Ethics and Social Responsibility for 21st Century ICT

Abstract

This chapter examines ethics and social responsibility for the 21st century world of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The approach divides into two principal dimensions. One dimension concerns the definition and interpretation of ethics and social responsibility. The other dimension concerns the application of the definition and interpretation to ICT services and technologies in the 21st century. This dimension divides in turn among ICT supplier organizations, managers and professionals within those organizations, and consumers of ICT services and equipment. Ethics and social responsibility are not simply the same concepts. Ethics is about what is normatively right or wrong action in relation to a good or bad outcome. Social responsibility is about what is due to social welfare normatively or social pressure and legal control empirically and who determines how to define that social welfare. Social responsibility thus may be partly normative and partly positive. There is an essential link to ethics, but the two concepts only partially coincide.