PHIL 327 Ethics in the Information Age

General

• Compare and contrast major moral theories and applied professional codes specific to information ethics.
• Focus most acutely on the centrality of justification for claims made in these accounts.
• Assess case studies, comparing various professional codes of ethics with accounts developed in the course, focusing on issues such as privacy, surveillance and data mining, freedom of speech, copyright, computer crime and abuse, justice in access to information, the political and social significance of the Internet, and so on.
• Use the work of the course to reflect on personal beliefs and attitudes about these central issues, and to construct ways, as a citizen concerned about the ways in which information technology is changing our lives, to act on those beliefs.
• Apply, at an advanced collegiate level, the resulting understandings to an analysis of the moral dilemmas inevitably facing all members of the information community, from information technology professionals to citizen concerned to contribute to the shaping of information policies.