Issues go beyond the treatment of individual patients, especially when public expenditures are involved. How much public investment should be made in medical research, as opposed to preventive public- health measures? What kinds of medical research should be funded? Public debates about the relative governmental support for AIDS versus breast cancer research, for instance, have pointed out that although many fewer people die from AIDS than breast cancer, it is AIDS that has until recently been accorded a much higher funding priority. Is the problem one of better lobbying by a homosexual minority or a failure of women to speak out on issues that affect them? Indeed, recent disclosures about tamoxifen trials that, in the name of breast cancer research, subjected thousands of women to greater risk than breast cancer itself led Dr. Charles Weijer, a fellow in research ethics at the Medical Research Council of Canada, to argue for a much wider, democratic involvement of potential victims in cancer research. “To negotiate the many agonizing choices ahead: treatment or prevention? Aggressive treatment or minimal treatment? Quantity of life or quality of life? Investigators need the input of the entire community affected by cancer.” (17) Physicians should not be left on their own to make such decisions, and patients should not simply accept physician recommendations.
The case of the liver transplant for Mickey Mantle highlights another aspect of this public-policy debate. Transplantable organs are in short supply. Mantle needed a liver transplant because of his years of drinking, and he was able to get it quickly because he was rich and famous. According to Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, “Spending $300,000 for a liver transplant for somebody who brought harm upon himself is not a prudent use of scarce money and scarce livers.” Nevertheless, this issue cannot be left to individual physicians or individual patients to decide. In Caplan’s words, “If society wants to pass laws saying no transplants for alcoholics, no transplants for felons or for smokers or for people who drive too fast, then it should.” But society “should not dump the issue of what to do about sin on those who work at the bedside; they’re not equipped to make judgments and it violates their professional ethics.”(18) Clearly it is not just physicians who should pass such laws; it is the general public that should legislate, since it is the public that will be affected. Yet a democratic public must itself become informed by the reflective contribution of biomedical ethics if it is to avoid unintelligent or morally pernicious regulations.
The Environmental Expansion of Ethics
The rise of the environmental movement and the development of environmental ethics constitute an even more general attempt to extend traditional ethics in the face of another challenge of technology, that is, environmental pollution by industrial technology. Until the industrial revolution, the need for a treatise between mankind and the planet was non existent. Therefore, there are no ethical guidelines concerning the environment. For example, the Ten Commandments contain two kinds of prescriptions: those concerned with human relations to God and those focused on relations between human beings. There are no guidelines on how humans should treat the natural environment.
Originally no such guidelines were necessary, for two basic reasons. First, among pre-modern peoples respect for nature was a given. The very goal of life was commonly understood as a harmony with the natural world and its orders. Second, from hunter-gatherer tribes through the agricultural revolution to medieval societies human technological power was mostly so limited that only in exceptional circumstances did it have a major impact on nature. But with the rise of modern techno-scientific civilization, not only does a kind of disdain for nature make a major appearance in culture, but human technological power also acquires the capacity to exercise major impacts on the natural environment at both the local and even the global level. Prior to the modern period, nature served as a fundamental touchstone for ethics.
From Aristotle through Cicero to Thomas Aquinas, natural law ethics presented the ultimate human good as harmony with the whole, of which the human is no more than a part. However, the fundamental movement within modern ethics, from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, has enlarged the realm of the morally significant. Although for the first five hundred years of this movement the expansion remained within the strictly human realm, the last century has witnessed provisional extensions beyond the anthropological.
Modern biology, for instance, affirms strong interrelationships between humans and the natural world. And although some might interpret this to mean that humans should be treated no differently from animals, environmental ethicists have more persuasively argued for the moral treatment of animals, plants, mountains, ecosystems, and the planet. The “World Charter for Nature,” adopted by the United Nations in 1982 (a third of a century after adoption of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights) provides order to this transformation. (19)
There are, however, two basic approaches to the ethical defense of nature: the anthropocentric and the bio-centric. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), considered the founding book of the contemporary environmental movement, was fundamentally ambiguous in this respect. When calling attention to the unwitting destruction of the environment by DDT and related petrochemicals, Carson as humanist pointed up the harmful effects these could have on people, and as naturalist she described the harm they impose on nature. The anthropocentric approach argues that moral analysis must be expanded to include nature because of the value nature has for human beings. Nature must be respected primarily as a means to human ends. In the absence of any vision of another way, the only solution to the problems of modern technology is thought to be simply more, and more modern technology.
In contrast the bio-centric approach, which includes diverse issues ranging from animal liberation to deep ecology, argues that nature has value and requires moral consideration independent of any human utility. Human beings have a moral obligation to recognize that they are part of a larger reality and that, at least occasionally, they ought to sacrifice their individual or short-term collective interests to those of the whole. Based on a new perception of nature as ecology, it becomes necessary to reformulate or recover previous societal value systems in relation to nature.
Such differences in fundamental theory are evident in a host of environmental debates, from those about how to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill to the extent of economic sacrifices that should be made to preserve various endangered species. Anthropocentric environmental ethics tends to validate an ultimate human dominance while respecting nature for its human benefits only. Whether nature can truly be respected when viewed on such strictly utilitarian grounds is, however, open to question. Bio-centric environmental ethics, in contrast, tend to grant an ultimate supremacy to nature, independent of man, and to require the sacrifice of human economic good in order to preserve biodiversity. Yet recent discoveries in the fossil record of at least five major destructions of biodiversity challenge the bio-centric claim that contemporary human practices create an unprecedented threat to nature. (20)
Consider as well the current debate about nuclear waste disposal. Once again anthropocentric environmentalists tend to think in terms of trade-offs between environmental preservation and economic costs, whereas bio-centric environmentalists present opposition to nuclear waste as a kind of definitive urgency. But since all economic costs will ultimately be borne by society, and even clear-cut imperatives must be acknowledged by social consensus, a case can be made that here, too, the issue must not be left in the hands of either an ethicist elite or the environmental activists. Just as the technical community cannot by itself make the final decision about the disposal of nuclear waste without appeal to some moral justification, so must any moral justification finally reflect the development of a technically and ethically informed public consensus. (21)
Computer Ethics for Professional and Public Organizations
Just as much as environmental ethics, computer ethics constitutes a new dimension of ethical reflection. When electronic computers came on the scene in the 1950s, they did so with much enthusiasm for their ability to do massive number crunching and to perform intensive data-management operations. Questions
about the impact of computers on people surfaced only at the edges of thought. While the 1950s and ’60s witnessed some discussion of the social challenges of automation and computer depersonalization, much more intense intellectual debates focused on whether computers could think.
For a hundred years, Darwinian evolutionary theory had stimulated debate about whether humans had evolved from apes, and how closely we might still resemble the higher simians. Now a basic question of anthropological philosophy has become, to what extent does artificial intelligence, or AI, which has evolved from humans, resemble its makers ? Although the AI debate had obvious practical ethical implications, it was discussed almost solely as a theoretical or metaphysical issue. One of the first people to place ethical issues in the forefront of reflection on AI was Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT.
In the mid-1970s Weizenbaum discovered that one of his exercises in the computer imitation of certain conversational strategies had been used to create a program called DOCTOR, which was being taken seriously as a tool for psychotherapy. “I was startled,” wrote Weizenbaum, ” to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it.” (22) According to Weizenbaum, this was just one area in which people were turning “the processing of information on which decisions must be based over to enormously complex computer systems.” (23) This seriously limits the kinds of questions and data that can be utilized. Moreover, because of their complexity such systems are not able to be completely understood by those who rely on them. As a result, any such computing system has effectively closed many doors that were open before it was installed.” (24)
Computers, like other fundamental technologies, offer certain opportunities while blocking others, thus altering the course of history in a manner not unlike the way political change can open a new path in social development at the same time it closes off many alternatives. The difference is that brute force is admitted as playing a major role in the political realm, allowing politics to be regularly subjected to criticism. This criticism provides a vehicle to identify irrationalities. Changes brought about by science and technology are generally thought to be the products of reason. Therefore, they are much less commonly questioned concerning the consequences. (25)
The shift from theoretical to ethical and political discussions about computers did not take hold until large-scale, relatively isolated mainframe machines were augmented by small-scale, much more widely available personal computers. Time magazine, reflecting public recognition of the importance of this augmentation, designated the personal computer “Machine of the Year” in January 1983. During the remainder of the 1980s computer ethics became a theme for discussion and education, especially among professions within the computer community. This discussion has become ever more prominent with the expansion of computer communications on the Internet.
Here one of the issue is that of corporate security and its flip side, personal privacy. Although extensive bureaucratic record keeping is no new activity, computerized information is vulnerable to electronic invasion and manipulation by hackers and program viruses in ways that hard-copy records never were. Additionally, much more information is being collected than ever before, and in forms that allow the linking of medical, financial, and legal records to create integrated profiles of use to commercial as well as law-enforcement interests. To what extent such virtual papers and effects” should be protected from criminal trespass as well as against “unreasonable searches and seizures” by the government? How would protection against such invasion best be implemented? These are issues subject to considerable debate within the technical community and its ethics experts. (26)
Reflecting public concern, especially about threats to privacy, computer professionals have developed codes of conduct that limit opportunities for unwarranted appropriation by individuals, corporations, or the government. The code of ethics of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest computer-professional organization, prescribes that “an ACM member, whenever dealing with data concerning individuals, shall always consider the principle of the individual’s privacy and seek the following: To minimize the data collected. To limit authorized access to the data. To provide proper security for the data. To determine the required retention period of the data. To ensure proper disposal of the data. ” (27) Such professional efforts take into account ethical concerns about the right to privacy clearly and constitute efforts not only to reevaluate the application of established ethical values but also to work toward a broader consensus about the role of computers in society.
Advocacy efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization co-founded by Lotus 1-2-3 developer Mitchell Kapor and Wyoming libertarian Republican John Perry Barlow, also deserve mention in this regard. For EFF, efforts to protect privacy must be complemented by openness in technical-design principles and a public-policy defense of electronic civil liberties. The public-policy aspect of such a position depends to some extent on the technical possibilities and even more on ethical understandings of those possibilities. It would be contrary to democratic principles for the technical community alone to attempt to implement these commitments independent of public involvement. Respect for concerns about the electronic availability of pornography and other morally questionable forms of information are additional considerations. (28) But even when the creation of personal data is limited and protected, and civil liberties are properly protected in cyberspace, such enormous quantities of information are being produced by digital means as to constitute what has been called a problem of “information overload.”
Daily, the staggering amounts of scientific data that are electronically produced and collected by satellites; atmospheric, geological, and oceanographic monitors; telescopes; and laboratories
Seal Straugh
throughout the world are digitalized versions of documents, texts,
audio recordings, videos, maps, photographs, paintings, and so forth, all of which are gushing into the Internet. The Internet has recently been described as resembling “an enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor, and a continuous stream of new books being added helter-skelter to the piles.”(39) Efforts to manage this information explosion have led to the creation of computer programs to scan and sort such material. “Smart instruments that analyze data even as it is being created are complemented by “search engines,” “knowbots” (i.e., knowledge robots), and “intelligent agents.” These virtual users are becoming the scouts of the information frontier.
Right behind such electronic scouts, however, the new information frontier is being peopled with virtual settlers. When such virtual settlers use the Internet as a combination postal system and telephone network, it creates what author and editor Howard Rheingold in 1993 called “the virtual community.” But what kind of community is it when people use cyberspace to log on as electronic fictions, projections of themselves in interactive multi-user domains? In these cyber-stages for role play and reversal, men represent themselves as women and women men; the shy come on as aggressive; the unattractive describe themselves as beautiful. What are the ethics of the masquerade ball, when the party can continue indefinitely? Does such utilization of cyberspace constitute a new learning process, or is it an escape from reality? Surely these, too, are questions to be decided off line as well as on, by the public as well as the cyber-citizen.