Abstract
Computer ethics, or more broadly, Information Technology (IT) ethics, is often concerned with issues about privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility and framing of policies and rules on the features. While ethical issues on these topics are important, issues about IT ethics apply more broadly. The purpose of ethics is not just to draft new policies or legal codes. Ethics also aims to probe and bring into limelight for ethical deliberations those issues, which have escaped policy formulations or human introspection. This paper tries to address one such ethical issue. This paper concerns with email ethics and with one of the features of emailing - ‘forwarding’. As an applied ethics domain, I have tried to use some samples of forwarded mails. Through the analysis of the given sample mails, I claim that (1) this issue of ‘forwarding’ falls well outside the domain of framing ethical policies and (2) it is a matter of ethical concern. I have addressed this ethical concern by drawing a criterion to judge if one’s act of ‘forwarding’ a mail is ethical act or not.
Highlights
Computer ethics, or more broadly, Information Technology (IT) ethics, is often concerned with issues about privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility and framing of policies and rules on the features
Its goal is to identify and formulate answers to questions about the moral basis of individual responsibilities and actions” (Nissenbaum, 1998). As it is a matter of social concern, some thinkers were trying to understand the ethical issues with policies and codes of conduct
One of the ethical concerns is to bring those actions into the fold of ethical deliberations, which would have until now escaped for the lack of proper policies
Summary
More broadly, Information Technology (IT) ethics, is often concerned with issues about privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility and framing of policies and rules on the features. One can try to argue saying that why should one bother about the negative effects as long as one adheres to act according to the message of the forwarded mail and in that case, it can be said the addressee does this as an instance of sharing the benefits. The issue is mentioning of these consequences, which make a case of forwarding these types of mails to be crossing the limits of accepted ethical behavior.
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