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Journal of Business Ethics
Published in: Journal of Business Ethics 4/2015

01-04-2015

Technology with No Human Responsibility?

Author: Deborah G. Johnson

Published in: Journal of Business Ethics | Issue 4/2015

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Excerpt

A major thrust of Richard De George’s book, The Ethics of Information Technology and Business (2003), was to draw attention to the ethical challenges for business as business practices were being reconfigured as a result of the introduction of computing and information technology. The topics on which he focused and his analysis are still relevant a decade later. Today privacy issues are pervasive. Intellectual and other kinds of property rights in electronic data and devices continue to challenge courts of law and legislative bodies. E-business is now the norm as most businesses are online in some form or another. The nature of work continues to change as new technologies are introduced; the new technologies change what workers do, when, where, and how they do it, and the extent to which they are monitored. As De George himself wrote, he was addressing a rapidly moving target, and the target—changes in the way business is done due to changes in computing and information technology—continues to move. …
previous article Richard De George and the Use of Ethical Theory in Applied Ethics
next article Ethical Protections for Future Persons: Is Their Present Non-existence a Serious Problem?

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Footnotes
1
A more extended analysis of the law of agency as it might apply to artificial agents is found in Chopin and White (2012).
 
3
Elsewhere I have explored the varying conceptions of autonomy that are being used in this discourse; see M. Noorman and D.G. Johnson, “Negotiating Autonomy and Responsibility in Military Robots”, Ethics and Information Technology, forthcoming.
 
4
Google has succeeded in convincing several municipalities to allow Google’s so-called autonomous cars to operate in their areas but these cars are not unmanned.
 
5
Although the idea will not be taken up here, it is worth noting that the notion of an incomprehensible and uncontrollable technology needs to be unpacked for many current technologies are incomprehensible and uncontrollable to some but not to others.
 
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Metadata
Title
Technology with No Human Responsibility?
Author
Deborah G. Johnson
Publication date
01-04-2015
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Business Ethics / Issue 4/2015
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2180-1

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