amplification device that makes the
example bad. A deaf man using an amplifier with a screaming couple would not be a violation of
privacy and if someone sneaks up to your room without an amplifier, it would be.
Then Thomson gives the example of owning a pornographic picture. She says you have
positive rights, like for example to sell it, and negative rights, for example for others not to look at it.
We don’t only have the right to try to prevent others from looking at it, but also to not have others
looking at it at all. You don’t have to do everything in your power to prevent it, since you own it.
However, in certain situation it might not be bad when the picture is looked at: like when you asked
someone to, or when it’s not relevant to you. You can waive (afstand doen van) your right either
intentionally or unintentionally (like when leaving a picture somewhere no one can avoid looking at
it). It is also possible that one right overrides another.
This is of course not just the case for objects you own, but also in relation to yourself. We
also have the right not to be looked at, listened to or touched. The right to privacy seems to be a
cluster of rights. It overlaps with other clusters of rights, like the right to ownership. It seems like
something doesn’t violate our right to privacy if one of these sub-rights is waived.
Privacy often has to do with information. We have a right that certain facts about us aren’t
found out or aren’t used in certain ways. Doing something to get personal information of someone, is
violating his right to privacy only if doing that to him is violating some right of his not identical with or
included in the right to privacy. For a particular right concerning information to lead to violated
privacy, it has to be included in the right to privacy cluster. “If a man has a right that we shall not do
such and such to him, then he has a right that we shall not do it to him in order to get personal
information from him. And his right that we shall not do it to him in order to get personal
information from him is included in both his right that we shall not do it to him, and (if doing it to him
for this reason is violating his right to privacy) his right to privacy.” But the question then is, isn’t
everything related to privacy also related to something else? Is privacy a derivative right? It could be
that we have a right to privacy because of certain other rights, not the other way around like with the
right to not be harmed for example. There doesn’t seem to be a thing that cases of privacy have in
common. Every violation of privacy can be explained by something else, without mentioning privacy.
For example: “Someone uses an X-ray device to look at you through the walls of your house? He
violates your right to not be looked at, and you have that right because you have rights over your
person analogous to the rights you have over your property-and it is because you have these rights
that what he does is wrong.”. ‘In any case, I suggest it is a useful heuristic device in the case of any
purported violation of the right to privacy to ask whether or not the act is a violation of any other
right, and if not whether the act really violates a right at all.”
