Showing papers in "Metaphilosophy in 1985"

What is computer ethics

Abstract: Computers are special technology and they raise some special ethical issues. This chapter discusses what makes computers different from other technology and how this difference makes a difference in ethical considerations. It describes computer ethics and shows why this emerging field is both intellectually interesting and enormously important. A typical problem in computer ethics arises because there is a policy vacuum about how computer technology should be used. Computers provide us with new capabilities and these in turn give us new choices for action. Computer ethics include consideration of both personal and social policies for the ethical use of computer technology. The mark of a basic problem in computer ethics is one in which computer technology is essentially involved and there is an uncertainty about what to do and even about how to understand the situation. Hence, not all ethical situations involving computers are central to computer ethics.

On finding one's feet in philosophy: from wittgenstein to marx*

Abstract: This address will be resolutely meta-philosophical. It will reflect some of my ambivalence about philosophy. Perhaps more than most people whose conceptions of philosophy were formed in the first two decades following the Second World War, I have my difficulties about the point of doing philos ophy, remain ambivalent about what it can and cannot do and remain unsure about what it should try to be. I am both depressed and astounded at the complacency with which so many philosophers view philosophy. They seem to have no awareness of how marginal our discipline has become or, at the very least, is felt to be by many people (including intelligentsia) outside of philosophy (Worsley, 1982). I shall try to confront these things and ask, knowing what we know now and standing where we stand, what philosophy can plausibly be and what it ought to be or at least try to be. To proceed in any reasonable way here we need to say something about what philosophy has been in our recent history and how well its research projects have panned out. This, of course, is a vast subject and a tendentious one. It is plain that anyone who sets out to talk about it in a way which is not utterly platitudin ous will skew her discussion in a certain way, perhaps skew it so badly that many of the key issues get begged at the outset. I think one way of off setting that to a certain extent is to begin in a rather autobiographical way and to indicate something of the philosophers and ways of doing and viewing philosophy that have formed me. That would be rather self-indulgent, if it were not reasonable to believe that what I say about myself also in part narrates a history that is not, among my generation, so terribly unique to me and that in that narrative there may be an object lesson. So I shall start by being auto-biographical. Around 1950, when I was finishing my dissertation, the ideas of the post tractatus Wittgenstein and something related, but a little more pedestrian, namely what was variously called Oxford philosophy or ordinary language philosophy, rapidly and extensively penetrated the whole of the English speaking philosophical world. It came first through Oxford philosophy

A computer ethics bibliography

Abstract: The present bibliography is not intended to be an exhaustive list of scholarly works, or technical writings in law or computer science. Rather, it is more like a "starter kit" to help anyone-layman or professional-begin the study of computer ethics. The intended audience, therefore, includes the educated layman, and not just professional philosophers or computer scientists. For this reason, the list below includes introductory textbooks, newspaper and magazine articles, a television script, and other very general materials. There are few legal writings or technical works from computer science. (This biblio graphy owes much to Maner 1980 and Johnson & Snapper 1985 [listed below].)