Slides

Are the Questions New?

• logical universality
• Mediate Human Activities
• Thereby altering them
• Cyberpractices

Informational Enrichment

• Policy Vacuum
• Conceptual Muddles
• Moral Opacity

Conceptual Muddles

New digital technology creates a conceptual muddle when it changes a social practice or activity in such a way that some concept or set of concepts connected with the practice or activity becomes unclear or contentious for members of the practice.

Policy Vacuums

• some regular activity or area of social practice is of moral concern
• standards of appropriate behavior and technological design for that activity or practice are non-existent, outdated, or poorly conceived

Moral Opacity

insofar as the people involved are unaware of its morally problematic features, either because they lack knowledge of the technology itself or because they fail to notice the values embedded in the ICT design or use.insofar as the people involved are unaware of its morally problematic features, either because they lack knowledge of the technology itself or because they fail to notice the values embedded in the ICT design or use.

Types of Ethics

• Ethics of Conduct
  • aretaic
• Ethics of Character
  • deontic
• Right V. Good

Socially Practical Conscience formation

• Not just Personal
• realistic social consequences
• Dialogically responsible

Flourishing and Virtue

• Self-Directed realization of distinctively human capacities.

List Theories

• Finnis V. Nussbaum
• Cyber: life, health, security, knowledge, opportunity, abilities, happiness, peace, and most of all, freedom

Cardinal Virtues

• Temperance
• Courage
• Justice
• Prudence

Disadvantages

• Particularism
• Change

The Human Good

• The Final End
• Human Flourishing

Flourishing

• Basic Values
• Capabilities

Weighing Ends in Deliberation

• Central to Flourishing
• Interpretation and Individuality

Virtue

• temperance
• courage
• justice
• prudence

Consequentialism

• describable consequences brought about by the target of moral evaluation
• specification of those values that make the consequences relevant for moral consideration

Evaluating Policies

• CBA
• Risk Analysis
• Pleasure and Pain
• Malevolence

CBA/Risk Analysis

• Pro-Con Fallacy
• Confirmation Bias
• Narrow Consequences

The Right and Proper

"the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question [is] the right and proper, and the only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action"

• aggregative

The Principle

an action or measure of government may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility, (meaning with respect to the community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it

Stakeholders

Second, for each alternative, (a) describe the different consequences of that alternative for the "community," which is everyone affected, or each of the stakeholders, (b) take the perspective of each stakeholder and ask how the consequences affect his or her interests, calculating the net balance of pleasure over pain for that stakeholder; then (c) aggregate the results for the individual stakeholders to obtain the net balance of pleasure over pain for the whole community; this result is the social utility of that alternative

Proxies for Value: Maximand

• Monetary
• How much effort
• Narrowing the effect-type
• Non-canonical
  • Capabilities (Sen)
  • Domination (Pettit)

Impartiality

• Special Relationships and Duties
• Nothing Supererogatory
• Distributive Indifference

Justice

• Institutions
• No dignity,

NPR

Officials will consider factors like how widely a product is used, how likely hackers are to discover the flaw, how much damage it can do, and how easily it can be patched. They'll also weigh how valuable an exploit is for gathering intelligence or helping law enforcement, and its effect on the government's relationship with businesses.

Question

Evaluate the policy from a utilitarian or consequentialist perspective. Are there any important stakeholders left out of the analysis? Would you include any other considerations with respect to risk, vulnerability, or security?

Meltdown/Spectre

• Disclosed Vulnerability to Intelligence(?) : July 28th, 2017
• Publicly disclosed: January 9th, 2018
• Meltdown is Intel Specific

Deontology

Universal Law Formula

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law

Contradictions

• system collapse
  • Perfect duties
• Necessary frustration of the rational pursuit of life goals
  • Imperfect duties

Biases

• Cultural
• Unconscious

Humanity Formula

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means

Moral Autonomy

• Respect Freedom
• Could they consent?

[G]ood arguments in most problem-solving or truth-seeking domains are those that prove generally persuasive under conditions that foster severe testing of assumptions and inferences against counterarguments, objections, consideration of all relevant information, and the like.

Systematic Union of Rational beings

Act only according to those policies that all rational beings could agree to as legislators making laws for a kingdom of ends.

Publicity

All actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity. (Toward Perpetual Peace)

Conscience

• Answerability to Interpersonal Demands
• "Representative Person"
• "If we are not to undermine autonomy, then when we test a behavior or social practice for its moral acceptability, we must take its longer-range consequences for the exercise of autonomy into account."

Scanlon

An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, uncoerced, general agreement

Habermas

a moral norm is valid when the foreseeable consequences and side-effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion in a rational discourse

Principle of Moral Regard

One may act only in ways that show due moral regard for human beings as members of society, that is: respect for the agency of human beings as autonomous, and concern for the needs of dependent human beings.

Policy: Universalizable

The government won't reveal an exploit that is common on desktop and laptop computers that they use to monitor terrorist communications.

5 Groups (Discuss two arguments: One for the permissibility/One for the Impermissibility)

• Kantian Universalizability
• Formula of Humanity
• Kingdom of Ends
• Scanlon
• Habermas

WOW

All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Game and all copies thereof (including without limitation any titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, character inventories, structural or landscape designs, animations, sounds, musical compositions and recordings, audio-visual effects, storylines, character likenesses, methods of operation, moral rights, and. any related documentation) are owned or licensed by Blizzard.

Unconscionability

A defense against the enforcement of a contract or portion of a contract. If a contract is unfair or oppressive to one party in a way that suggests abuses during its formation, a court may find it unconscionable and refuse to enforce it. A contract is most likely to be found unconscionable if both unfair bargaining and unfair substantive terms are shown. An absence of meaningful choice by the disadvantaged party is often used to prove unfair bargaining.

Comprehensive CyberEthics

• Formal
• Substantive

Principle U

A moral norm is valid when the foreseeable consequences and side-effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion in a rational discourse

Substance of Habermas

• Committ ourselves to respecting people as dialogically autonomous agents.
• relative force of different impacts

Moor

A policy is just only if no rational impartial person would reject it as doing unjustifiable harm to the core human values of life, happiness, and autonomy, or the human rights that protect those values.

• Rights as necessary conditions

Intermediate

• Substance of value

ICA

(ICA) A cyberpractice CP is morally acceptable only if all reasonable, conscientious stakeholders could agree, on the basis of perspective-sensitive good reasons, that the impacts of CP (i.e., CP and its reasonably foreseeable consequences) are consistent with due moral regard for each stakeholder's autonomous pursuit of values, and dependent satisfaction of needs.

Categories of Values

• Understanding a value means knowing how to value it.
• Presumptive force of values
• Nonetheless, Values must be interpreted

ICA

• Heavy Burden
• Morally self-serving

Essentially Contestable Values

• Inherently open to different interpretations and weightings

CP(p)

• The specific policy within a cyberpractice

DCE

(DCE) A cyberethical evaluation regarding the moral acceptability of cyberpractice CP(p) is dialogically cogent insofar as it is supported by perspective-sensitive good reasons that can lead all reasonable, conscientious stakeholders to agree that the foreseeable impacts of CP(p) are (are not) consistent with due moral regard for each stakeholder's autonomous pursuit of values, and dependent satisfaction of needs.

Dialogically Responsible

• Formal Condition

to the extent that we take account of, and strive to respond to, the views that have been put forward in different venues by the various stakeholders who give evidence of good faith.

Q(sub)

Are CP(p) and its reasonably foreseeable impacts consistent with due moral regard for each stakeholder's autonomous pursuit of values, and dependent satisfaction of needs?

Q(PM)

(QPM) To what extent does my scrutiny of the relevant perspectives and public process of discourse on the issue warrant confidence that my answer to the substantive question (QSUB) enjoys public merits—i.e., that it can hold up as tenable across those relevant expert and stakeholder perspectives that qualify as reasonable and conscientious?

Dialogical Responsibility

• Reasonable Acceptance
  • Conscientious
  • Expertise
• Well-Structured Networks of Communication
  • Macro-social

Polarization

• Echo Chamber

Public Merits

• High
• Mixed
• Low
• Absence

Inherent Matters of Collective Judgment

To publish is thus to claim that one's research findings are fruitful for further inquiry, something other scientists can build on. Consequently, the value of research to inquiry as a cooperative endeavor is inherently a matter for collective judgment. To qualify as fruitful for inquiry, after all, different research teams and laboratories should be able to benefit from the work.

Good Theories

• Empirically Adequate
• Supported by Sufficient Evidence
• Wide Explanatory Scope
• Support Predictions and Retrodictions
• Avoid ad hoc adjustments
• Frutiful for further research

PSGR

We could then define "perspective-sensitive reasons" as reasons that connect with the different perspectives on the issue, and we could define good perspective-sensitive reasons as perspective- sensitive reasons that find acceptance and thus enjoy public merits.

Networks of Communication

• Whether venues of communication exist to distribute relevant information and arguments across mutually relevant publics
• Whether widespread biases, prejudices, mutual suspicion, and the like block an argument's travel across contexts, or foster the spread of dubious arguments
• Whether misinformation has distorted how arguments travel

Issue Definition

• Public Merits: Framing
• Impact Analysis

Conscientious Stakeholders

• Conscientious and Reasonable Stakeholders
• Careful Well-thought out arguments
• It's not opinion, it's argument and the judgment of its cogency by C&R stakeholders

Arguments are evaluated from perspectives

For dialogically responsible cyberethics, every conscientious, reasonable stakeholder qualifies as a judge of cogent cyberethical argument—which is not to say: a self-sufficient authority on morality, but rather: someone who has a legitimate place in the moral dialogue.

Arguments

• Truth: its supporting reasons are true or plausible,
• Relevance: the supporting reasons genuinely connect with the moral question as formulated
• Sufficient support: the reasons provide sufficient basis for regarding the moral question as a serious one
• Nonfallacious reasoning: the argument avoids fallacies, for example, the moral question is not loaded, does not rely on a dubious slippery slope assumption, etc.

How long does the dialogical process take

• Stakeholders may change
• Moral opacities can cleared up
• Policy vacuums are filled
• The process is indefinite

How to balance important values with less weighty but wider impact values

• Morally Conscientious stakeholders take greater goods into account
• Some realy weighty values can displace a really widely-felt inconvenience

What happens if you miss a stakeholder

• It makes your argument weaker
• In some cases, it could invalidate your argument

Is there always a satisfactory answer

• Some values may be incommensurable
• Counter-arguments may be tenable, but also inconclusive

Clarifying the Question

• What Question are we asking

Issue Definition

Impact Analysis

• Moral Question

Is it morally permissible to require open-source code portfolios on a resume/CV?

Impact Analysis

Judgment of Values

• Clarify concepts
  • Negation vs Undermining Pursuit
  • Probability of impacts
  • Short vs. long term impacts

Is it consistent with DMR?

• Due Moral Regard

Public Merits Evaluation

1. What are the relevant perspectives for evaluating the dialogical cogency of your argument? This normally includes every (non-malicious) stakeholder perspective and every relevant expertise.
2. Have you found reasonable arguments from conscientious stakeholders for every stakeholder & expert perspective? Or are some perspectives inherently uninterested in moral discourse?
3. Is there evidence of good communicative channels across perspectives, so that their views are well-informed?

Theory and Practice: Feminist Insights

• Incorporating feminist insights about the gendered production of knowledge with a traditional epistemology of science.

Empiricism and Rationality

• We know (from experience)

There is no reason to think our presently cramped and stunted imaginations set the actual limits of the world, but they do set the limits of what we now take to be possible.

Reasonable

• Reflectively Endorsable
• The Social Character of Knowledge

Reforming Practices

Legitimizing the explicit introduction of feminist interests to justify the choice of different models, feminist epistemologists use reason in its permissive mode to open up space for alternative theories oriented toward liberatory ends and to contest theories that close off possibilities for social change by representing the subjects of study as if they had no room to maneuver.

The problems

• Gender Structures
• Gender Symbolism
• Androcentrism
• Sexism

Barbara McClintock

In some cases, sex discrimination in the academy has demonstrably retarded the growth of knowledge. It took more than three decades for biologists to understand and recognize the revolutionary impor- tance of Barbara McClintock's discovery of genetic transposition. Her attempts to communicate this discovery to the larger scientific community met with incomprehension and disdain. Th

Hierarchy and Divisions of Labor

Cognitive distortions due to the gender-coding of types and fields of knowledge are strictly separable from any claims about differences in the ways men and women think. Although it is true that the "feminine" sciences and subfields attract more women researchers than the "masculine" sciences do, the differences in cognitive authority between the various sciences and sub-fields were modeled on differences in social authority between men and women before women constituted a significant portion of the researchers in any field. Men still predominate even in fields of study that are designated feminine.

Masculine Models

Gender disparities are greatest in STEM fields that have two prominent qualities. The first is a perceived masculine culture and the second is a lack of course experience before college.

Dogs love their puppies

The ideology of masculinity, in representing emotion as feminine and as cognitively distorting, falsely assimilates emotion-laden thoughts-and even thoughts about emotions to sentimentality.

Sexist assumptions

Gender disparities are greatest in STEM fields that have two prominent qualities. The first is a perceived masculine culture and the second is a lack of course experience before college.

Property

• Rules that govern people's access to resources and intellectual products
• According to Modern political theorists (Locke, Hume), it is a fundamental aspect of justice

Types of Property

• Common
  • Rules that make them available to all
• Collective
  • Community determines how to use the resources
• Private
  • Individuals determines how to use or otherwise dispose of the resources/intellectual resource
  • It is social.
  • It is limited.
  • It is a bundle of different rights.

Justification

• We spend money on protecting your property
• Why do we not take your property and give it to someone else who puts it to better use
  • Hume argues, for instance, that there would be too much conflict in deciding who gets to use what resource and for what purpose

Property and Virtue

• '[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business' (Aristotle, Politics, 1263a)
• Starts at your body: self-ownership

Aquinas: Limited Entitlement

• People in need have a claim against your property

Locke

Though the Earth…be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men.

Kant/Rousseau

• Provisional Appropriations
• Ratified by social consent

Hegelian Property

• Develops out of a Lockean theory
• Property is one way off objectivizing our self

Consequentialist stories

• Tragedy of the commons
• Private property along with a functioning market helps distribute resources

Property Rules/Liability Rules/Inalienability Rules

• Are you entitled to an injuction or damages

The Problem of Social Cost/One View of the Cathedral

• Coase Theorem
• Property Rules

Property

• Property-type entitlements can be sold for whatver the seller determines.
• Liability rules allow the destroyer to do so if they pay an objectively determined sum
• Inalienable entitlements can't be sold.
  • Inalienability rules are thus quite different from property and liability rules. Unlike those rules, rules of inalienability not only "protect" the entitlement; they may also be viewed as limiting or regulating the grant of the entitlement itself.

Who gets rich:

Consider first a hypothetical to which the Coase Theorem applies. Imagine a patent infringer who can produce a patented product more cheaply than the inventor who owns the patent. Whether a transaction is required to produce the efficient outcome depends on whether the patentee has a legal right, but the efficient outcome will be the same. If the inventor holds the right, the higher-valuing infringer can be expected to negotiate a license. If the infringer has the right, she can market her product without negotiating a license. The infringer's superior product will reach the market in either case, although the parties' wealth differs depending on who has the right.

Majority Opinion

That test requires a plaintiff to demonstrate: (1) that it has suffered an irreparable injury; (2) that remedies available at law are inadequate to compensate for that injury; (3) that considering the balance of hardships between the plaintiff and defendant, a remedy in equity is warranted; and (4) that the public interest would not be disserved by a permanent injunction. The decision to grant or deny such relief is an act of equitable discretion by the district court, reviewable on appeal for abuse of discretion. (…) Neither the District Court nor the Court of Appeals below fairly applied these principles.

Four Factor Expansive Principles

Although the District Court recited the traditional four-factor test, 275 F.Supp.2d, at 711, it appeared to adopt certain expansive principles suggesting that injunctive relief could not issue in a broad swath of cases. Most notably, it concluded that a "plaintiff's willingness to license its patents" and "its lack of commercial activity in practicing the patents" would be sufficient to establish that the patent holder would not suffer irreparable harm if an injunction did not issue. Id., at 712. But traditional equitable principles do not permit such broad classifications. For example, some patent holders, such as university researchers or self-made inventors, might reasonably prefer to license their patents, rather than undertake efforts to secure the financing necessary to bring their works to market themselves. Such patent holders may be able to satisfy the traditional four-factor test, and we see no basis for categorically denying them the opportunity to do so.

Kennedy's Concurrence in eBay Inc. v.MercExchange, L.L.C.

In cases now arising trial courts should bear in mind that in many instances the nature of the patent being enforced and the economic function of the patent holder present considerations quite unlike earlier cases. An industry has developed in which firms use patents not as a basis for producing and selling goods but, instead, primarily for obtaining licensing fees. … For these firms, an injunction, and the potentially serious sanctions arising from its violation, can be employed as a bargaining tool to charge exorbitant fees to companies that seek to buy licenses to practice the patent. … When the patented invention is but a small component of the product the companies seek to produce and the threat of an injunction is employed simply for undue leverage in negotiations, legal damages may well be sufficient to compensate for the infringement and an injunction may not serve the public interest. In addition injunctive relief may have different consequences for the burgeoning number of patents over business methods, which were not of much economic and legal significance in earlier times. The potential vagueness and suspect validity of some of these patents may affect the calculus under the four-factor test.

Injunctive Relief

Explain Kennedy's misgivings about injunctive relief in these cases.

Issues in Property

• Patent Trolls
• Right to Repair
• Breaking DRM

More Issues in Property and Proprietariness

CopyLeft

• Some make a distinction between CopyLeft and Permissive Licenses

Four Freedoms

• 0. The Freedom to run the program as you wish, for whatever purpose.
• 1. Study the source code
• 2. The freedom to make exact copies and distribute them.
• 3. The freedom to make and distribute modified versions

Arguments in Favor

If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the developer or “owner” of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.

• Spyware
• Malware
• Censorship
• The State should only run non-proprietary software

Political Liberty

• Freedom as Non-Interference
• Freedom as Self-Mastery
• Freedom as Non-Domination

“the capacity to interfere in their affairs on an arbitrary basis”

• People who are dominated are at the mercy of the dominator
• Power is not arbitrary, on this view, to the extent that it is reliably controlled by effective rules, procedures, or goals that are common knowledge to all persons or groups concerned

TiVos and Tyrants

• The TiVo used GPL licensed software but hardware prevented running modified versions of the software

Tenant Farmers and Tyrants

ebook readers treat you as a tenant-farmer of your books, not an owner. You have no rights, only a license-agreement that runs to thousands of words, and that you'll never fully satisfy.

Amazon

In a number of cases, digital content purveyors can revoke your access to your "purchased" content. Do you think this digital property is your 'property'? Is this a legitimate curtailment of your property rights? Take a look at this example:Amazon Takes Stuff

Privacy

The Voyeur Motel: Gerald Foos

The reason for purchasing this motel was to satisfy my voyeuristic tendencies and compelling interest in all phases of how people conduct their lives, both socially and sexually. . . . I did this purely out of my unlimited curiosity about people and not as just a deranged voyeur

Whoa!

I have seen most human emotions in all their humor and tragedy carried to completion. Sexually, I have witnessed, observed and studied the best first hand, unrehearsed, non-laboratory sex between couples, and most other conceivable sex deviations during these past 15 years. My main objective in wanting to provide you with this confidential information is the belief that it could be valuable to people in general and sex researchers in particular.

Gay Talese on Foos

I asked Foos if he ever felt guilty about spying on his guests. While he admitted to constant fear of being found out, he was unwilling to concede that his activities in the attic brought harm to anyone. He said that he was indulging his curiosity within the boundaries of his own property, and, because his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it. He reasoned, "There's no invasion of privacy if no one complains."

Privacy: Warren and Brandeis

The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Tort and Information Privacy

(1) information about oneself, (2) situations in which others could acquire information about oneself, and (3) technology that can be used to generate, process or disseminate information about oneself.

Philosophy and Privacy

• Reductionist
• Intrinsic Value of Privacy
• Non-Essentialist
• Epistemic

Semantic

• Referential
• Attributive

Moral Reasons

• Prevention of Harm
• Informational Inequality
• Informational Discrimination
• Moral Autonomy

What is it

1. Informational control?

2. Liberty, Autonomy, Personality

• We must therefore conclude that the rights, so protected, whatever their exact nature, are not rights arising from contract or from special trust, but are rights as against the world; and, as above stated, the principle which has been applied to protect these rights is in reality not the principle of private property, unless that word be used in an extended and unusual sense. The principle which protects personal writings and any other productions of the intellect of or the emotions, is the right to privacy, and the law has no new principle to formulate when it extends this protection to the personal appearance, sayings, acts, and to personal relation, domestic or otherwise.

#+BEGIN_COMMENT

Moor on Privacy

A citizen or person C enjoys normative privacy with respect to personal information I in situation S to the extent that

• authorized access to I in S is restricted to specified parties for specified purposes,
  • according to publicly stated rules of access,
  • exceptions to which must be impartially justified by a comparative risk assessment and codified as public adjustment rules, such that
• C enjoys as much control over access as possible.

Data Mining

• Content
  • Different now with facial recongition, etc.
• Structure
• Usage

Individuality and De-Individualization

• De-Individualizatio: a tendency of judging and treating peopleon the basis of group characteristics instead of on their own individual characteristics and merits

Traditionalist

• No new issues?

Laws

• Loopholes w/ respect to "3rd Parties"
• Self-regulation?

Control?

• unfair?
• aware?

But it's anonymous

• anonymous to personal

5th: Argument

Data mining techniques will provide more accurateand more detailed information, which can lead to better and fairer judgements. So, web-data miningleads to less unwanted marketing approaches. Therefore, why would people complain?

• People didn't ask.
• Manipulation?

Personalized?

• Intrusive?

K,L, T

#+END_COMMENT

Privacy and Anonymity