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Week 15: IT and Ethics



In my last blog post, I will be touching upon an ethical theory and how I see it implemented in IT. For the theory, I chose Social Contract Theory that was first formulated by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. According to the theory, society should strive to develop a set of rules that make sense to everyone (making people follow them voluntarily). For instance, driving on the right (or in some places, left) could be a common example - drivers keep to the right not for fearing the police but to avoid confusion and possible crashes.

I think this pretty much describes how online communication and hacking work. Although there aren't really any rules strictly in place other than netiquette rules on how you should behave online or how, who, and if to hack someone, most people obey a set of rules that just make sense to everyone without really having them written down. Even though there are some netiquette rules, it's merely a recommendation, not a requirement. So everyone can act morally online by their own choice without having someone demanding it from them. For example, online people tend to follow unwritten rules just because they are common sense, like not using capslock and spamming or helping people out when someone has questions about a topic that you might know more about like on StackOverflow or Reddit. No one demands that you should contribute but since we are all in one singular cyberspace that we all use, we try to follow these rules so it would be a more enjoyable experience for everyone.


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