Catanduanes State University

COLLEGE OF INFORMATION AND

COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
Virac, Catanduanes

LEARNING MATERIALS AND COMPILATION OF

LECTURES/ACTIVITIES

GEC3
LIVING IN THE I.T. ERA
 D ISC L AIM ER

This learning material is used in compliance with the flexible teaching-learning

approach, espoused by CHED in response to the pandemic that has globally affected

educational institutions. Authors and publishers of the contents are well acknowledged. Such

as, the college and its faculty do not claim ownership of all sourced information. This learning

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College of Information and Communications Technology

 C H APTER 7: POLICING TH E INT ERN ET

LEARNING OUTCOMES
1. Determine if they are using the internet safely;
2. Know various kinds if information threats in the internet;
3. Understand the different terminologies about privacy and surveillance and online activities; and
4. Apply the guidelines of proper etiquette online.

KEY TERMS
1. Privacy
2. Security
3. Surveillance
4. Online ethics
5. Anonymity
6. Intuitionism
7. Utilitarianism
8. Universal principle ethics
9. Online safety
 LESSON 2: ONLINE ETHICS

The era of the Internet has introduced many new dimensions to the study and practice of ethics. Online
ethics refers to patterns of behavior used when on the Internet, guided both by law and personal
philosophy. The great capabilities of this communication medium allow for the potential of great harm,
cruelty, and even crime. Major concerns in the field of online ethics include the protection of private
information, the limits of a presumed freedom of expression, and issues of libel. Understanding legal
ramifications and trusting personal philosophy used in other areas of life can help a person determine his
or her online ethics.

Possibly one of the most alluring promises of the Internet is its ability
to create anonymity. On discussion boards, blogs, and through
various email addresses, a person can easily create dozens of
personas, each accessible to different people. But one of the most
pervading moral questions of online ethics regards the difference
between protecting anonymity and deceiving others.

To a certain extent, withholding personal details is a wise idea on the

web. Posting contact information or financial data is an unfortunate
Online ethics refers to the behavioral way to attract identity thieves or fraudsters, leaving the user and family
patterns and personal philosophies of members vulnerable to crime. Many social networking sites provide
Internet users.
extensive privacy options that allow users to determine the amount of
personal data visible. While protecting personal information is
considered by many to be reasonable, anonymity can also shift from protective to abusive quite easily.

A person going through a divorce, for instance, may use a false screen
name or give vague details about circumstances when venting angry or
hurt feelings on a discussion board for divorced people. In this case, the
user may be protecting the anonymity of him or herself as well as other
parties. If, however, a person uses the anonymity of the web to provide
specific details about another person that could lead to possible harm, it
becomes an ethical gray area.

Another major issue in online ethics is the prevalence and influence of

online bullying. With social networking sites being a major part of many
A commonly cited code of
people’s Internet experience, an entirely new format for bullying or online ethics is to act the same
manipulation has arisen. In one famous news item in the online ethics age, way on the Internet that is
grieving parents sought to bring charges against an adult woman for acceptable in other areas of
contributing to the suicide of a 13 year-old girl. According to news reports, life.
the woman had befriended and then cut off contact with the girl through a
social website under a presumed identity, purportedly to gain her trust and then hurt her feelings. Whether
or not this type of action is criminal will be a question for legal systems in years to come, but whether it is
ethical is hotly debated.

Generally, a commonly cited code of online ethics is to act the same way
on the Internet that is personally acceptable in other areas of life. While the
ability to conceal details can serve helpfully as a protective measure, when
it is used to obtain or distribute information or bring about results that could
not be managed without anonymity, ethical problems arise. This most
basic of all online ethics conundrums dates back to Plato’s famous
“Parable of the Ring,” which asks that if a person had the capability to
become invisible and thereby get away with anything, would it be right to
use the capability?
Extreme cases of online bullying
may cause the victim to
contemplate or attempt suicide.

38
1.1 Ethical Principles
The basis of ethics as cooperative principles is the realization that rules limiting individual self-interest can
often produce greater cooperative benefits. Making and keeping agreements are a major part of ethics so
conceived. But ethical principles allowing us cooperative benefits involve more than keeping agreements.
The principle of kindness—to give aid to others in need—holds without any agreement. We simply assume
that human beings recognize each other as fellow human beings and give aid because in so doing they
expect that they will receive aid when they are in trouble.

By contrast, morality has a large arbitrary element because of its basis in beliefs that are explicitly not
shared by all, such as religious beliefs. The principle that one ought to kill one’s daughter if she marries an
infidel can hardly be based on anticipated cooperative benefits. It is a membership rule for a religious sect.
Failure to appreciate the distinction between ethical principles that ensure cooperative benefits and moral
principles that reflect mainly arbitrary religious or cultural beliefs may be responsible for the attractiveness
of relativism, the belief that ethical beliefs are true only for specific groups.

Three levels of ethical principles are: individual, social, and global. Social principles apply within a
society, a group whose members share cooperative benefits and burdens with each other. Global or
transnational principles apply to concerns which cannot be handled by dividing them up between societies.
Internet ethical issues involve principles at all three levels.

Some plausible candidates for standards for individual ethical behavior are these:

• Intuitionism: there are no overall standards, just a variety of principles we feel are correct by
intuition.

• Utilitarianism: the right thing to do is what produces the greatest good for the greatest number.

• Universal principle: act on principles that could be willed to be universal law.

Intuitionism is actually not a standard. It says that there is no good explanation of right and wrong, but we
nevertheless have strong intuitive feelings about what is right and wrong. For the intuitionist, these feelings
need no justification. The Ten Commandments, taken by themselves, are an intuitionist theory. The major
difficulty with intuitionism is that when different principles of right action conflict, we have no principled way
of resolving the conflict.

Utilitarianism can be stated: act so as to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number.
Utilitarianism has much plausibility. For how could it possibly be wrong to do the action that produces the
greatest good? How could it possibly be right to do an action which produces less good when you could
have done better? Although a plausible idea, utilitarianism suffers from two major difficulties. One is that if
we consider actions in isolation from one another, it is easy for a utilitarian to break promises or fail to fulfill
contracts when more good would be produced in that case. The trouble then is that institutions which allow
cooperative benefits, to live and work together, would disintegrate. Important goods are not available unless
we consider ourselves bound to follow certain non-utilitarian rules.

Utilitarianism can, however, achieve these goods if it is modified to apply to rules rather than individual
acts. Then one is still bound by social rules governing the institutions of keeping agreements and fulfilling
contracts even though more good might be done in the individual case by breaking the social rule. One
takes actions not because the individual actions produce the greatest amount of good, but because the
right action is to follow social rules which produce the greatest amount of good. This theory is called rule
utilitarianism.

But how do we tell which rules these are? The second major difficulty is that summing goodness over
individuals in any precise way has been proved to be impossible. So the notion of the greatest good for the
greatest number can only serve as a metaphor. It simply can’t be made precise.

Universal principle ethics is one major alternative to utilitarianism. Universal principle ethics insists that
rightness is not just some sum of goodness. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1785) developed universal
principle ethics, founded on his Categorical Imperative: act on principles that could be willed to be universal
law. For example, making an agreement you have no intention of keeping could not be willed to be universal
law because then no one would make or accept agreements. The biblical Golden Rule, “do unto others as
you would have them do unto you,” is a similar but less formal version of the Categorical Imperative.

As with intuitionism, universal principle ethics has little guidance for what to do when principles for right
actions conflict. Some account is needed of ethical social rules, especially on how they fit together into a
system without conflicts. The 20th century philosopher John Rawls expanded a suggestion by Kant on how
to make this into a comprehensive theory of justice (Kant 1785, 74; Rawls 1999a). Rawls’s theory has had
wide influence and is used extensively by lawyers, jurists, and politicians.

At the individual level, utilitarianism and universal principle ethics often yield the same results. When they
conflict, I shall favor universal principle ethics.

At the level of a society, rule utilitarianism is widely used as a theory of justice, especially by economists
dealing with public policy. Rawls’s alternative is a theory which bases principles of justice on a social
contract (Rawls 1999a). Rule utilitarianism allows very uneven distributions of value, justifying the suffering
of the less advantaged by greater overall advantage. By contrast, according to a social-contract view, the
well-being of everyone, including the worst-off, is taken into account.

From the point of view of the social contract, another serious objection to utilitarianism is that it does not
care directly about freedom. Parties to a social contract would instead insist that each individual has basic
liberties which are not to be compromised or traded off for other benefits. This is Rawls’s social contract’s
first principle of justice, Greatest Equal Liberty:

Society is to be arranged so that all members have the greatest equal liberty possible for all, including fair
equality of opportunity.

Besides the basic freedoms such as freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and so on, it includes equality
of opportunity. Thus society’s rules are not biased against anyone and allow all to pursue their interests
and realize their abilities. 5 Freedom is to be limited only for the sake of another freedom (Rawls 1999a).

Rawls’s second principle of justice is the Difference Principle:

Economic inequalities in society are justified insofar as they make members of the least-advantaged social
class better off 6 than if there were no inequality.

The social contract basis for the Difference Principle is straightforward: if you are entering a society with
no knowledge of your specific place in that society, the Difference Principle guarantees that you will be no
worse off than you need be.

At the level of society, Rawls’s two principles of justice are a plausible alternative to utilitarianism. They are
the ethical principles I will employ at this level.

At the global or transnational level, there are serious problems with simply extending ethical principles of
justice obtaining in societies. Global concerns are those which clearly are not the responsibility of one
society or another. They are of two types: Concerns about relations between societies, and globalized—
mainly economic—concerns. For this reason, at this level, two social contracts are required: an
International Social Contract, and a Global-Economy Social Contract. The International Social Contract is
based on Rawls’s Law of Peoples (1999) and requires minimalist democracies 7 to refrain from intervening
in each other’s affairs and to assist each other when in need. The Global-Economy Social Contract has
close analogues to Rawls’s Principles of Justice, but there are important differences in their derivation and
application. One important feature of the Global-Economy Social Contract is that it is agreed to
by individuals sharing benefits and burdens in the global economy. Therefore the Global Greatest-Equal-
Freedom Principle applies to individuals, not corporations, states, or any other global institution. Similarly,
the Global Difference Principle applies only to participants in the global economy and its application must
respect domestic justice (Schultz 2010).

Schultz’s Information Technology and the Ethics of Globalization (2010) contains a very extensive
discussion of these global principles, their justification, and their superiority to competing accounts
(Schultz 2010: Sections II and III). One point from that discussion is important in considering Internet
ethical problems. Most utilitarians and some social- contract theorists grant no ethical legitimacy to any
group of people other than all of humanity. This sounds noble but I believe it leads to unacceptable
ethical conclusions. The global-economy social contract I favor is between people sharing benefits and
burdens in the global economy. The alternative cosmopolitan-utilitarian view requires redistribution to
people with no connection to each other. Instead, I believe the correct ethical principle is an analogue of
the individual principle of benevolence: To help other societies (or other economies) in need when the
cost to one’s own society would not be too great