Question

Retrieve a copy of RFC 1087: Ethics and the Internet, dated January 1989. After you've read though the document, answer the following:

1. Is the document still relevant today? Explain why or why not?
2. Is the document written in a format that can be understood by today's internet users? Explain why or why not?
3. If you were tasked with updating the document to reflect technology today, what changes would you make?

Your analysis should be between 250 and 350 words.

Answer 1

Answer:-

Is the document still relevant today? Explain why or why not?:-

its still not relevent

why not:-

A statement from RFC 1087 that is not relevant today is, “Access to and use of the Internet is a privilege and should be treated as such by all users of this system.” I think we take the internet for granted today. No one sees the internet as a privilege, more so a right. Internet, for the most part is widely accessible around the world, with the exception of third-world, and other developing nations

Is the document written in a format that can be understood by today's internet users? Explain why or why not?:-

understood by today's internet users:-

why:-

RFC 1087 I think is still understandable with its few points mentioned but it doesn’t cover all area of so called internet ethics extensively. The clauses which tells some activity as unethical like purposely seeking to gain unauthorized access to the resources of the Internet which defines the breach of confidentiality of the systems
It mentions about waste of resources (people, capacity, computer) through such actions is also unethical which nowadays can be called as a DDOS attack where availability is compromised
I think the document addresses the concerns for unethical use of internet but we need strong rules,regulation or laws to complement such points to prevent malicious users to perform unethical activity on internet

If you were tasked with updating the document to reflect technology today, what changes would you make?

The basis of ethics as cooperative principles is the realization that rules limiting individual self-interest can often produce greater cooperative benefits. 2 Making and keeping agreements are a major part of ethics so conceived. But ethical principles allowing us cooperative benefits involve more than keeping agreements. The principle of benevolence—to give aid to others in need—holds without any agreement. We simply assume that human beings recognize each other as fellow human beings and give aid because in so doing they expect that they will receive aid when they are in trouble.

By contrast, morality has a large arbitrary element because of its basis in beliefs that are explicitly not shared by all, such as religious beliefs. The principle that one ought to kill one’s daughter if she marries an infidel can hardly be based on anticipated cooperative benefits. It is a membership rule for a religious sect. Failure to appreciate the distinction between ethical principles that insure cooperative benefits and moral principles that reflect mainly arbitrary religious or cultural beliefs may be responsible for the attractiveness of relativism, the belief that ethical beliefs are true only for specific groups. 3

Three levels of ethical principles are: individual, social, and global. Social principles apply within a society, a group whose members share cooperative benefits and burdens with each other. Global or transnational principles apply to concerns which cannot be handled by dividing them up between societies. Internet ethical issues involve principles at all three levels. In my discussion of Internet ethical cases, I will be applying definite ethical standards at all three levels.

Some plausible candidates for standards for individual ethical behavior are these:

• Intuitionism: there are no overall standards, just a variety of principles we feel are correct by intuition.
• Utilitarianism: the right thing to do is what produces the greatest good for the greatest number.
• Universal principle: act on principles that could be willed to be universal law.

Intuitionism is actually not a standard. It says that there is no good explanation of right and wrong, but we nevertheless have strong intuitive feelings about what is right and wrong. For the intuitionist, these feelings need no justification. The Ten Commandments, taken by themselves, are an intuitionist theory. The major difficulty with intuitionism is that when different principles of right action conflict, we have no principled way of resolving the conflict.

Utilitarianism can be stated: act so as to produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism has much plausibility. For how could it possibly be wrong to do the action that produces the greatest good? How could it possibly be right to do an action which produces less good when you could have done better? Although a plausible idea, utilitarianism suffers from two major difficulties. One is that if we consider actions in isolation from one another, it is easy for a utilitarian to break promises or fail to fulfill contracts when more good would be produced in that case. The trouble then is that institutions which allow cooperative benefits, to live and work together, would disintegrate. Important goods are not available unless we consider ourselves bound to follow certain non-utilitarian rules.

Utilitarianism can, however, achieve these goods if it is modified to apply to rules rather than individual acts. Then one is still bound by social rules governing the institutions of keeping agreements and fulfilling contracts even though more good might be done in the individual case by breaking the social rule. One takes actions not because the individual actions produce the greatest amount of good, but because the right action is to follow social rules which produce the greatest amount of good. This theory is called rule utilitarianism.

But how do we tell which rules these are? The second major difficulty is that summing goodness over individuals in any precise way has been proved to be impossible. So the notion of the greatest good for the greatest number can only serve as a metaphor. It simply can’t be made precise (Arrow 1951). 4

Universal principle ethics is one major alternative to utilitarianism. Universal principle ethics insists that rightness is not just some sum of goodness. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1785) developed universal principle ethics, founded on his Categorical Imperative: act on principles that could be willed to be universal law. For example, making an agreement you have no intention of keeping could not be willed to be universal law because then no one would make or accept agreements. The biblical Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is a similar but less formal version of the Categorical Imperative.

As with intuitionism, universal principle ethics has little guidance for what to do when principles for right actions conflict. Some account is needed of ethical social rules, especially on how they fit together into a system without conflicts. The 20th century philosopher John Rawls expanded a suggestion by Kant on how to make this into a comprehensive theory of justice (Kant 1785, 74; Rawls 1999a). Rawls’s theory has had wide influence and is used extensively by lawyers, jurists, and politicians.

At the individual level, utilitarianism and universal principle ethics often yield the same results. When they conflict, I shall favor universal principle ethics.