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Information and Communication
Technology Ethics and
Social Responsibility
Tomas Cahlik
Charles University Prague, Czech Republic & University of Economics Prague, Czech Republic
INTRODUCTION
Information and Communication Technologies
(ICTs) have penetrated during the last 20 years all
human activities everywhere on the Earth. Human-
ity has entered into the information age, virtual
reality and even virtual worlds have been crated.
The basic ethical questions stay as they have
always been: How are we to live? What are we to
be? Basic answers are, of course, that we ought
to live good lives and be good persons.
The aim of this article is:
• To specify what “living a good life” and
“being a good person” could be in the in-
formation age;
• To identify some challenges and opportu-
nities ICTs offer in this context.
Having absolutely stabilized basic questions
and basic answers makes the methodology of
ethics quite different from the methodology in
sciences. In sciences, one starts with a thorough
review of previous research, specifies some
new and interesting research question, makes
hypotheses about possible answers and bases
argumentation on data. In ethics, one reflects
problems of the current age in a mirror that was
created centuries ago and has been polished by
many ethical reflections ever since. Forms of
ethical texts are rich: dialogs, even poems, but
the most used form is an essay.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2255-3.ch426
Copyright © 2018, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
Category: IT Security and Ethics
BACKGROUND
Literature review in research articles is used for
showing that the research described in the article
fits into research themes that are interesting for
contemporary research community. Literature re-
view in ethical reflections is used differently, just
for illustration of ideas that have been published
in the area of interest and for “opening the scene”.
Looking into the Web of Science database in
September 2015 and using keywords “information
technology”, “ethics” and “social responsibility”
60 entries are obtained (from that 55 articles or
conference proceedings), 31 entries being pub-
lished since 2010. This reveals not high but steady
and increasing activity on the interdisciplinary
border between ICTs and that part of ethics that
is linked to social responsibility.
Looking closer into the content of those ar-
ticles, following themes can be identified in the
last decade:
• Ethical questions linked with the creation
and use of “big data”, including creation
of agreed standards of good practice -
e.g. (Rizk&Choueiri, 2006), (Light,&
McGrath, 2010), (Celen, & Seferoglu,
2013);
• Development of sustainable information
society - e.g. (Tsai&Chen, 2013), (Busch,
2011), (Niemela&Ikonen&Leikas&Kanto
la&Kulju&Tammela&Ylikauppila, 2014)

in the sense of an inclusive and environ-
mentally friendly society; application of
precautionary principle in the development
of ICTs (Som&Hilty& Kohler, 2009);
• Corporate social responsibility of both ICT
suppliers and users – e.g. (Tsai&Chen,
2013), (Busch, 2011), (Vaccaro&Madsen,
2009), including suggestions for standards
of good practice (Patrignani&Whitehouse,
2014) and how to enable consumers to
push companies to behave ethically with
the use of ICTs (Watts& Wyner, 2011);
• University social responsibility (Arntzen,
2010); new teaching and learning culture
based on ICTs (Stepien, 2010).
This indicates research activity that is driven by
applications and can be contrasted with the research
activity from the years before, that was pushed by
theoretical considerations. (Lianos, 2000) e.g. starts
with sociological concepts and identifies the threat
that ICTs can atomize society through making de-
velopment of personal trust obsolete. Lianos uses
credit card as an example: one does not need to be
trusted by the provider of money, the only thing
that is relevant is the validity of the card. Technical
norms replace moral and social norms.
Research fields may have different dynamics. It
is quite usual that after the theoretical development
some themes or even the whole field dissolve in
applications. Nevertheless, after some time, both
practitioners and applied researchers may find it
useful to return to more generalizing theoretical
reflection. In this article, the most general level
of ethical reflection is being considered.
Ethics as practical philosophy offers a lot of
valuable ideas that have been generalized from the
real life problems of the whole human history. In
this article, especially ideas developed by utilitar-
ian philosophers, existential philosophers and the
proponents of the “virtue ethics” can be identified.
Two more areas of ethics linked with this article
are “ethics of norms” and “casuistry”. Readers are
advised to find more detailed summaries of those
three schools and two areas on web.
Category: IT Security and Ethics
“LIVING GOOD LIFE” AND
“BEING A GOOD PERSON” IN I
THE INFORMATION AGE
Issues, Controversies, Problems
Let us identify three challenges and three opportu-
nities ICTs directly offer in the context of ethics.
This gives a framework to this article from which
the discussion of economic costs and benefits stays
mostly out, even if economic costs and benefits
surely have ethical impacts.
Specification of the first challenge builds upon
the above described conclusion in (Lianos, 2000)
that technical norms replace moral and social
norms. Problem is that the network of moral
and social norms has always been considered as
something absolutely necessary for the identity
of specific society and that the dissolution of this
network means atomization and threatens the
whole society.
The second challenge is linked with the cur-
rent research frontier of ICTs, with virtual reality.
Economic and social thinking is strongly based
on utilitarianism and its basic persuasion that for
having a good life pleasures must be maximized
and pains minimized. ICTs allow creating a virtual
reality in which the choice of pleasures is almost
unlimited and in which we are able to avoid
pain. The basic question here is the authenticity
of such a life. It can be easy and pleasant but it
loses any sense.
Above the basic utilitarian life level, another
level ought to be built in which we ask if our
activities are right. What is the right activity has
been discussed in Western thinking for centuries
since Plato and two basic outcomes are as follows:
• In a right activity, humans are used not as
tools only. E.g. authors of new software
ought to take into consideration not only
how much they earn but if the software al-
lows better self-realization of users, too;
• Real circumstances must be taken into con-
sideration in following the basic target of
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Information and Communication Technology Ethics and Social Responsibility
“being better humans”. E.g. software firms
must follow the profit motive as well as the
moral one to stay in the business.
ICTs have not changed these basic outcomes
but have surely changed the real circumstances
and this opens the stage for discussion of what
the right activities are in these changed circum-
stances. All new technologies have always done
this, but what makes ICTs specific is the scale
and speed of change.
One lives a good life if one realizes his or her
potential in right activities. A person can develop
its potential and become a virtuous person through
cultivating its virtues and fighting its vices. Good
people are virtuous people and there exists a posi-
tive correlation between being good people and
doing right activities. So there exists a strong link
between being a good person and living a good life.
The second challenge of ICTs lies in the pos-
sibility that people could be sucked too much into
the virtual reality, enjoy pleasures there and try to
avoid reality. Their lives would lose authenticity
and they would not leave the basic utilitarian life
level. Impacts on both the individual and society
would be analogic to impacts of drugs addiction.
There exists a positive feedback between
the first and second challenge: instead of being
identified with a real society existing at some
geographical place, people are identified with
the usually anonymous social group sharing the
same virtual reality. In the process of atomization
of real society, the motivation for its members
to find substitutes of social ties in virtual reality
increases. This closes the loop.
In this context, we could ask about the geo-po-
litical impact of having socially atomized countries
in which a lot of citizens avoid reality together with
socially homogenous countries where people live
more in reality. Let us imagine a possibly violent
conflict and ask who would probably win in such
a conflict? Or let us imagine mass immigration of
people from the second type of countries to a country
of the first type. What would happen? It is surely
not socially responsible to ignore these scenarios.
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The first opportunity of the virtual reality ICTs
have created lies in quick detection of suspect
economic, political and other social activities in a
real society and in facilitating the discourse about
such activities. By definition, discourse is discus-
sion in which participants are free in the sense that
they are not influenced by exogenous incentives
or constraints in the expression of their opinions.
Virtual reality, if it is free - without censorship
- and anonymous offers an optimal environment
for discourses on any topic. Discourses on suspect
social activities help to create socially accepted
moral norms and push firms and politicians to
social responsibility.
The second opportunity lies in the enormous
educational potential of the virtual world. For
Aristotle, being educated was considered to be a
virtue by itself, even if not being a moral virtue.
For Plato, if people just knew what were right
they would behave in that way. It may be too op-
timistic but we know that there exists a negative
correlation between educational level in a country
and e.g. crime.
Instead of discussing this intuitively clear
opportunity on general level let us illustrate how
ICTs can be used for benchmarking and looking
for best practices in ethical issues. In (Codes
of Ethics Collection), there are thousands of
different ethical codes. Each of them presents
norms that have been accepted by some organiza-
tion (firm, association, university etc.). Ethical
Codes are classified according to professional
categories, one of them being “Computer and
Information Science”. In September 2015, 56
organizations are found in this category, some
of them with ethical codes for specific activi-
ties, some of them with different versions of the
same code showing how it has been developed
in time.
Any organization interested in development
of its ethical norms can use this enormous source
to compare the norms it already has with norms
of its peers in the Codes of Ethics Collection. In
an internal discourse, it can then formulate and
accept the best for itself.

We can see another positive feedback, now
between both opportunities: educational mate-
rial easily accessible through ICTs can be used
in discourses and additional knowledge created
in discourses becomes easily accessible through
ICTs.
The third opportunity lies in using ICTs for
supporting the creation of virtues and the third
challenge in supporting the creation of vices. The
lists of moral virtues and vices have been chang-
ing during the centuries since Aristotle and there
is not full consent about what ought to be on the
lists. The most of virtues and vices get stronger
with the repetition of either good or bad activities.
Let us take the (List of virtues) and (List
of vices) from the webpage http://www.virtue-
science.com/, choose some of them and analyze
how they can be strengthened by ICTs. (We could
surely take any other list, but the advantage of
these two lists is that the list of virtues has 120
items and the list of vices 17 only. This supports
the optimistic attitude towards human nature.)
“Compassion” and “Charity”: ICTs allow
watching repeatedly and with high frequency poor
people around the World what develops compas-
sion among the most of watchers; psychologically
especially among young people who are in the
same time the most knowledgeable users of ICTs.
This positive correlation can make this effect quite
strong. ICTs offer a very easy way (e.g. donation
through SMS) to do charitable activities what
makes compassioned people to do such activities
repeatedly. This strengthens the virtue charity.
“Curiosity”, “Commitment” and “Creativity”:
Anderson in (Anderson, 2010) describes a nice
example how web video powers global innova-
tion. A slum boy watches video with street dance.
Watching wakes up his curiosity and he makes
commitment to master street dance himself. He
surely has to be highly creative in transferring
the knowledge from video into reality. There are
millions of different activities and millions of
web users, many of them behaving similarly as
the slum boy, so ICTs have a very strong effect
on these three virtues.
Category: IT Security and Ethics
“Enthusiasm” and “Cooperation”: For econo-
mists, it is really difficult to explain the very ex- I
istence of the open source software or Wikipedia
because of non-existence of material incentives.
Possible explanation is following: Knowledgeable
users of ICTs are usually quite enthusiastic about
the possibilities ICTs offer. They form a global
community and identify strongly with this com-
munity. This has created the situation in which
they like to cooperate not for material benefit but
for achieving a shared goal. This works if indi-
vidual costs of cooperation are negligible, what
they with the use of ICTs can really be. Social
benefits are enormous.
“Chastity” as a virtue or “Lack of Chastity”
as a vice: In this context, pornographic content
of web sites ought to be discussed. Watching
pornography repeatedly creates habit - sometimes
addiction – and weakens chastity. This discussion
is not relevant for all World societies, e.g. in Japan
people do not consider chastity as having sexual
context. Watching pornography is clearly linked
with the second challenge of ICTs discussed above;
real sexual activity can shift to virtual reality what
could have demographic impacts.
“Sloth”: Let us understand laziness as aversion to
be active in the real world. Being active in that part
of virtual reality that overlaps with reality perhaps
weakens sloth; ICTs can increase the efficiency
of our real activity what increases our motivation
for doing it. Problem is that ICTs have created an
enormous potential for procrastination – for doing
less urgent but pleasurable tasks in preference to
more urgent but less pleasurable ones. The seductive
power can be strong and yielding to temptation is
surely positively correlated with sloth.
Solutions and Recommendations
The positive impact of above discussed oppor-
tunities can neutralize or outweigh the negative
impact of above discussed challenges - threats.
We cannot say for sure what happens because
we know that all systems with positive feedbacks
can considerably and dis-continually change very
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Information and Communication Technology Ethics and Social Responsibility
quickly their behavior and that it is impossible
to predict when the change comes and what the
behavior of the system would be after the change.
Similar situation has occurred with the spread of
each new technology and some recommendations
can be done based on historical experiences.
It would not have any sense to try to stop the
development of ICTs, it is simply impossible.
What is possible is to try to increase the costs of
ICTs activities that are negative from the ethical
point of view and to increase benefits of activities
that are positive from the ethical point of view. If
it ought to be done, how to do it and who ought
to do it opens a lot of questions. Let us take as an
example the possibility of censorship.
Censorship can decrease negative impact
through forbidding access to pages that could cre-
ate addiction. Problem is that it constrains freedom
in the virtual reality that is the basic condition
for using up the opportunities of ICTs. In each
society, some equilibrium level of censorship has
been created that reflexes different opinions on
this issue. Both opinions and the equilibrium shift
in time, we can imagine that in Western societies
more www pages than child pornography could
be blocked and in China some of the currently
blocked www pages could be unblocked.
Previous example shows that discourse of
ethical issues linked with ICTs can never stop and
that all members of society have responsibility to
take part in it.
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Following research questions would deserve more
attention:
• What is the impact of ICTs on social iden-
tity? Could possible changes in social iden-
tity have a geo-political impact?
• What other virtues and vices are influenced
by ICTs and how?
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• Is it possible to increase the costs of ICTs
activities that are negative from the ethical
point of view, ought it to be done and by
whom?
• Is it possible to increase the benefits of
ICTs activities that are positive from the
ethical point of view, ought it to be done
and by whom?
CONCLUSION
ICTs offer a lot of possibilities and present some
challenges – threats - for living a good life in the
ethical sense and being a good person. It is impos-
sible to predict if the positive impacts outweigh
the negative ones. Anyway, it is impossible to stop
the development of ICTs. The question is if the
society ought to try to increase the costs of ICTs
activities that are negative from the ethical point
of view and to increase benefits of activities that
are positive from the ethical point of view, who
ought to do it and how. All members of society
have responsibility to participate in discourse of
this question.
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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS
Casuistry: Branch of ethics that uses case
studies to make clear moral principles and norms
in typical situations. All ethical codes specify
some norms of conduct. These norms are usually
explained with the use of different case studies.
Existential Philosophy: Branch of Philosophy
that starts with individual existence and the prob-
lem of its being in the World. Important predeces-
sor was Søren Kierkegaard (19th century), among
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Information and Communication Technology Ethics and Social Responsibility
main representatives we can find Martin Heidegger
and Jean-Paul Sartre (both 20th century). They
looked for authentic existence and have found
different solutions depending especially on the
religiosity of the specific philosopher.
Ethics: Practical philosophy, scientific analy-
sis of moral contents.
Ethics of Norms: Branch of ethics that
analyses the structure of norms and what they
are based on.
Norms: Norms are the shared and sanctioned
rules. Sanctions can be both formal (e.g. law) and
informal (e.g. pressure of social group).
Utilitarianism: Branch of ethics that bases
moral reasoning on consequences of actions.
Actions are good if they maximize pleasure and
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minimize pain. Among grounders are Jeremy Ben-
tham and John Stuart Mill (18th -19th century).
It has penetrated the mainstream economics. It
can be shown that total utility of consumers can
be increased by redistribution.
Virtue Ethics: Branch of Ethics that considers
humans as being bearers of given or developed
virtues. Humans have to develop virtues and fight
with vices for becoming good. Basic concepts
go back as far as to Plato and Aristotle (5th, 4th
century BCE).
Virtual Reality: Created and accessed by ICTs.
It usually overlaps with “reality” but the overlap-
ping is changing and fuzzy. Extremes of Virtual
Reality are Virtual Worlds, in which “avatars” of
humans can live parallel lives.