IT Ethics Assignment Essay
10 Pages2217 Words91 Views
Added on 2020-05-28
IT Ethics Assignment Essay
Added on 2020-05-28
ShareRelated Documents
Running head: IT ETHICSResearcher Illegally Shares Millions of Science Papers Free Online to Spread KnowledgeName of the StudentName of the UniversityAuthor’s note
1IT ETHICS“Researcher Illegally Shares Millions of Science Papers Free Online toSpread Knowledge”Ethics is a field that deals with moral principles and philosophy. It helps inrecommending and defending the concepts of wrong or right behaviour (Peters, 2015). Ethicaltheories can be used for understanding whether an action is morally correct or incorrect. Ethicaltheories are classified into metaethics, applied ethics and normative ethics (Melden, 2013).Metaethics tries to get an insight into the meaning of the principles of ethics and revolves aroundthe concept of moral judgements. Applied ethics focuses on examining controversial situationsand issues such as animal rights and nuclear war. Normative ethics tries to establish moralstandards for regulating right as well as wrong conduct (Dewey, 2016). This essay uses the fourmain ethical theories: Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, Deontology and Contract Theory foranalysing an article based on automation. It explains the concepts of the four ethical theories andtries to find out whether automation is ethically right or wrong. About the articleA researcher and neuroscientist from Russia named Alexandra Elbakyan made 48 millionor more peer reviews and journal articles available over the Internet at free of cost. She wasaccused of providing pirated journals via a site called Sci-Hub in an illegal manner. She hadrefused to close the Sci-Hub despite a lawsuit from one of the biggest publishers in the world,Elsevier. A district court New York had also ordered to close the site. According to Elbakyan,paying $32 was expensive for the students for carrying out research work (MacDonald, 2018).She believed that knowledge should be accessible to everyone irrespective of their income. Sheeven claimed that leading universities such as Cornell and Harvard were unable to afford the
2IT ETHICSresearch papers because of high subscription rate. Elbakyan said that pirating in the film andmusic industry destroys its creators. The pirating in case of journal publishing is different as ithelps to spread knowledge and facilitate research works. According to Elbakyan, shutting downof the Sci-Hub site would demonstrate that the general public and students have no right toaccess information and knowledge. Utilitarian TheoryThe utilitarian theory falls under the category of normative ethics. Utilitarianismdetermines an action or policy to be ethically correct or incorrect depending on the consequences(Barrow, 2015). This theory considers an act to be morally right when it produces maximum‘utility’ for the maximum number of people. Utility is measured in terms of happiness andpleasure. Utilitarianism focuses on the principle of greatest happiness that states that an action ismorally right when it maximizes the utility of the people in the world. A morally right actionwould always make the people happy and reduce pain or negative consequences. Utilitarianismor consequentialism focuses on the effects of an action and decides whether the action is wrongor right. This theory is based on the fact that if the good thing in the world such as happiness isincreased then it will make life better (Mulgan, 2014). Positive contributions of human beingshelp to reduce pain of the people and make the world a better place. Utilitarianism focuses on thewell being of the people. This article talks about a neuroscientist named Alexandra Elbakyanwho had developed a website called Sci-Hub for providing free research papers and peer reviewsto the people. She had enabled the students and researchers to download journal articles of bigpublishers such as Springer and Elsevier over the Internet without any cost (MacDonald, 2018).The sole intention behind this pirating was to support Human Rights by allowing the people tofreely access knowledge. She had taken this action as she could understand the problems faced
End of preview
Want to access all the pages? Upload your documents or become a member.
Related Documents
Management Issues in Information Technologylg...
|8
|2053
|150
Perspectives on Pleasure and Utility in Ethicslg...
|5
|718
|389
Information Technology Ethics: Blame on Social Media for Christchurch Videolg...
|7
|2280
|38
Business and Professional Ethicslg...
|6
|1378
|38
Business Ethics and Valueslg...
|6
|1886
|95