Contemporary Issues in Ethics and Information Technology

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Contemporary Issues in Ethics and Information Technology", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 2, pp. 166-167. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710730411

Interest in information ethics has grown in recent years and Schultz's new study of contemporary issues goes a long way to explain why this is so. His focus is information and IT ethics rather than internet and cyberspace ethics examined by writers like Spinello. Schultz has a philosophy and computing background and is currently professor of computer information systems at Woodbury University, Burbank in California. His approach is attractive and provides a coherent and wide‐ranging examination of information ethics that will make the book useful to courses where information ethics are studied and taught as well as to practitioners keen to update their general knowledge of the field.

Several features of this book recommend it as special. One is a sure‐footed understanding and presentation of central ethical ideas: the first section asks and then answers “what is ethics?”, applying it to IT in a realistic corporate environment, asking why we need to know, and tying it in with ethical theory (causes‐effects, duty, and rights and the like). He makes it clear that, in IT and information work, practitioners need to know about obligation and compliance not just in a legal sense but in an ethical sense too. He asks readers to think about applied ethics in the organization and beyond it.

The second section looks at professional ethics. This could be a tired rehearsal but is far from it, because Schultz presents and analyzes three key codes of conduct, teases out what we mean by “justice” in a market economy, and probes the ethical balances between the search for efficiency and competitive advantage on the one side and ethical accountability on the other. The consequentialist pragmatism of business gets a long‐overdue critique as he examines trust in the supply chain, monopoly behaviour in the IT and retail market, outsourcing and off‐shoring dilemmas when profit may be put above employee interests (and where this applies globally).

This approach has an unexpected realism and vision that many more parochial books about ethics in this field lack, even though Schultz likes to discuss and speculate on the wider themes rather than dig down into practical examples (which would have improved this already good book). The third section turns to information users, and provides a sensible concise commentary on privacy and security (the link here is central and is the subject of another work from IRM Press by Quigley (2005)) and on copyright and piracy. His angle is that of exploring balances between privacy and the public interest, utilitarian social forces and the individual, IT practitioners and terrorism law, rights ownership and access, corporate power (for example Disney) and freedom to know. All these issues can be found in many other places but here they are given clear and thoughtful exposure. The last section turns to the value of IT and the implications of (IT) technology generally, asking whether arguments about technological determinism apply today, weighing up technology and species survival and ecology, wondering whether ERP (enterprise resource planning) drives knowledge acquisition rather than responding to it, and speculating on the impact of IT on what we are as human beings.

Over‐arching the whole book are the ideas of the legal philosopher Rawls (1999), above all his two principles of “greatest equal liberty” (fair equality for all) and of “difference” (that economic inequalities in society are justified by their making the least advantaged better off than if there were no inequality). These ideas are applied to and in each section, giving both a strong social policy edge to Schultz's arguments and a legal dimension to the ethical issues he raises. All in all, then, not a practical guidebook to information ethics, in the sense that you could use it directly for staff training, but a work nonetheless full of realistic ideas about ethics in a corporate and socially‐aware context, a world where Napster and Microsoft, Wal‐Mart and Disney exercise substantial economic and legal clout over IT, and where IT practitioners, often with the eyes focused on immediate problems (including ethical ones), may not raise their eyes to see the bigger picture. That said, this is mainly a book for the student and teacher in information, library, and IT studies.