Law and Ethics in the Information Age

Abstract

There is a long tradition going back to Aristotle that says that all people?be they businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, students or ordinary citizens?want happiness, however they define that term. And to get happiness we need not only be good people, but we need to live in a good society. The role of ethics is to help us achieve both. Yet as we look at the way business ethics, medical ethics, engineering ethics, computer ethics, and so on have developed over the past twenty-five years, the emphasis has been primarily on the ethical actions of the individual, on producing ethical businesspeople or doctors or journalists or computer engineers. There has been very little attention paid to the necessity of good laws that protect the common good and that are the backbone of a good society. As we enter the new millennium, society faces two emerging sets of problems: those related to globalization and those related to the newly developing Information Age. In both areas, having ethical people and ethical norms that cross boundaries is important. But equally important are ethically defensible, nationally and internationally coordinated laws and enforcement agreements. And ethically defensible laws always promote not individual but the common good. If we look back at the development of society in the Industrial Age we see that it took not only good individuals but also legislation in the industrially developed countries to do away with child labor, to guarantee a minimum wage, to abolish sweat shops, to inhibit high level corruption.