The article undertakes to develop a theory of privacy considered as a fundamental moral right. The authors remind that the conception of the right to privacy is silent on the prospect of protecting informational privacy on consequentialist grounds. However, laws that prevent efficient marketing practices, speedy medical attention, equitable distribution of social resources, and criminal activity could all be justified by appeal to informational privacy as a fundamental right. Finally, the authors show that in the specter of terrorism, privacy can (...) be conceived as a fundamental moral right, one that is completely consistent with the willingness to submit for surveillance of private lives. (shrink)

A philosophical and practical model for approaching the ethical challenges librarians are facing is provided in this work. The moral value of information is first examined, prompting a rethinking of librarians' understanding of professional neutrality and calling for them to broaden their role as community information specialists. Organizational ethics are next covered; the authors recommend specific management styles and values appropriate to libraries. This is followed by a critical analysis of the culture and tradition of librarianship, showing how the field (...) has reached its current identity and how its history can provide insights for new professional values. Practical recommendations for handling ethical problems in reference service, collection development and Internet access are then presented. (shrink)

When businesses fail, their ability to honor agreements, uphold promises, and act on the higher ideals of their mission statements is often compromised. Following the ethical maxim that Aought implies can, @ business ethicists often grant that our practical obligations have to be understood against the backdrop of the relative scarcity or abundance of the business and social environment. Nothing brings on scarcity more dramatically than the total liquidation of a business =s assets. Bankruptcy protection and reorganization can, and probably (...) should, lead businesses to cut back on some of their obligations. But even if we allow this concession to practical exigency, we can still ask probing questions about how the.. (shrink)

Readers of previous installments of this column will recall that I have been discussing both the general relationship between information practices and moral virtues and some specific questions about the effects of information technology, such as the "expert system," upon our ability to lead virtuous lives and have morally satisfying work. In this column, I want to take a practical turn by articulating some of the ethical considerations which might motivate workplace information policy.

Published in The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying, Bloomsbury Press, October 2016.

When professionals are asked about the value of information technology to their work, they typically give two kinds of answers. Some see the advent or arrival of sophisticated information technology as a great boon to their professional lives. For them, the only question is how soon can the technology be deployed to open up new horizons for professional activity and end dull and tedious work. Others sense more acutely the serious..

Philosophers have given relatively little attention to the ethical issues surrounding the nature of intellectual property in spite of the fact that for the past ten years the public policy debate over "fair use" of copyrighted materials in higher education has been heating up. This neglect is especially striking since copyright ethics are at stake in so many aspects of academic life: the photocopying of materials for classroom use and scholarly work, access to electronic texts, and the cost and availability (...) of single-source information technology such as Dialogue, library card catalogues, the Oxford English Dictionary, and a variety of other print and electronic resources. Of course, the ethics of copyright are not only an issue for those of us in the business of education: recent allegations of copyright infringement by Texaco, which regularly photocopied articles from scientific and technical journals for its employees, suggests that questions about copyright ethics may arise regularly for every corporation and business. While the current lawsuit against Kinko's Copies(1) and Texaco may settle some public policy questions in the short run, the legal discourse on fair use depends upon competing ethical intuitions which are not likely to be resolved soon. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the general problem of how to give a philosophical account of the nature of representation by looking at three specific philosophies of language and the philosophic treatment of fictional discourse. I argue that Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin all try to give accounts of meaning by arguing for what I call a "closure of meaning" in language. The closure thesis is the claim that some set of criteria can exhaustively determine the ways in which (...) language can be meaningful. This thesis is implicit in Husserl's theory of expressive meaning in the Logical Investigations, in Wittgenstein's picture theory, and in J. L. Austin's pragmatic account of meaning in speech act theory. My general thesis is that the three philosophers in question do not successfully defend the closure thesis for linguistic representation. Since fictional discourse is a source of counterexamples to the closure thesis, I look specifically at two recent philosophical accounts of fiction by David Lewis and John Searle. I criticize these attempts to account for fictional discourse within referential and pragmatic theories of language. Since such attempts are usually part of a closure thesis, my discussion of fiction provides further reasons for doubting the general possibility of accounting for a closure of meaning in language. (shrink)

When tennis fan Jane Bronstein attended the 1995 U.S. Open she probably knew there was a remote chance her image would end up on television screens around the world. But she surely did not know she was at risk of becoming the object of worldwide attention on the David Letterman Show. As it happened, Letterman spotted an unflattering clip from the U.S. Open showing a heavyset Bronstein with peach juice dripping down her chin. Not only did he show the footage (...) six times that fall, but he ridiculed her on his “Top 10 List,” calling her a “seductive temptress,” even paying to put the clip on the Sony Jumbotron electronic billboard at Time Square. Ms. Bronstein sued David Letterman’s production company under New York civil rights law for violating her privacy. (shrink)

In this presentation, our goals are to identify some of the ways in which information technology poses a threat to librarians' professional identity and to develop a theory about the role that it should play. In the process of doing that we will identify organizational processes which may help librarians negotiate technological change, both within their profession and with their patrons. (For simplicity, we will use the phrase "information technology" to refer to contemporary trends in electronic or cybernetic information technology. (...) Obviously, print books are also a form of information technology.). (shrink)

Ethicists don't discuss etiquette very much, in part because it has always seemed too close to the surface of social interaction and too ephemeral or conventional for theory. But I suspect that most people, even philosophers, would agree that social etiquette often reinforces and complements our ethical intuitions. For example, in social etiquette we draw a line between reasonable and normal questions to ask others and questions which pry, invade privacy, or otherwise embarrass them. A natural justification of this practice (...) is that it conserves personal autonomy by helping people control information about themselves and decide for themselves how and when to disclose information. Many of the practices of "polite culture" serve similar, if less profound, purposes. (shrink)

"Provides a grounding in the philosophical, historical, and legal development of the concept of intellectual freedom by providing current thinking on a range of intellectual freedom concepts, cases, and controversies"--.

When tennis fan Jane Bronstein attended the 1995 U.S. Open she probably knew there was a remote chance her image would end up on television screens around the world. But she surely did not know she was at risk of becoming the object of worldwide attention on the David Letterman Show. As it happened, Letterman spotted an unflattering clip from the U.S. Open showing a heavyset Bronstein with peach juice dripping down her chin. Not only did he show the footage (...) six times that fall, but he ridiculed her on his “Top 10 List,” calling her a “seductive temptress,” even paying to put the clip on the Sony Jumbotron electronic billboard at Time Square. Ms. Bronstein sued David Letterman's production company under New York civil rights law for violating her privacy. (shrink)

ideals of their mission statements is often compromised. Following the ethical maxim that Aought implies can,@ business ethicists often grant that our practical obligations have to be understood against the backdrop of the relative scarcity or abundance of the business and social environment. Nothing brings on scarcity more dramatically than the total liquidation of a business=s assets. Bankruptcy protection and reorganization can, and probably should, lead businesses to cut back on some of their obligations. But even if we allow this (...) concession to practical exigency, we can still ask probing questions about how the future possibility of business failure may ground our understanding of the current actual obligations of owners and managers (hereafter, managers) to employees. While the obligations of the bankrupt business may devolve to minimal contractual obligations, an analysis of the responsibility of managers for business failure may tell us something important about the nature of both employment and managerial ethics. (shrink)