Title: Vitual Lives, Virtual Brains
Source: www.puppetgov.com
Week 3 Forum - Main Posting
Choose ONE of the articles
which have been collected for you in Course Documents. The folder is labeled
"Journal of Ethics and Information Technology Articles." For your
main posting this week, include the following:
The name of the article you
chose to read.
The main purpose or topic of
the article.
Several main points from the
article that you think might be of interest to your classmates.
Any interesting connections to
our textbook and/or examples, details, or questions related to the article that
you think might spark discussion amongst your classmates.
Please see the information in
the Assessment area of Course Documents if you aren't sure what a good
discussion posting looks like.
This assignment is due in the
Week 3 Forum at least two days before the end of our academic week.
The
name of the article:
Beyond the skinbag: On Moral
Responsibility of Extended Agencies (Hanson, 2009).
The
main purpose or topic of the article.
The main purpose of this
article was to describe the challenges presented by the complex and rapidly
evolving world of cyberspace and ethics, creating difficulties in the
assignment of assignment of moral
responsibility for actions (Hanson, 2009).
Several
main points from the article that you think might be of interest to your
classmates.
The term “skin bags” is a
slang term for human beings that was coined by Arthur C. Clark.
Because of the interconnected
nature of cyberspace, where does the assignment of ethical and moral
responsibility lie? Is it the individual
or the joint resonsibility of several entities?
The question that is
explicitly asked is this: “Where does
the moral responsibility for the priorities generated by the computerized
system lie: with the human programmers and users alone, or also with the
databases and computer hardware and software?”
The conclusion seems to be
that the responsibility can be a shared thing since are all in this together as
it gets more and more complex all the time:
“Finally, the joint
responsibility perspective encourages constructive, moral behavior in all
contexts. Under moral individualism people are isolated in their skin bags,
independent of other things. They of course
have obligations to others, but the others remain, precisely, Other, ultimately
alien from the Self. In contrast, extended agency theory emphasizes the
multiple connections between humans and nonhumans of all descriptions in
systems of action ranging in scope from the immediate all the way to the global. This is more consistent with
recent emphases on ecological thinking. When the subject is perceived more as a
verb than a noun—as a way of combining different entities in different ways to
engage in various activities—the distinction between Self and Other loses both
clarity and significance. When human
individuals realize that they do not act alone but together with other people
and things in extended agencies, they are more likely to appreciate the mutual
dependency of all the participants for their common wellbeing. The notion of
joint responsibility associated with this frame of mind is more conducive than
moral individualism to constructive engagement with other people, with
technology, and with the environment in general (Hanson, 2009)”
Any interesting
connections to our textbook and/or examples, details, or questions related to
the article that you think might spark discussion amongst your classmates.
In a related article, Andy Oram covers something that
presents a profound issue that sstill perplexes legal minds and military
strategests alike and that is a little think called “The Attribution
Problem.” In cyberspace, where the
source actor can be cloaked or concealed, you may only be certain of the
immediate source of crime or an attack.
But who do you attribute that situation to as the person or group who
originallly initiiated the event or the crime (Oram, 2010). Also, in a time when the Internet is
frequested by evil people, gangs, non-state actors, and legitimate
representatives of states that can and probably partake of cyberwar types of
activities, the final unanswered questions, even if the attribution problem is
solved, are who did it, who ordered it, how did they do it, and why did they do
it. In the final result those who are
engaging in really bad things on the Internet care little about morals and
ethics.
Quite simply, we have to deter and defend against it, stop
it, and counter-attack if possible.
In his article was a little surprised that Hanson overlooked
these dimensions of cyberspace actions.
In a related topic, Chapter 3 in the Reynolds covers a wide
range of bad things that can happen in cyberspace, by Renolds too misses the
Attribiution Problem. But, to Reynolds’
credit, he did cover the current state of laws that retrict bad conduct in
cyberspace (Reynolds, 2012).
Note that on page 90 in the Reynolds book, he touches on the
ILOVEYOU worm and the $5 billion of damage it created in May 2000 after it was
launched. What he failed to describe was
that when FBI agents arrived to question Raphael Guzman and his cronies about
the creation and the unleashing of the ILOVEYOU worm that was very cleaverly
written in VBScript and propagated itself using Outlook, e-mail servers, and
contact lists, they quickly discovered that they had no way to prosecute Mr.
Guzman because there were no were literally no laws against this activity in
the Philippines at that time (Hume, 2010).
Ultimately, I think history has shown that in the harshest
cases of misuing a technology for evil purposes, ethics and morals are topics
that are debated after the fact. In this
case, a big sign with “It’s the Attribution Problem, Stupid!” might apply.
References:
Hanson, F. A. (2009). Beyond the skinbag: On Moral Responsibility
of Extended Agencies. An article published in the Journal of Ethics and
Information Technology. February 2009.
Retrieved from the Bellevue University online library at http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.bellevue.edu/content/q1v7731u26210682/fulltext.html on December 2, 2011.
Hume, G. (2010). A Decade Ago: Hoe
the ILOVEYOU WORM Changed Security. An
article published on the Information Week website on May 5, 2010. Retrieeved from the web at http://www.informationweek.com/blog/229202714
on December 18, 2011.
Oram, A. (2010). Susan Landau
explores Internet Security and the Attribution Problem. An article published on November 29, 2010 at
O’Reilly Radar. Retrieved from http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/11/susan-landau-explores-internet.html on December 18, 2011.
Reynolds, G. W. (2012). Ethics in
Information Tehnology, 4th edition.
Boston, MA: Course Technology.
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William Favre Slater, III
MBA, M.S., PMP, CISSP, SSCP, CISA, ISO 27002,
ISO 20000, ITIL v3, Cloud Computing Foundation
Project Manager / Program Manager
CIS 537 Blog: http://cis537-wfs.blogspot.com
http://billslater.com/career
Chicago, IL
United States of America
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