Morality and the Web - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Morality and the Web

Jeroen van den Hoven

Professor Ethics and Technology

Delft University of Technology

Scientific Director

3TU.Ethics The Hague

• Criteria for success of an epistemic practice

(Goldman, Thagard, e.a.)

• Speed
• How quick do you get an answer to your question
• Power
• The capability of an epistemic practice to get you answers at all
• Economy
• The cost of getting an answer
• Fecundity
• The number of people the practice can involve and reach at one time
• Reliability
• The ratio of true beliefs to the total number of beliefs acquired re the topic of a question

• Connectivity
• Communication
• Interaction
• Coordination
• Transaction

• Information
• Ubiquitous
• Pervasive
• Ambient
• Constitutive
• Confusing
• Value laden

• Not merely Enabling
• Constitutive
• ICT Shapes practices, discourses, institutions

Democracy

Trust

Privacy

Property

Community

Person

Intelligence

Life

Democracy

Work

Health

Friendship

Electronic DemocracyE- TrustInformational PrivacyIntellectual PropertyCyber CommunityDigital PersonArtificial IntelligenceArtificial LifeDigital DemocracyTele WorkE- HealthNet Friendship

“New Sort of Community”

“New Sort of Privacy”

“New sort of Trust”

“New sort of Friendship”

Conceptual Vacuum - Policy Vacuum & Design Vacuum

• David X. Li's Gaussian copula function as first published in 2000. Investors exploited it as a quick—and fatally flawed—way to assess risk.
• Gamma
• The all-powerful correlation parameter, which reduces correlation to a single constant..

• Interfaces
• Infrastructures
• Algorithms
• Ontologies
• Code
• Protocols
• Integrity constraints
• Architectures
• Identity Management Systems
• Authorization Matrix
• Procedures
• Regulations
• Incentive structures
• Auction mechanisms
• Voting mechanism
• Monitoring and inspection
• Governance arrangements

Express

Implement

Responsibility

Privacy

Accountability

Agency

Autonomy

sustainability

Computers

Oiltankers

Airplanes

Reactors

Roads

Internet

Electricity Grids

Hospitals

Values

Norms

Laws

Ideals

Code

Architectures

infrastructures

Information Systems

Ontologies

Standards

artifacts

Evaluate,Justify

Audit

• Emancipates
• Empowers
• Equalizes
• Enhances Accountability
• ………..

• Cyberbullying
• Trolls
• Happy slapping
• Anorexia glorification
• Cybersuicide (pacts)
• Violent computer games
• Child Pornograph and Pedophilia

• Why did you do it?
• It was just…..no more than
• It was virtual…; it all seemed a bit unreal
• Because I could…
• It was private…
• It’s all new
• Everyone does it, no one told me it was wrong
• I don’t know
• I didn’t realize it caused so much grief
• I got further and further into it
• I became addicted

• Added to the conceptual confusion common to new IT (“is this a friend?” Is this “a community”?)
• Moral Fog is created by the morally relevant features of the Web jointly
• EVIL ONLINE, Dean Cocking & Jeroen van den Hoven, Wiley Blackwell, 2011

• Cascades (availability, information, reputation)
• Daily me, informational/moral homogeneity
• Physical Isolation
• Domestication of Wrongdoing
• Anomimity; feeling of anonymity, hiding in the crowd
• Virtuality
• Blurred public private boundaries and blurred boundaries of social spheres; unclear jurisdiction
• Interpretative flexibility; problem of relevant descriptions
• Voluntariness of self-presentation; involuntariness in off-line emotional responses and reactive attitudes is morally significant; reliable signals of moral motivation

• Banality of Moral Wrongdoing
• Wrongdoing is close, common
• Wrongdoers exploit ambiguity;
• Problem of relevant description

• Ethical behaviour to large extent dependent on situational and contextual factors
• Milgram
• Zimbardo
• Trolley-research

• We design Large Socio Technical Systems (e.g. SNS)
• We make moral mistakes in design; e.g. financial world, safety culture in oil industry.
• Ethics is in an important sense situational
• Moral development, education, guidance and character formation massively situated in Social Media Environments
• We have to (think about) design for moral development and flourishing on the Web