Issues Activity
Issues come in two main varieties: "ought" or value issues and "is" or factual issues.  "Is" issues are often expressed as questions starting with the words "is", "does", "will", etc. Resolving an "is" issue is a matter of finding out the facts of the matter using the methods of science, logic, journalism, etc. "Ought" issues, on the other hand, take the form of questions starting with the words "should", "ought", "must", etc. Resolving an "ought" issue is a matter of giving and responding to arguments concerning the consequences, lawfulness and virtues of different courses of action.
In groups of three, spend ten minutes brainstorming on the production of two lists of issues concerning ONE of the following very broad topics:

(A) Computing and justice.
(B) Computing, autonomy and personal freedom.
(C) Computing and democracy.
(D) Computing and the economy.

Your will be told which topic to address.

Your first list of issues should be "is" issues. The second should be "ought" issues. Spend about the same amount of time (i.e. five minutes) on each list, and make sure that you have at least four issues in each list.

After the activity, we will discuss your issues as a class. Which issues are connected and in what ways? How would one go about writing a term paper on them? What sources of information would be needed? Are there subsidiary issues that would also need to be addressed as part of the main issue? Which issues seem juicy enough -- not too broad, not too narrow, interesting to you personally, and of social significance -- for you care about for most of a semester?

This activity and the following discussion (especially the final question in the list above) should help you in your first term paper assignment, the proposal letter.

Embedded Values Discussion
Did everyone read Brey and Lessig?

Brey
        Disclosive ethics
Lessig
        Mechanisms of regulation
        Code as architecture

Consequentialism Mini-Lecture
Remember, class answered questions in survey about ethics being about what happens, or judging a person by actions, not speech.

Implies an emphasis on consequences is a public morality. And it's in policymaking, not personal professional ethics that we see it most at work.

Different varieties. Most influential is utilitarianism, which we'll come back to.

Egotism
Anybody read any Ayn Rand? What do they think? The intelligent, creative leader trying to create a better world despite being dragged down by dull bureacrats....

But mostly egotism is a straw-man ethics that ethics needs good response to. Why should I care about anybody else? It's a dog-eat-dog world, etc... Won't go into that in this course.

But egotism DOES apply and is taken seriously at the public level. Company interest and national interest are not obviously illegitimate. Much of business law, ideology, economics and international politics assumes underlying competition & exercise of power. Think about this....


Technological Determinism Mini-Lecture
Definition of some terms
    Technological utopianism
    Technological dystopianism
    Luddites

Diffusion of innovations
Technological change
Technological determinism
Technological dialectic

Hegel: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis as model for problem-attempted fix-new problem.

Marx: Internal contradictions (e.g. free market competion leads to monopoly, thus undermining freedom of choice).

Tenner: How technology bites back: Fixes to acute problems often introduce new chronic problems. Especially case with measurement or safety technologies. E.g. creative subversion of measurements and displacement of danger to other hazards. Examples: Use of lines of code per day as measure of programmer productivity detracts from reviewing and testing; ski boots reduce fractures but have increased ligament damage; pesticides cause environmental harm; antibiotics cure infectious diseases but lead to resistant strains.

PICS-Compliant Activity
This exercise is about the way that ethical values and political priorities affect policy decisions. It assumes that you have read the two articles in RICE that address protection of minors on the Internet: the evaluation of CPPA by Catudal (pp. 170-187) and the defense of PICS by Resnick and Miller (pp. 188-197).

Consider the proposal that ISPs and browser manufacturers must include PICS-compliant software in their services so that parents may impose content controls:

(a) AS A TEAM, list the stakeholder populations affected by this policy issue. The list entries should be words or phrases that denote the populations in question. (Hint: "parents" might be one such stakeholder population.)
    - Max time: 5 minutes.

(b) AS A TEAM, do the following: For each stakeholder, describe the positive and negative outcomes of PICS. This should take the form of a numbered list for each stakeholder where each list entry is a word, phrase or short sentence. (Hints: There may be 3-4 outcomes per stakeholder. A positive outcome for parents might be "children safe from pornographic spam.")
    - Max time: 10 minutes.

(c) ON YOUR OWN, compare outcomes more formally:

(i) Assign weights with the values 1, 3 or 9 to each stakeholder. This value should represent the degree to which the values of this stakeholder population should be honored by the choice between the proposed policy and the status quo. The value that you choose is a matter of opinion. Explain to yourself why you give some of the stakeholders a weight of 9 or only 1; you may have to justify this to other members of your team later.
    - Max time: 5 minutes.

(ii) Prepare an mXn table, where m, the number of rows is the number of stakeholders identified in (a) and n, the number of columns, is the number of outcomes listed in your answer to (b) (duplicate outcomes have just one column). Decide from each stakeholder's point of view whether the outcome is positive, negative or neutral, and if positive or negative is it very, moderately or slightly so? To do this, assign for each stakeholder an outcome value in the set {-9, -3, -1, 0, 1, 3, 9} and put the chosen value in the matrix. (Hint: the parent value for "children safe from pornographic spam" might be 9 because it is something that a parent might be expected to value highly.)
    - Max time: 5 minutes

(iii) Add up all the outcomes in each row. This gives you one measure of the overall outcome of the policy from that stakeholder's point of view. If it is positive, the stakeholder should rationally be in favor of a PICS enforcement policy; if it is negative, the stakeholder should rationally be opposed. Finally, multiply each row sum by the weight that you gave that stakeholder in (i) to get a weighted row total. Add these weighted row totals to give you a rough measure of the outcome for the PICS enforcement policy.
    - Max time: 5 minutes

(d) AS A TEAM, discuss your answers to  (c). Where are the differences between you? Why did they arise? Try to come to an agreement about the values that are very different and produce a team matrix.
    - Max time: 10 minutes

(e) AS A CLASS, discuss the activity. Was it insightful or artificially constraining? Perhaps you thought it was both. If so, in what ways did it help you make a policy decision and in what ways did it get in the way? If this weren't a class exercise and classes are 50-minutes long, how long would you really need to make a good decision? Who should be involved in the team or committee that made the decision? If all public policy decisions were made this way, what grounds would you have for criticizing them? What, if anything, is missing from the process?
    - Rest of class period, and some of next class

Utilitarianism Lecture
Reflection on cost-benefit analysis exercise

1. Did anybody get a result that they "didn't want"? Does this invalidate the whole process? Is it really a decision procedure, or is it really a way to surface weights and ascribed values?

2. How sensitive is the outcome to the assignment of numbers to outcomes? Is it reasonable to reduce everything to commensurable numbers? Why 1,3,9 and not 1,2,3 or 1,5,25? Wouldn't these accidental choices of procedure make a big difference? Are the numbers sensitive to probabilities of outcomes as well as their values? (cf. decision analysis)

3. Who says that some stakeholders deserve more weight than others? (But it forces you to be explicit.)

4. What about rules or principles that trump all of these issues? E.g. constitutional protections of free speech in the case of PICS.

Basic notions of utilitarianism

Consequentialism without problems of self-interest/egotism. Liberalism (i.e. emphasis on the freedom of the individual to choose action and justify behavior) without selfishness.

Priestley: "Greatest good to the greatest number." (Influenced Franklin as well as Bentham). Contrast with the cost-benefit exercise, where we identified specific shareholders and decided which ones counted more than others.

Bentham:

Historical context: No need to know this, but the people had colorful lives.

Progressive thought to oppose tradition, establishment of religious morality. One of the founders of the University of London, which did not require allegiance to CoE, unlike Oxford and Cambridge. (He also designed architecture of UCL).

Also designed an unbuilt model prison: the Panopticon. (This isn't strictly relevant to utilitarianism but will come up again in Privacy.) Replacement of cruelty and physical punishment by prisoners' self-regulation -- but chief mechanism is potential for surveillance.

cf. 1984? Mention Foucault whose view was that modern technological society was a panoptic prison. E.g. piecework payment for production line labor. Discuss telephone monitoring of service calls? Workplace surveillance?

Very dry and boring texts and uneventful, sheltered (childlike) life.  Gave his walking stick and teapot names. Nietzsche: "Soul of washrag, face of poker, / Overwhelmingly mediocre."

But despite himself left a bizarre panoptic legacy -- maybe he had a witty streak after all. Embalmed and brought out for U. London Senate meetings.

[Read Tyranny of Numbers: pp. 16-17.]

"Maximization" was word invented by Bentham -- also "international" and "codify". But then he also wanted to call astronomy "uranoscopic physiurgics." You can't win them all.

Basic idea is an economic metaphor of balancing interests, defining the good as that which maximizes benefits overall. Democratization as opposed to special interests or power.

Spent life articulating greatest good principle, but issue here, who is "everyone"? Peter Singer thinks we should include animals too.

And what about the tyranny of the majority? "Pushpin" vs. "poetry" If the majority favors simple pleasures, it's elitist to insist on anything else. (cf. the CBA exercise where we couldn't ask the stakeholders their preferences, but decided for them.)

But also seems to insist on best interests being separate from preferences. E.g. on legalization of homosexuality (unpublished): "How a voluntary act of this sort by two individuals can be said to have anything to do with the safety of them or any other individual whatever, is somewhat difficult to be conceived."

J.S.Mill:
James Mill. John Stuart's upbringing as an experiment. Speaking Latin and Greek by five, but eventually had breakdown & cool relationship with father.

Member of parliament. Agreed to run only if he didn't need to campaign. Thin reedy voice. His writing style is "Victorian" but robust. He wanted to persuade educated readers, not impress academics. Recommend: On Liberty.

But lived according to principles. Lived with a married woman before her husband's death and wrote about universal suffrage.

Wrote only book on logic written between Aristotle and Frege that is still worth reading.

Objections to utilitarianism

Maximization of what?

Bentham: Maximize pleasure. Pushpin is superior to poetry if enough people think so. Criticized as the "ethics of the trough."

Mill: Informed happiness. But open to elitism.

Special relationships and obligations:
If you make a promise (e.g. publishing a privacy policy) shouldn't you keep it? Even if the consequences of breaking it are better (for everyone)?

Illegitimate values:
Why give any weight to all stakeholders? (E.g. pornographer in case of PICS). And if you must weight stakeholders, do you do it on the basis of population size? Why? Not all systems of representation (e.g. Senate/electoral college/UN votes) are based on this.

Impossibility of prediction:
Do we care about outcomes or anticipated outcomes? But can we know? Are we subject to systematic biases like wishful thinking? (Note this does surface the need for a lot of relevant "is" knowledge as a background for making "ought" judgments.)

Later utilitarianists argue that bounded rationality implies that we should use rules of thumb (i.e. ethical principles) as ways to satisfice consequences in situations like the one the decision maker faces. But then the same questions arise: how do you know which rules lead to what outcomes?

Impossibility of measurement:
Whether the outcome is measured in terms of happiness or pleasure or preference satisfaction, what are the units of measurement and how are they measured? (We used a three-point logarithmic scale -- but why??)

Modern CBA for public programs usually reduces everything to money. (Often with complex accounting rules to account for future value.) This might work for an intellectual property policy (or not) but how do you quantify outcomes about access to information by minors in monetary terms? Should you?

In summary
Utilitarianism doesn't work in practice the way Bentham proposed. But it's a good idealization of what we should do if we are concerned with stakeholders and have influence over policymaking. The problem is matching ideals to practical procedure -- e.g. by obtaining estimated outcomes and combining them fairly.

There are more fundamental objections -- especially for use in personal ethics -- that outcomes are irrelevant when courses of action could violate obligations -- either prior commitments or universal laws and principles.

Intellectual Property Rights Questions

(a) Give arguments for the defendants' case that the postings are acceptable under fair-use guidelines.

(b) Give arguments for the Church's claim that the postings are not fair use.

(c) Decide between the arguments, giving your reasons.

Baase Scenario Method

Method: Scenario analysis [adapted from Baase: A Gift of Fire (1st Edition), p. 350]

1. Identify all the people and organizations affected (the "stakeholders.")

2. In cases where there is no simple yes/no decision, but rather one has to choose some action, list as many possible actions as you can.

3. Consider the impact of each action on each of the stakeholders. List consequences, risks, benefits, harms, costs.

4.  Identify the rights of the stakeholders and your responsibilities as decision-maker. Determine if any of the actions would violate someone's rights or would violate general ethical guidelines.

5. Decide which actions that remain are ethically wrong, which are ethically obligatory, and which are acceptable but not required choices.

6. If there are several ethically acceptable options and none that are obligatory, select one of the acceptable options, considering the ethical merits of each, courtesy to others, practicality, self-interest, personal preference, and so on.


Free Speech Question

You run a small company that developed and markets a filter program to help parents filter out material that they do not wish their children to access on the Internet. Your work in filtering is widely acknowledged as pioneering in the field and has influenced many products, including those of competitors.  Now, a foreign government wants your company to develop a custom version of the program to be used on the country's Internet connection to the rest of the world. The custom program is to filter out material that the government does not want its citizens to access.

(a) Give arguments in favor of accepting the contract, and arguments against.

(b) Is it ethically wrong to accept the contract?

(c) Would you accept it? Why or why not? Would it depend on what kind of information the government wanted to filter?

(c) Your company has competitors, and the foreign government could get one of them to develop a filtering system for it if you do not accept the contract. Given its inevitable anti-free-speech use by non-democratic governments, will you feel any responsibility for the way in which the software came to be used in ways different to your original intention? Could you have foreseen it, and should this have affected your original decision to develop the techniques and the software?

(e) In what ways does this example illustrate the pessimistic claim that technology will always be used for negative purposes?