Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to attempt to investigate how Information and Communications Technology researchers in UK computing departments address ethics in their research. Whilst research and innovation in ICT has blossomed in the last two decades, the ethical, social and legal challenges they present have also increased. However, the increasing attention the technical development receives has not been replicated in the area of developing effective guidelines that can address the moral issues inherent in ICT research.Design/methodology/approach– This research (...) is qualitative and made use of interviews. The data analysis was done with dialectical hermeneutics. Through a dialectical hermeneutic process, this research unpacks different understandings of relevance attached to ethics reviews of ICT research in UK computing departments.Findings– The findings include that ethics reviews are relevant because; it is a moral duty, it improves trust for researchers, it is part of risk assessment, it is in compliance with the law and it is a sustainable act.Practical implications– These various understandings illustrate an important dialectic process on the current state of the art in ICT research.Social implications– It asks to what degree the currently dominant model of ethics review based on biomedical ethics is optimal to ICT.Originality/value– It proposes a framework that can effectively help researchers and administrators to ensure responsible research and innovation in ICT. Finally, it identifies that ICT researchers would benefit from the developing repertoire of responsible research innovation. (shrink)

Traditional rule consequentialism faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection—the worry that by looking only at the consequences in worlds where rules are universally adhered to, the theory fails to account for problems that arise because adherence to rules in the real world is inevitably imperfect. In response, recent theorists have defended sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism which are sensitive to the consequences in worlds with less utopian levels of adherence. In this paper, I argue that these attempts (...) underestimate the problem they are designed to avoid—the worry about ideal worlds is only one manifestation of a deeper and more general problem, the distant world objection, which threatens not only the sophisticated revisions of rule consequentialism, but any view which determines what we ought to do by evaluating worlds that differ from ours in more than what is up to us. (shrink)

Rule consequentialism (RC) holds that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined by an ideal moral code, i.e., the set of rules whose internalization would have the best consequences. But just how many moral codes are there supposed to be? Absolute RC holds that there is a single morally ideal code for everyone, while Relative RC holds that there are different codes for different groups or individuals. I argue that Relative RC better meets the test of reflective equilibrium than (...) Absolute RC. In particular, I contend that Relative RC is superior because it accommodates our convictions about costless benefits. Some have charged that Relative RC threatens our convictions about the generality of moral codes and that it leads inevitably to what Brad Hooker calls “runaway relativism.” I argue that Relative RC has principled reasons for stopping this imagined slide down the slippery slope. (shrink)

A general introduction to consequentialism.