What is the Social Responsibility in the Information Age? Maximising Profits?

Abstract

Social responsibility is a highly popular term, and it seems to be of importance to what is happening in the information age. In this paper, the notion of social responsibility is analysed and its relationship to the information age is discussed. The result is that, while the term social responsibility may make sense, it is imperative to clarify its definition before drawing any further conclusions from it. On this condition, talking about social responsibility can be helpful in expressing some of the normative questions of the information age. If a clear definition is lacking, however, it might be a better idea to forget about the term rather than come to a counterintuitive conclusion as the one hinted at in the title of the paper, namely that it is an expression of social responsibility to maximise profits.