The ethics of technology is not as effective as it should. Despite decades of ethical discussion, development and use of new technologies continues apace without much regard to those discussions. Economic and other forces are too powerful. More focus needs to be placed on the values that underpin social attitudes to technology. By seriously looking at Indigenous thought and comparing it with the typical Western way of seeing the world, we can gain a better understanding of our own views. The Indigenous Filipino worldview provides us with a platform for assessing our own core values and suggests modifications to those values. It also indicates ways for broadening and altering the focus of the ethics of technology to make it more effective in helping us to use technologies in ways more conducive to human well-being.

We have a technology fetish. That is, we have an excessive and irrational devotion or commitment to new technologies. This fetish matters. New technologies are too often developed and accepted with little critical thought. After a discussion of the fetish it will be argued that it is not inevitable and that something should be done about it because of potential harms. Finally, suggestions are made for alleviating the potential for those harms. Monitoring and surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence are used to illustrate the argument.

Claims have been made that the current COVID-19 pandemic is a message from nature to stop exploiting the earth to the extent that we have been. While there is no direct evidence that this pandemic is a result of human actions with respect to the earth, ample evidence exists that deforestation and other environmental changes, together with climate change, do make it more likely that viruses will cross from wildlife to humans. We humans are mammals and our welfare depends on the health of the earth. We are not so different from other living creatures in this regard. It is in our interests to look after the earth, something that Indigenous Australians knew well. Mother Earth must be cared for if she is to care for us. Nature perhaps is sending us a message in the same sense that my car does if I do not maintain it. It stops functioning properly. We have to modify nature to satisfy our needs but we must be careful how we modify it.

The implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is not without its challenges, and one of these is raised when societal desirability is included amongst the RRI principles. We will argue that societal desirability is problematic even though it appears to fit well with the overall ideal. This discord occurs partly because the idea of societal desirability is inherently ambiguous, but more importantly because its scope is unclear. This paper asks: is societal desirability in the spirit of RRI? On von Schomberg’s account, it seems clear that it is, but societal desirability can easily clash with what is ethically permissible; for example, when what is desirable in a particular society is bad for the global community. If that society chose not to do what was desirable for it, the world would be better off than if they did it. Yet our concern here is with a more complex situation, where there is a clash with ethical acceptability, but where the world would not be better off if the society chose not do what was societally desirable for itself. This is the situation where it is argued that someone else will do it if we do not. The first section of the paper gives an outline of what we take technology to be, and the second is a discussion of which criteria should be the basis for choosing research and innovation projects. This will draw on the account of technology outlined in the first section. This will be followed by an examination of a common argument, “If we don’t do it, others will”. This argument is important because it appears to justify acting in morally dubious ways. Finally, it will be argued that societal desirability gives support to the “If we don’t…” argument and that this raises some difficulties for RRI.

Systematic study of data sharing by citizen scientists will make a significant contribution to science because of the growing importance of aggregated data in data-intensive science. This article expands on the data sharing component of a paper presented at the 2013 ASIST conference. A three-phase project is reported. Conducted between 2011 and 2013 within an environmental voluntary group, the Australian Plants Society Victoria (APSV), the interviews of the first phase are the major data source. Because the project revealed the importance of data sharing with professional scientists, their views are included in the literature review where four themes are explored: lack of shared disciplinary culture, trust, responsibility and controlled access to data, and describing data to enable reuse. The findings, presented under these themes, revealed that, within APSV, sharing among members is mostly generous and uninhibited. Beyond APSV, when online repositories were involved, barriers came very strongly into play. Trust was weaker and barriers also included issues of data quality, data description, and ownership and control. The conclusion is that further investigation of these barriers, including the attitudes of professional scientists to using data contributed by citizen scientists, would indicate how more extensive and useful data sharing could be achieved.

The aim of this study is to examine incompetence in the Australian ICT workplace from the perspective of Australian ICT professionals. The data collection for this project included conducting a quantitative survey, conducting qualitative interviews and conducting focus group discussions with key informants. Of the 2,315 respondents who participated in the survey, the MRF analysis revealed that incompetence was ranked fifth from the top of a list of the 57 most common ethical problems experienced by ICT professionals (N=750, 35.9%). An inspection of the results of the cross tabulations revealed that 34.8% described their occupational category as manager and 29.1% indicated they were consultants. The GLM has found a significant relationship between the choice of incompetence and occupation (Deviance = 23.15, Df = 6, P=0.0007) suggesting occupation, among other things, does predict the choice of incompetence. The findings from the qualitative interviews are consistent with the above findings. A cross referencing of the interviewees responses that addressed the issue of incompetence during the interviews against their occupation has revealed that consultants had more to say on the topic than any other occupation (20.8% or 10 of the 48 references). This is followed by managers who accounted for 14.6% (7 of the 48 references). These findings indicate that the experienced professionals have a greater concern about incompetence than others; an observation that the findings from the focus group interviews have also confirmed. Obtaining such findings would not have been possible had only one method been used.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) workplace. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a qualitative research methodology. A total of 43 ICT professionals were interviewed during the month of February 2014 in six Australian capital cities. All interviews were conducted face-to-face and followed a semi-structured interviewing format utilising open-end questions and further probing questions. The purposive sample represented ICT professionals from large and small organisations, government and private sector, different geographic locations, ages, genders, types of jobs and employment experience. Data analysis was completed with the help of QSR NVivo 10, a software package for managing qualitative data. Findings – Of the 25 reasons identified for unethical behaviour in ICT workplaces, 30 per cent of participants agreed on five major ones: pressure, bad management, greed, lack of respect towards ICT and communication issues. Practical implications – By focussing on the reasons behind unethical behaviour in the Australian ICT workplace, this article helps those identifying strategies for dealing with unprofessional behaviour to take into account the root causes of unprofessional behaviour. Originality/value – There is hardly any literature on reasons for unethical behaviour in the ICT workplaces. This article seeks to address this imbalance in the literature. Also, integrity systems in ICT are a new focus in collective, organisational ethics. Identification of and resolving unethical ICT workplace practice is an innovative contribution to the literature.

Our technologies have enabled us to change both the world and our perceptions of the world, as well as to change ourselves and to find new ways to fulfil the human desire for improvement and for having new capacities. The debate around using technology for human enhancement has already raised many ethical concerns, however little research has been done in how human enhancement can affect human communication. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether some human enhancements could change our shared lifeworld so radically that human communication as we know it would not be possible any longer. After exploring the kinds of communication problems we are concerned with as well as mentioning some possible enhancement interventions that could bring about such problems, we will address some of the ethical implications that follow from these potential communication problems. We argue that because of the role that communication plays in human society, this issue deserves attention.

Professionalism is arguably more important in some occupations than in others. It is vital in some because of the life and death decisions that must be made, for example in medicine. In others the rapidly changing nature of the occupation makes efficient regulation difficult and so the professional behaviour of the practitioners is central to the good functioning of that occupation. The core idea behind this book is that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is changing so quickly that professional behaviour of its practitioners is vital because regulation will always lag behind.

In this article the precautionary principle is taken to be both a normative ideal and a pragmatic guide. Despite the cognitive limitations of humans (there will always be some doubt about whether we have acted in the best way to reduce or eliminate some future harm), in certain cases it is a principle that ought, morally, to be applied. More importantly however, it is also a pragmatic guide, and despite commonly raised difficulties, it is a reasonable and coherent principle and a useful guide to action if formulated and applied carefully.

In the 2008 issue of this journal Paul Thompson [4] argued that animal disenhancement presented something of a conundrum. On the one hand there seems to be something wrong with it but on the other it is difficult to find good arguments against it. Clare Palmer argued in a later issue [3] that the problem was even worse than that set out by Thompson. The current symposium is a response to those two papers, all of the authors arguing that strong arguments can be made against animal disenhancement. None of these current papers focus on nanotechnology as such but all are concerned about uses of new technologies. More importantly perhaps, together with the two earlier papers, they point to a central issue in the ethics of technology, that is the relationship between technology and the good life, or well-being. Should the focus of technological research and development be on the individual or on the environment of that individual? This is a big issue and animal disenhancement is just one part of this larger question. If an individual, whether it be a human or a non-human animal, is not coping well or is not happy in its environment, two basic approaches are possible. Change the individual or change the environment. Obviously it is not so simple and frequently it will not be an either/or but rather a bit of both. And sometimes too it will clearly be one or the other. In humans this issue is manifested in the discussion of the medicalization of health, taken here to mean that the scope of medical treatments is expanding (see [2], for a discussion of the term). The problem of a stressful environment, for example, is often approached, not by changing the environment but by helping the person to cope with the stress through the use of drugs. Medical technology to improve life of course has always been used on the individual but its scope now is being extended as more is learnt about the brain and how it affects moods and psychological states. In a sense this is nothing very new. We do not always try to change our environment in order to overcome our difficulties with coping. The use of alcohol and other drugs for this purpose is certainly not new. References to “Dutch courage”, the use of alcohol to engender courage, go back to at least 1665 [1]. Nevertheless, with the emphasis on the individual that there is in contemporary Western society, it does seem that modifying the individual is often the first and unquestioned option. In this environment the disenhancement of animals makes sense. If animals suffer and if it is too difficult or expensive to change their surroundings, we change them. Given that the alleviation of suffering is good, disenhancement must be good. As we saw a minute ago however, intuitively there seems to be something wrong with it. We will not always let a Nanoethics (2012) 6:39–40 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0145-3

IntroductionTo say that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has affected Saudis tremendously is an understatement. This is because ICT has in actual fact revolutionized every aspect of their lives including the way they communicate, the way they conduct business, the way they learn, and the way they work.There is strong evidence particularly from the local Saudi media that suggests that ICT has in fact subjected people in Saudi Arabia to circumstances they have never previously experienced and as a result challenged their understanding of how to behave ethically amidst competing demands from self, employer, clients, friends, and community. The invasion of privacy, for example, which employees suffer when their employers use video cameras to systemically monitor them without their consent or even knowledge, is considered by many employers in Saudi Arabia, even the most religious, as acceptable and not wrong and unethical.The massive rise in the adoption of ICT has seen the birth of many unethical behaviors including the use of Bluetooth on mobiles to spread obscenities or blackmail women, the use of Facebook to cyber-bully teenagers, the use of email to spam people, and the use of web-based forums to offend people or spread rumors. These of course are in addition to other typical unethical behaviors like the setting up of insecure networks, the delivery of software products that are behind schedule, over budget, and incompatible with customer requirements, the violation of intellectual property rights, and the use of bit torrent software to download copyrighted materials, among other things.The biggest ethical problem, however, that information and communication technologies have created is probably invading people's privacy through the use of these ICTs. The use of mobile cameras to photograph women or film them in ways that invades their privacy is a good example of these unethical behaviors. What has become a serious problem for Saudi women in recent times, as reported in the media, is when criminals threaten women to either submit to their sexual desires or face the consequences of having their photos or video clips posted on the internet or distributed publically using Bluetooth on mobiles causing serious damage to their family reputation. The recent case of an immigrant computer technician who discovered some personal photos of a female when he was fixing her computer and then blackmailed her is an example of these cases of extortion. It should be noted that the male honor and family reputation are to a large extent in the hands of the female members of the family. If it was discovered and became public that a woman committed adultery, for example, or engaged in an illicit sexual relationship with a man or just met secretly and privately with him in the real world, the family honor and reputation would be destroyed.Ethics is the cornerstone of the Islamic religion and there is no doubt that the Muslims' sacred book, Al-Quran, and the sayings of the prophet Mohammed (saw), which complement it, provide adequate guidance for Muslims in what to do in every situation they encounter. However, the issues created by the latest ICT have generated new possibilities for human actions, as suggested by Jim Moor (Tavani, 2007), an American computer ethicist, and thus these issues need to be examined, clarified, and put into context before they can be assessed from both moral and religious perspectives.Western nations are fully aware that people's religion and upbringing alone are not sufficient to deal with the complexities that the new technologies have created. They also understand that ethics awareness is important in clarifying the problems that emerge as a result of the introduction of new technologies in the school, home, or workplace. For this reason they integrate ethics awareness in their education systems, university curriculums, and computing professional bodies' websites and also support and encourage research in this area. …

This paper provides an analysis of the current and potential ethical implications of RFID technology for the library and information professions. These issues are analysed as a series of ethical dilemmas, or hard-to-resolve competing ethical obligations, which the librarian has in relationship to information objects, library users and the wider social and political environment or state. A process model of the library is used as a framework for the discussion to illustrate the relationship between the different participants in the library system and it is argued that ethical analysis should involve the identification of future developments as well as current issues. The analysis shows that RFIDs do currently pose some dilemmas for librarians in terms of the conflicts between efficient service, privacy of users and an obligation to protect the safety of society as a whole, and that these are likely to become more problematic as the technology develops. This paper is part 2 of a series of papers on RFIDs and the library and information professions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.