What ethical challenges to the social order could arise from technological advances - Essay Example

What ethical challenges to the social order could arise from technological advances? Introduction Ethics relates to directives on the perceptions of right or wrong, the two variables available to individuals. Technological advances have created ethical issues related to people and society at large, as they open up immense possibilities for wider social development. Advancement in technology has added to the list of resources used in committing crimes and put at risk the treasured social values. With the advent of internet and electronic commerce, ethical issues in business have gained urgency regarding finding solutions as gathering, aligning and disseminating information has become a risky proposition by misusing the customer data, raised interference in privacy and safeguarding of the intellectual rights. Technology issues are contemporary business issues in the context of their outcome on society, particularly the biotechnology companies that are confronted with issues related to the use of embryonic stem cells, genetic engineering, and cloning. All of these dilemmas have life-long societal and ethical significances. Recurrent technological advancement is likely to heighten the role of businesses in ethical fields all-of-a-sudden (Barnett, 2011). The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has outlined the significance of ethics in the field of Information Systems, as is visible from its straight-forward effect on the functions of IS professionals. There is sufficient literature on ethical issues covering computing and information technology in the concurrent context but not all of the work has been made available for discussion in the leading IS literature. There is need to recognise the contribution of Hagerman’s discourse ethics, which can be an instance of normative ethics as it offers processes for figuring out moral norms. The three routine kinds of ethical approaches are: consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics and communitarianism. Each kind of ethic has a range of its own although other ethical approaches such as the ethics of care exist but consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics and communitarianism are the leading approaches, attending to all fields of business ethics (Mingers & Walsham, 2010). Discourse ethics is distinct from other approaches to ethics as it is based on actual debates between those impressed by decisions and propositions. Considering that the theory could be abstract, the need to find practicality of the discourse ethics for the IS area by employing current techniques like soft systems methodology is important. Application of the theory carries practical potential via analysing its application to particular IS topic areas including Web 2.0, open source software, the digital divide and the UK biometric identity card scheme (Mingers & Walsham, 2010). An interdisciplinary area named bioethics came into existence in the early 1970s, integrating various professions such as clinicians, lawyers, philosophers, theologians, and other humanists amid technological advances in medicine and increasing regard for people in society. This was the time when haemodialysis and mechanical ventilation, abortion reform and the first human heart transplant was done. Technological innovations cut across individuals values. In brief, bioethics was the outcome of dispute (Parker and Gettig, 2000). Dispute arose over individuals' rights of self-determination confronting with some social values and with the medical profession's past non-confronting paternalistic regard for patient welfare, as the medical profession and individual professionals decided on their own, irrespective of the viewpoints of patients. Such medical cases where the patients challenged the medical fraternity for not fully informing the consequences of an operation or such legal issues started raging such as Karen Quinlan's parents' right to remove her from her respirator. Bioethics developed to offer a legal and ethical mechanism under which issues could be settled between the physician and patient and between social consensus and personal values. The individual patient's values outdid the traditional values of medicine and the privacy of people and the physician–patient relationship creating a wall opposing the interference of society's interests (Parker and Gettig, 2000). Since its inception, the major focus of bioethics has been the physician–patient relationship. Happenings in theoretical ethics, particularly feminist ethics backed bioethics' new attention. Feminist philosophers advocated that for doing justice to ethical questions, ethics must pay increased attention to the social situations and political changes, the balance of power and the history of injustice (Parker and Gettig, 2000). In such an intellectual and social environment, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was started in 1990 to integrate efforts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Energy (DOE) to present a final genetic map of all human genes. The Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Programme of the HGP was blamed for anticipating the social outcomes of gaining insight and formulating policies to help its use. With 5% of the genome budget helping in the ELSI functions, the ELSI Programme was both the first government-supported outside research lead in ethical problems and the biggest source of public finance for bioethics (Parker and Gettig, 2000). About twenty years ago in MIS Quarterly, Richard Mason stated that there were four leading "issues of the information age". The article by Mason and related notions has been used by many researchers as the ground for information technology ethics discussions. Peslak (2006) revisits the present position of information technology ethics by statistically measuring present trends toward these "four issues of the information age" as initially presented by Mason, which are: privacy, accessibility, property, and accuracy (commonly called to as PAPA). A survey of 200 people to find out the leading information technology issues and peoples’ perspective on these ethical issues has been attempted. All the four issues have been equally touched by respondents but privacy issue has been the leading one, to be succeeded by accessibility and accuracy which are observed parallel and property comes on the last from significance point-of-view. A demographic study indicates that gender plays a major part in deciding identification of privacy and accuracy as critical ethical issues (Peslak, 2006). This survey stresses on the implications of the research on ethical issues related to information technology and helping on how these elements are observed by different demographic groups. It has important meaning for the practitioners. The outcome that women are touchier to privacy issue than men can permit customised marketing by online business firms. This marketing can attend to increased privacy issues among women. The identification of accuracy as a significant issue to women boosts incessant attempts by the industry to encourage and state the security of their firms' web shops and data sources to take a competitive edge. There are many other inferences that can be researched as an outcome of this study including tackling ever-present issues over property and access to information and their impact on electronic commerce, shopping habits and our lifestyle trends. The concern for all the PAPA elements by consumers is great. It shows that people value and identify as crucial, all of the Mason elements. Finally, companies need to look at the issues of privacy, property, accessibility and accuracy and attempt to clean the impact of negative viewpoints of many consumers in regard to information technology ethics (Peslak, 2006). Floridi (2010) has aligned together two research areas in applied ethics, referred to as information ethics and business ethics in the context of their impact on information and communication technologies (ICTs), which otherwise have been separate areas so far. Safeguarding the informational method of the notional basics of business ethics by employing viewpoints and means of information ethics in the perspective of combining of the two areas in a linked-in society has been the purpose behind. ICT, like other areas, has also affected our moral lives. Floridi (2010) has attempted to fill the gap between these two research areas, known as information ethics (IE) and business ethics (BE) that dwell on the ethical impact of ICT. The new linked-in environment unbound by time and space needs to be taken seriously by working on its ecology. Business is a part of this growth of the info-sphere, which must be looked back by future generations with thankfulness for creating a business-friendly environment (Floridi, 2010). Range of ethical issues is quite vast touching the common man variously in practice. When it comes to cyberstalking in businesses, it is of two types. According to Paul Bocij (2004)), it is related to “incidents in which an organization acts as a stalker and incidents in which an organization is the victim of cyberstalking” (p. 144). Bocij finds various purposes behind many business cyberstalkers and individual cyberstalkers who routinely indulge in online stalking activities (Tavani, 2005). Literature over cyber-stalking or on computer ethics literature is very scant, as only a number of papers have been written on it, including the traditional text-books on applied ethics. Some cases over cyber-stalking have also been in the issues of many journal articles, for example, the details of cyberstalking in books by Green and Adam (2001) and others (Tavani, 2005). Although it is not clear whether Bocji has been able to create readers’ awareness about the risks of cyberstalking and about the weaknesses of the victims of stalking but other issues such as “the transmission of threats and false accusations, identity theft, data theft, damage to data or equipment, computer monitoring, solicitation of minors for sexual purposes, and any other form of aggression” have been tackled (p. 14). Bocji has given wide coverage to online stalking to the limit of getting the feeling that a separate discussion on the topic needs to be made (Tavani, 2005). The four leading technological trends that have become the cause of raised ethical issues are given in the Table below. TABLE 1 TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT RAISE ETHICAL ISSUES TREND IMPACT ________________________________________________________________________ Computing power doubles 18 months Increasing organisations depend on computer systems for critical functions. Data mining costs rapidly reducing Organisations can easily keep vast databases on individuals. Data analysis advances Companies can analyse vast quantities of data collected on people to create detailed profiles of their behaviour. . Networking advances and the Internet Copying data from one location to another and accessing personal data from remote locations are much easier. ________________________________________________________________________ Most organisations are employing the increased computing power of advanced technology for their basic production processes. It has made them dependent and at risk to system errors. Therefore, possibility of poor data quality has increased. Possibility of abuse of the systems that help in increasing the productivity levels also increases. The prevailing social directives and the laws are not customised according to new technology use. There are no universal parameters to install dependable systems agreed for application (Laudon, 2006). Sophisticated data mining techniques and reducing data storage costs have encouraged the tendency by public and private organisations to gather data on all stakeholders, including employees, customers and prospects. These progresses in data storage techniques and fast decreasing storage costs have also reduced the cost of violating data privacy effectively. For instance, major search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, America Online (AOL) and MSN, preserve detailed search histories of the Americans, researching through these search engines daily and generating millions of searches every day. These bulky information gathered of consumer intent become the natural aims of private firms wanting to get market leverage (Laudon, 2006). Sophistication in data analysis methods for huge gathered data are another technological trend that have increased ethical issues because companies private and public can access all minute individual information about peoples. The currently used data management tools enable companies to gather and merge the various blocks of information saved on computers more easily than it used to happen in the past. Considering self-case analysis, we use computer for shopping online, make use of telephone, and subscribe to magazines, video rentals, mail-order purchases, banking transactions and local, state, and federal government communication besides visiting the web pages, using search engines and writing blogs. Thus, a lot of information can be retrieved, telling our hobbies, links with outside world, possible purchases, political ideologies and perspectives. All this private information becomes public with the advancement in technology, thus, creating ethical social issues (Laudon, 2006). Companies desirous of enlarging their customer base tap this information to restructure their marketing campaigns to adjust their marketing planning as per the customers’ buying trends and offer customised products and services. Marketers make use of the computer by collecting data from various resources and create electronic dossiers of the personal information, which is called profiling (Laudon, 2006). Websites such as DoubleClick (www.doubleclick.net) are into the business of internet advertising brokering, providing data on demand to their client companies to assist them in better focusing their ads towards desired prospects. Such websites as DoubleClick and ChoicePoint are permitted to gather personal data of visitors for earning purpose from advertisements based on visitor information (Laudon, 2006, 132). Thus, huge data mining at large scale although has reduced the cost of data access through small desktop machines but have opened the doors for an attack on personal space with great and unimaginable accuracy. If the speed of technological advancement remains as it is, by 2023, the whole of the US population would be available on the radar of companies like DoubleClick and ChoicePoint. Technologies such as non obvious relationship awareness (NORA) can instantly track desired information to nab extremists before they board a flight (Laudon, 2006, 132). The reach to global digital communication networks by individuals and businesses presents a number of ethical and social challenges. Who will check and control the flow of information over these networks? Can anybody trace the information gathered about oneself? What repercussions these networks would have on the traditional links between family, work, and comfort? How could the traditional job patterns be changed when millions of “employees” become middlemen using mobile offices for which they themselves must pay? (Laudon, 2006). Conclusion The issue of technology is complicated enough to raise ethical dilemmas, not easy to resolve. Medical area is a befitting example of new technology creating new problems that are complex in nature and providing solutions. Consider these examples: --The distribution of limited resources such as receiving a kidney transplant --The withdrawal of treatment to patients under given circumstances --The use of costly resources such as life-saving costly medication to be offered under whose responsibility for making payment (Lankard, 1991).   Codes of ethics are being formulated due to the complication related to ethical issues arising out of specific situations and contexts. Ethical dilemmas in businesses can be resolved by including all stakeholders, even indirect stakeholders, in finding a solution to the legal-cum-ethical issues (Lankard, 1991). The preventive ethics setting offers a model for analysing clinical and scientific behaviour which befits more than the elements quickly visible in a specific situation. By anticipating ethical issues, exploring reaction of the stakeholder parties and testing past social elements and organisational mechanisms, preventive ethics predicts the impact of policies and their use on people of various social, economic, and educational settings. By following a predictable (rather than a reactive) stance, the preventive ethics model supports the making of policies over genetic research and the supply of genetic services which depends on the experience of researchers in non-genetic situations. Finally, in desiring to predict and reduce ethical tussle and to find out potential ethical solutions to issues before actual issues arise, preventive ethics offers people the chance to make use of genetic and other medical technologies in formulating their life plans as per the cherished values. References: Floridi, Luciano., 2010. Network ethics: information and business ethics in a networked society. Journal of Business Ethics, 90, 649–659. doi 10.1007/s10551-010-0598-7 [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Lankard, Bettina A., 1991. Resolving ethical dilemmas in the workplace: a new focus for career development. ERIC Digest No. 112. Available from: http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9220/focus.htm [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Laudon, 2006. Chapter 4 Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems. Part One: Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise. Available from: http://www.prenhall.com/behindthebook/0132304619/pdf/laudon%20MIS10_CH-04%20FINAL.pdf [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Mingers & Walsham., 2010. Toward ethical information systems: the contribution of discourse ethics. MIS Quarterly, 34 (4) pp. 833-854. Available from: http://content.ebscohost.com [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Parker, Lisa S. & Gettig, Elizabeth., 2000. Ethical issues in genetic screening and testing, gene therapy, and scientific conduct. ACNP. Available from: http://www.acnp.org/g4/gn401000180/ch176.html [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Peslak. Alan R., 2006. Papa revisited: a current empirical study of the mason framework. Journal of Computer Information Systems. Penn State University, Dunmore, Pennsylvania 18512. [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Tavani, Herman T.., 2005. Cyberstalking: Harassment in the Internet Age and How to Protect Your Family, by Paul Bocij. The Information Society, 21, 393–395 doi: 10.1080/01972240500253665. Taylor & Francis Inc. [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Tim Barnett, Tim., 2011. Contemporary Social Issues. Corporate Social Responsibility. Available from: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/Comp-De/Corporate-Social-Responsibility.html#b [Accessed 29 November 2011]. Read More