A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Chapter 70

Computer Ethics

PHILIP BREY

Computer ethics is a new field of applied ethics that addresses ethical issues in the use, design and management of information technology and in the formulation of ethical policies for its regulation in society. For contemporary overviews of the field, see Tavani (2007), Weckert (2007), Spinello and Tavani (2004), and Himma and Tavani (2007). Computer ethics, which has also been called cyberethics, emerged in the 1980s, together with the rise of the personal computer. Early work in the field, however, had already started in the 1940s, soon after the invention of the computer. The birth of computer ethics as a field is often fixed at 1985, the year that saw the appearance of seminal publications by Jim Moor (1985) and Deborah Johnson (1985). The field is sometimes also defined to be a part of a more general field of information ethics, which includes computer ethics, media ethics, library ethics and bio-information ethics.

Why would there be a need for computer ethics, while there is no need for a separate field of ethics for many other technologies, like automobiles and appliances? Jim Moor (1985) has argued that the computer has had an impact like no other recent technology. The computer seems to impact every sector of society, and seems to require us to rethink many of our policies, laws and behaviors. According to Moor, this great impact is due to the fact that computers have logical malleability, meaning that their structure allows them ...