Computer ethics – problems and solutions

Abstract

In the last decades of the 20th century, since computer technologies have become part of many aspects of daily life, in the specialized literature more and more insistent were promoted the ideas, which supported the existence of all the grounds for constituting computer ethics, as a field attributed to applied ethics. Like other "exponents" of the ethical domain - bioethics, ecological ethics, engineering ethics - computer ethics focuses on the issues regarding behavior and moral choice, generated by the intensive development of science, technology and economics. It is known that the first attempts of computer ethics as an intellectual direction were constituted in relation to the problem of creating and using computer systems. From the very beginning, attention was drawn to the fact that many of the problems of computer technology development, usually perceived as technical, mathematical or epistemological problems, are essentially ethical in nature. The approval of the philosophical component in computer ethics was warned by the publication of a special edition of the American magazine "Metaphilosophy", where the articles of such specialists in the field as J. Moor, W. Bethel, D. Lioid and J. Snapper were published (1). Thus, computer ethics is seen as a dynamic and multi-level field of research which studies the facts, the conceptualization methods, the conduct limits and values, related to the ever changing computer technology. The mentioned issue is determined by the final purpose of the ethicalcomputer research - the elaboration of the human’s code of conduct in relation to the technology. The widening of the circle of unprofessional users and the development of networks led to the fact that new types of subjects appeared in the field of computer ethics. The tendency to "diversify the subject" finds its demonstration, in particular, by publishing in 2005 the anthology "Computers, ethics and social values" (2). In this book there is a special chapter dedicated to social networks, as well as a series of articles that are focused on analyzing the behavior of hackers. Now, in the field of computer ethics, are also included the ethics of e-mail communication, the problems of access to pornography, the rules of conduct on online forums and chats, the problems of the quality of websites’ content and much more. In present, the tendency to consider computer ethics as part of a broader direction, namely, information ethics, has been quite clear. In information ethics, as a field of applied ethics, a particular attention is given to the problem that addresses the creation, control and use of information. All of these legitimately lead to the study of the phenomenon of online social network communication, information ownership and access to intellectual property. Thus, the establishment of such a direction as computer ethics is full of learning, in addition to all the others, it demonstrates the dependence of the humanist approaches to global technologies, not only on the level of development and spread of these technologies, but also on professional traditions, from the cultural and social context.