Technovana

In teaching ethics, and in paying too much attention to politics, I encounter the sentiment that "We've always had [insert great misfortune], so we'll never be without it" over and over again. The sentiment is offered as a reason not to work toward alleviating poverty, warfare, disease, and all manner of problems that simply affect the whole globe and likely look to big to overcome. Still, I think this is a problematic line of reasoning, and one that we should stamp out as if it were a logical fallacy (and might trade on one, more below). Ok, so why is it a problem? For one, it's simply conversation-stopping in any ethical debate. Should we devote resources to researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? Well, babies have always died for no reason, so we'll never prevent that... There is simply nothing to do but throw one's hands in the air and give up. Now, in ethics, there is some reason to take this argument seriously. There is a very general principle...

Yesterday the European Court of Justice issued an important ruling that has the tech policy world buzzing about privacy, search engines and personal history. In short, the court ruled that the EU Data Protection Directive gives a person the right to demand that old information be purged from search results. The particular case involves an attorney seeking removal of links to announcements about a real-estate auction connected with a debt settlement in 1998. While the ECJ made a number of interesting moves in the case (including a welcome argument that the distinction between data processors and data controllers does not make as much sense today as it did in 1995 when the Directive went into effect), the big consequence everyone is talking is the right to be forgotten. The long memory of the Internet is a feature it's hard not to love and fear at the same time. Whether you have something to hide or not, if it's on the Internet, it stays on the Internet (most of the time, at l...

I'm the middle of one of those research projects I feel obligated to do, but at the time can't bring myself to feel entirely passionate about. There really is nothing that brings out ambivalence in me like ethics and cyber-warfare. First and foremost, I am no big fan of war, warfare, or the military broadly construed. For that reason alone, the ethics of war should be a topic of great interest. If it's the case that person most fit for office is the one who wants it least, then the best war ethicist should be an absolute pacifist. Think about it this way: what would war ethics look like according to Genghis Khan or Napoleon? I think Atlanta still wakes up in hots sweats over Sherman's ideas about conducting a just war. Of course, when you actually have to think about the ethics of just war, you have to confront the realist/idealist problem. War is awful and nothing good comes of it (anyone who says otherwise has way too much invested to be unbiased), so the most just ...