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Foundational Questions About Values in Information Technology
Full text linkIn the contemporary debate about values, information technology constitutes an
important source of hard ethical questions and in turn is a testing area for the
moral theory of values. Values are difficult to track down and yet there are a number of
inquiries starting from economics, social psychology, ethics, and political theory
that engage with the cognitive, epistemic, and moral status of values. This paper is a
contribution to an account of values in connection with information technology. It
argues that information technology may provide further support to a theory of
values that is able to embrace the transformative effects of the digital revolution. In
particular, it is plausible that a non- ideal reflection on digital wrongdoings is better
equipped to produce substantive knowledge about values that have been
undermined than a different approach focused on ideal guiding values. Moreover,
information technology overcomes the vaunted fact/value dichotomy and supports
the fact/value entanglement. As the principal concern of data-mining and machine
-learning communities are ways of remedying a remarkable number of biases and
conformism in techno-social systems, it is within the bounds of possibility to
supplement the non-ideal theory from this new practical angle. I therefore call for a
fully conceptual consideration of values drawing on the experience and reflection
that is growing in the field of information technology
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