What is computer ethics?The Importance of Computer Ethics and foundation of it in the Digital Age

Introduction

Computer ethics guides responsible tech use, addressing issues like privacy and AI. It's essential for shaping a fair, accountable digital future.

Hands typing on a laptop, surrounded by digital graphics like charts, emails, and currency symbols, under the text "Computer Ethics," suggesting technology and data ethics.

Defining Computer Ethics

Computer ethics, a branch of practical philosophy, guides how computing professionals make decisions about professional and social conduct. Coined by Walter Maner in the 1970s, the term gained academic traction in the 1990s. Its foundations are explored through information ethics, established by Luciano Floridi. Computer ethics is essential in modern computing.

Understand the importance of computer ethics

The information revolution has significantly changed many aspects of life—commerce, employment, medicine, security, and more. As a result, ICT has impacted community life, relationships, education, careers, freedom, and democracy in both positive and negative ways.

Computer and information ethics examines the social and ethical impacts of ICT. More narrowly, computer ethics applies traditional ethical theories to issues involving computers and networks.

“Computer ethics” also refers to professional ethics, where computer professionals follow codes of conduct and best practices. Terms like “cyber ethics” and “Internet ethics” focus on Internet-related issues. Over recent decades, the growing field has led to new courses, research roles, centers, events, organizations, and publications.

The Foundation of Computer and Information Ethics

In the mid-1940s, Norbert Wiener founded “computer ethics,” a new branch of ethics born from scientific and philosophical advances.

During World War II, Wiener and his colleagues in the U.S. and U.K. helped develop electronic computers and advanced information technologies. In the process, they founded a new applied science Wiener called “cybernetics,” from the Greek word for ship pilot.

Even while the War was raging, Wiener foresaw enormous social and ethical implications of cybernetics combined with electronic computers. He predicted that, after the War, the world would undergo “a second industrial revolution” — an “automatic age” with “enormous potential for good and for evil” that would generate a staggering number of new ethical challenges and opportunities.

After the war, Wiener published Cybernetics (1948), introducing his new science and its ethical implications. In The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), he further explored ethical issues posed by computer and information technology.

The issues that he identified in those two books, plus his later book God and Golem, Inc.(1963), included topics that are still important today: computers and security, computers and unemployment, responsibilities of computer professionals, computers for persons with disabilities,computers and religion, information networks and globalization, virtual communities, teleworking, merging of human bodies with machines, robot ethics, artificial intelligence, and a number of other subjects.

Although he coined the name “cybernetics” for his new science, Wiener apparently did not see himself as also creating a new branch of ethics. As a result, he did not coin a name like “computer ethics” or “information ethics”. These terms came into use decades later. (See the discussion below.) In spite of this, Wiener's three relevant books (1948, 1950, and 1963) do lay down a powerful foundation, and do use an effective methodology, for today's field of computer and information ethics.

His thinking, however, was far ahead of other scholars; and, at the time, many people considered him to be an eccentric scientist who was engaging in flights of fantasy about ethics. Apparently, no one not even Wiener himself recognized the profound importance of his ethics achievements; and nearly two decades would pass before some of the social and ethical impacts of information technology, which Wiener had predicted in the late 1940s, would become obvious to other scholars and to the general public.

In The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener explored some likely effects of information technology upon key human values like life, health, happiness, abilities, knowledge, freedom,security, and opportunities.He applied powerful and wide-ranging metaphysical ideas and analytical methods to identify, analyze, and resolve social and ethical problems linked to all forms of information technology. These included computers and computer networks, radio, television, telephones, news media, journalism, books, and libraries.

Wiener addressed a broad range of concerns and applied his ideas and methods to all types of information technology. Because of this wide applicability, scholars appropriately named the new field of ethics he founded “information ethics.” Consequently, the term “computer ethics,” as people commonly use it today, refers only to a subfield within Wiener’s much broader ethical vision.

In laying down a foundation for information ethics, Wiener developed a cybernetic view of human nature and society, which led him to an ethically suggestive account of the purpose of a human life. Based upon this, he adopted “great principles of justice” that he believed all societies ought to follow. These powerful ethical concepts enabled Wiener to analyze information ethics issues of all kinds.

Conclusion

In the digital age, it's essential to address the ethical impacts of computer technology. Developers, policymakers, and users must engage in meaningful discussions and make ethically driven decisions. Promoting responsibility and accountability ensures technology delivers benefits while respecting ethical principles. Embracing computer ethics helps shape a society where innovation reflects human values and supports well-being.