Editorial: Moral luck, social networking sites, and trust on the web

Abstract

In June 2009, the Eighth International Conference on Computer Ethics—Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE 2009) was held at Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. Four papers originally presented at that conference are included in this issue of Ethics and Information Technology. The selected papers examine a wide range of ICT-ethics related issues, which, at first glance, might seem too diverse to be included under the rubric of a conventional theme in applied ethics. On closer inspection, however, many readers will note that the topics discussed in these papers either overlap or intersect in certain areas, especially in their examination of some controversies that have recently emerged in the field. These include challenges posed by social networking sites such as Facebook, as well as concerns affecting trust in online environments. Another challenge addressed in one of the selected papers involves the role that ‘‘moral luck’’ can play in ICT ethics. In our effort to highlight the key ethical issues examined in these four papers, we categorize them under the theme ‘‘Moral Luck, Social Networking Sites, and Trust on the Web.’’ The opening essay, by David Horner, examines the ‘‘problem of moral luck’’ in ICT ethics—a problem that Horner describes as an ‘‘unjustly neglected topic’’ within this field of applied ethics. Following a brief introduction and summary of Bernard Williams’ argument that moral values, like other kinds of values, can be subject to moral luck, Horner applies Williams’ scheme to ICT ethics. Horner also draws on Thomas Nagel’s insights with respect to distinguishing four categories affecting moral luck: consequentialist luck, constitutive luck, circumstantial luck, and luck in antecedent conditions. Horner pays particular attention to the way that moral luck can impact our understanding of both professional responsibility and (what he calls) the ‘‘identification and attribution of responsibility.’’ He then describes some ways in which the notion of moral luck can erode our understanding of the ‘‘scope of responsibility and agency,’’ and he shows how this notion also poses a challenge for the kinds of theoretical approaches that are often used in analyzing moral questions that arise in designing and implementing ICTs. But Horner also points out that by analyzing moral luck in the context of ICT ethics, we can begin to think in new ways about some of our traditional concepts such as moral responsibility, accountability, and risk. In the second essay, Michael Zimmer examines some ethical concerns affecting research on social networking sites (SNSs). In particular, he focuses on the ‘‘profile data’’ that was collected from the Facebook accounts of a cohort of students (at a university in the US) and then publicly released in 2008 by a group of researchers. Zimmer M. C. Bottis Department of Archive and Library Sciences, Ionian University, Iannou Theotoki 72, Corfu 49100, Greece e-mail: botti@otenet.gr