The Ultimate Value of Information Technology

In order to conclude our discussion of the value of information technology, we need to answer these questions: What characteristics does IT share with modern technology generally? What is its place with respect to the rest of technology and with respect to the rest of the world? The goal of this chapter is to formulate how information technology might interact with ethical principles required at the species level, ecosystem level, and the level of being as a whole. I also want to consider the impact of these ethical principles on our responsibilities as IT professionals. The most positive feature of information technology is its potential to contribute to the increase in human consciousness by making more knowledge more widely available. Yet it can just as easily enable questionable applications of technology that further our extinction as a species or the destruction of the ecosystem. Let us begin by asking of information technology the questions we asked about technology generally: Is information technology a neutral means? Does it have its own ends and point of view?

The Ultimate Value of Technology

In the previous chapter, we saw how difficult it was to determine the value of information technology, even with a clearly defined point of view from which to assess that value, namely, the interests of the organization utilizing the technology. Over and above the point of view of the organization or even the economy as an aggregate of organizations, there are other perspectives to consider. Is it correct to view technology as another enabling value like health and wealth, an all-purpose means that enables us to achieve any number of our ends?1 Or should technology rather be viewed as an entirely different way of structuring reality? These questions raise broader issues that need to be considered from much wider points of view: What is the value of information technology for humanity as a whole? And finally, what is the value of information technology for being as a whole? In considering these questions, we need also to consider whether the value of information technology is best assessed as a part of technology generally, or whether information technology has its own characteristics relevant for assessing its value. I will examine issues concerning technology as a whole in this chapter, and return to the IT-specific issues in the next chapter. Beyond considering technology and information technology from the point of view of humanity as a whole, it may be necessary to consider technology and information technology from the point of view of being as a whole. One could think of the point of view of being as a whole as God’s point of view, except that many religious conceptions of God assign many different human attributes to God. And so to determine what is valuable from God’s point of view would embroil us in major religious disputes about God’s nature. Trying to take the point of view of being avoids such disputes. Rather, we are asking, what is the value of technology from the point of view of the unfolding or revealing of whatever is, has been, or will come to be?2 Even the point of view of humanity is itself very difficult for many people to embrace. Instead, their highest point of view is that of some limited human group, most typically national or social groups, ethnic groups, or economic groups or organizations. Yet even with these difficulties, it is easier to discuss the value of technology and information technology from the point of view of humanity as a whole than it is to discuss these questions from the point of view of being. So we will start with the point of view of humanity.

Copyright and Piracy

As I noted in Chapter II, information technology’s basic feature of easy reproduction of digital information gives rise both to new benefits and to new ethical problems. Easy reproduction allows new—and sometimes unwelcome—ways of sharing material previously much harder to copy, such as digitized music and movies. Napster, based on the brilliant and revolutionary idea of distributed storage on millions of machines with no centralized profit-taking, was defeated by centralized profit-takers. Of course, there was also an issue of copyright violation. Currently, movie and music companies are aggressively pursuing digital copyright violators. The response of the record and movie companies might have been different. The earlier technological advances of cassette audiotapes and VCRs facilitated copying music and video but did not elicit a wave of court cases against consumers. After an initial attempt to block any copying, the recording and movie industries realized that amateur copying was actually promoting sales. However, since the inception of Napster, music CD sales have gone down significantly. It is an open question whether copying or poor music quality is more responsible. Music commentators state that current industry producers have strong incentives to promote mediocre music in familiar genres.1 An accompanying issue is control of channels of distribution to reduce competition against mediocre music.2 In fact, much of what these companies now treat as piracy had always been considered “fair use” in other areas.3

Offshoring as an Ethical Issue

Removal of jobs from one country to another to exploit lower paid workers tends to raise objections from those whose jobs are removed. However, historically, such jobs have tended to be low-wage, low-skill jobs, and the people holding them have typically not been able to mount effective resistance. Recently, highly skilled, highly paid IT jobs have begun to be exported from the United States, and although some of the questions raised are the same as for the earlier low-wage jobs, there are some different considerations. What are the relevant ethical considerations involved in exporting jobs to exploit lower wages? In certain circumstances, there seems to be nothing wrong with this practice. If, for example, the currency exchange rate makes work done in the U.S. cheaper than work done in France, but otherwise the standards of living of the workers in the two countries are comparable, it is hardto see an ethical issue here. This seems to be a form of arbitrage on labor prices. “Arbitrage” is defined as buying the currently relatively low-priced commodity and selling the currently relatively high-priced commodity in the expectation that the market will correct one or both prices. In liquid markets, it serves a scavenger function to even out price disparities. For example, New York-London gold arbitrage is a recognized function performed by some firms. They buy the cheaper gold and sell it into the more expensive market. The net effect is to reduce or eliminate price disparities. It is a sort of benign communication function in a market economy, helping to even out prices consistently throughout markets. Although offshoring has some of the features of arbitrage, it does not seem to have all the relevant features that make arbitrage a benign, healthy function of a market economy. The most important difference is that the “commodity” subject to arbitrage in offshoring is labor. In a true arbitrage situation, the commodity’s location does not change the nature of the commodity, and this is why price differences in gold are simply fluctuations due to market functioning. But it makes a big difference where labor is located. The whole point of offshoring jobs is precisely that we don’t want to move laborers from India or China to the United States, because then we would have to pay them prevailing U.S. wages. For offshoring to work, we must take advantage of a social context with prevailing lower wages. Offshoring is in fact a new ethical problem brought about by the availability-at-any-location feature of information technology. By the use of IT, we can take advantage of social contexts with prevailing lower wages when the relevant features of the job can be performed great distances away.

Justice in a Market Economy

As we saw from the last two chapters, the ethical IT professional is embedded in contexts of management, organization, and society. Ethical behavior for the IT professional is, therefore, impacted by the ethics of people and institutions in his or her environment. The primary term for ethical institutions is justice.1 In the next three chapters, we will examine the justice of institutions impacting the IT professional. The framework used will be that provided by the works of John Rawls (1999, 2001). Rawls’ work is based on the idea of a social contract, that a justly ordered society is one to which individuals can freely decide to obligate themselves. But our decision will very likely be biased if we base it on our current situation. So Rawls’ major addition is to say that the decision must be made prior to being in society, without knowledge of what our position will be in society, and it will be a decision we will be obligated to stick to and expect others to make and stick to as well. The basic principles for society chosen in this position (which Rawls calls the original position) will be the Principles of Justice. According to Rawls (1999, 2001), there will be two: 1. The First Principle of Justice or Greatest Equal Liberty: Society is to be arranged so that all members have the greatest equal liberty possible for all, including fair equality of opportunity. Each individual has basic liberties which are not to be compromised or traded off for other benefits. Besides the basic freedoms such as freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and so on, it includes equality of opportunity. Thus society’s rules are not biased against anyone in it and allow all to pursue their interests and realize their abilities. 2. The Second Principle of Justice or the Difference Principle: Economic inequalities in society are justified insofar as they make members of the least advantaged social class, better off than if there were no inequality. The social contract basis for this principle is straightforward: If you are entering a society with no knowledge of your specific place in that society, the Difference Principle guarantees that you will be no worse off than you need to be to keep the society functioning.

A Backgroun in Ethical Theory

In this book, “ethics” is a general term for concerns about what people should do. The term “ethics” comes from the Greek word ethike, which means “character.” Indeed, the ancient Greeks conceived issues about what people should do in terms of impact upon character—whether people were of good or bad character (Aristotle, 350 BCE). Our concern with good reputation reveals this kind of thinking, but bad actions and bad performance can be more important than any amount of good reputation if they are bad enough. Not even the most capable network troubleshooter could survive the discovery of large amounts of downloaded kiddie porn on his workstation. William Bennett’s A Book of Virtues (Bennett, 1993) is a more recent example of a character-based ethics very similar to Greek ethics. The central term of Greek ethics, ethike arête, is usually translated as “virtue”—the literal meaning is “excellence of character.” “Good character traits” is probably the nearest translation. Bennett’s list of virtues or good character traits includes: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty, and faith. His selection of virtues overlaps with the classic Greek virtues or good character traits. Plato’s list was: courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. (Plato, 360 BCE). Aristotle added liberality, pride, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, and ready wit. Although all of these—Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Bennett’s—are good character traits to have, having them doesn’t answer many important questions about what actions to do, especially when virtues conflict. Is perseverance in constructing a computer virus a good thing? Clearly the rightness or wrongness of the action in which we are persevering is very important. Or what about loyalty to an organization ripping off poor people? Here honesty (and compassion) may be more important than loyalty and responsibility. Indeed, Bennett’s list omits justice, considered the most important virtue by Plato. Since justice is primarily a virtue of institutions rather than individuals, Bennett’s list leaves out issues about how well society is arranged. We have made some progress on these issues since Greek times.1 The point is that character-based ethics is incomplete. Bennett himself, in replying to critics of his compulsive gambling behavior, seems to believe that as long as an individual has the “virtues,” that is, the good character traits, then other actions are irrelevant. Most of the rest of us in these non-classic-Greek times believe otherwise. Nowadays, “ethics” is an inclusive term for concerns also referred to as “morality,” “value,” and “justice.” Besides character, ethics in this inclusive sense is also concerned with the rightness and wrongness of actions, the value or goodness of things and situations, and with the justness of institutions. The basic terms of ethics are: right, good, and just.

Valuing Information Technology

Besides being of interest in its own right, the question of the value of information technology (IT) has ethical implications, primarily for policymakers and managers in organizations. IT professional duty and managerial duty require undertakings that have a reasonable expectation of improving the organization and its prospects. Since IT plays a complex role in providing benefits for an organization, and also since IT projects can fail in ways that have major negative impact on an organization, the valuation of IT impacts the ethical responsibilities of policymakers and managers. In the late 1980s, a number of researchers set out to quantify the value added to an organization by computerization or automation (two terms commonly used in those days). To their surprise, they found no or comparatively little value added. This result became known as the “Productivity Paradox” (Brynjollfson, 1992; Loveman, 1988; Roach, 1991). The ensuing discussion continued through the 1990s and beyond. Whatever else the discussion accomplished, it showed the complexity of questions about the value of information technology. There are cases in which IT has clearly added value to a particular organization at a particular time. It is also true that, in some cases, IT has added more than shareholder or monetary value so that from any social point of view, the result is positive. The World Wide Web is an example. The difficulty in assessing value comes when one tries to reach conclusions about the overall contribution of IT to the economy or to society. It is widely known that IT benefits are far from automatic and sometimes difficult or impossible to achieve. So, overall, do the benefits outweigh the costs? How do we go about answering this question? What are the appropriate points of view from which to determine value?1 The two main appropriate points of view are: 1. The user point of view. The user is whoever employs the technology, whether an individual, organization, or organizational department. 2. The socioeconomic point of view, which is the point of view of the society or economy, whatever promulgates overall economic policies. From the user point of view, typical questions would be as follows: • Individual: Is it worth it for me to purchase this firewall software? • Organization: Should we install ERP software companywide? What are the benefits and liabilities for the organization? Is the investment worth it? • Independent Department: Should we switch our production software to another company’s product? Again, what are the benefits and liabilities for the department? (In the background, there should be a procedure insuring that potential impacts for the rest of the organization are considered.)

Professional Duties

It is perhaps easiest to begin the application of ethics to information technology with the ethical responsibilities of IT professionals. Several ethical codes have been developed, and in this chapter we will see how the concepts of Part I apply to these codes. My aim is to establish the ethical basis of these codes. The underlying ethical concepts are Rawlsian, but not his Principles of Justice (Rawls, 1999). Rather, they are distinctions developed as part of the theory of right action. The distinction between duty and obligation is particularly relevant. In addition, something needs to be said about the concept of a profession. Most IT professionals have a very strong sense of their responsibilities as IT professionals. In a way, it is astonishing that such a young profession has developed such a strong sense of its own ethical identity so quickly. Older professions such as Medicine or Law have traditions going back over two thousand years, and their standards have been incorporated into law in most areas. Although IT has its professional organizations, such as the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP), those organizations do not currently perform a widely recognized credentialing function. Although these organizations promulgate model curricula, they have nothing like the force of the American Medical Association (AMA) certification for medical schools, or the American Bar Association (ABA) certification of law schools. Since IT is a profession without benefit of the formal apparatus of the older professions, it follows that the credentialing and legal sanctions of the older professions are not what makes them professions. Credentialing and legal sanctions safeguard what was already there, namely a calling shared by individuals. Professions differ from mere jobs because those in professions commit themselves indefinitely toward serving a goal beyond their own self-interest, which is their primary focus. Thus, those in the medical profession commit themselves to healing people, and those in the law commit themselves to interpreting and applying the law and preserving the integrity of the legal process. Professional athletes similarly commit themselves to practicing their sport as well as they can. All professionals are prepared to set aside their individual interests when their profession requires it. The basis of a profession—an individually adopted goal beyond self-interest—is also the essential basis for professional ethics.1 What then is this goal for IT professionals? What do IT professionals feel called to do? I think their calling is to provide the best functioning IT systems (infrastructure and applications) possible in the organizational context in which they are dealing. In terms of this calling, IT professionals know what they need to take responsibility for in the technical area, even when managers or clients have other ideas. These responsibilities are often not mandated by management. Indeed, management may not even be aware that IT professionals have assumed and carried out these responsibilities. Yet the well-being of the organization may very well depend on these responsibilities being carried out. A good example is data integrity; nonprofessionals usually have only a vague idea of what is involved in insuring data integrity, and yet failures in insuring data integrity will almost certainly compromise the usability of a system. Even without formal, generally accepted credentialing for IT professionals, there is still a distinct calling recognized by IT professionals with duties attached to it. The absence of generally accepted credentialing does, however, create possibilities for conflicts with management and others, which we will discuss later in this chapter.

E-Problems

In Chapter I, I observed that new uses of IT will be built on four basic features of information technology: • Speed of information processing • Unlimited size of information storage capacity • Availability of information at any location (connectivity) • Easy reproduction of digital information These features combine in many different ways to produce the various applications of IT that give rise both to new benefits and to new ethical problems. But, just as new and unpredictable uses of information technology arise with some regularity, so do new and unpredictable ethical problems. I will define an e-problem as an ethical problem that arises as a result of one of the four features of IT listed above. In this chapter, I will examine five unexpected and difficult e-problems:

Trust Issues in a Market Economy

In a competitive market economy, one is required to serve the interests of one’s employer or corporation. As we saw in Chapter IV, Professional Duties, one can do this in several different roles: as an employee, as a manager, or as a consultant. In each of these roles, one’s duties are often fairly clear. But there are a number of circumstances in which these duties are not the final word. First, when corporate boundaries become blurred, as they are in contemporary supply-chain management, new ethical issues arise. In a traditional market situation, agreement with another company to charge a fixed amount is often collusion or price fixing and is both illegal and unethical. In a supply-chain context, agreements that a supplier charge a fixed amount are essential for vendor managed inventory. They are not illegal and not regarded as unethical. Similarly, outsourcing agreements require companies to be concerned for each other’s well-being.