I n ethics, a distinction is traditionally made between an ethics of the right and an ethics of the good.   Ethics of the right is what most people know as ethics proper.   It is the study of what kinds of actions are right and therefore obligatory , and which ones are wrong and therefore impermissible.   Main approaches to an ethics of the right are deontological ethics, consequentialist ethics, and virtue ethics (understood as the ethics of virtuous character and behavior).   The ethics of the good, in contrast, concerns the question “What is good and therefore worth striving for?” (Ross, 1930; Larmore, 1996).   It does not ask questions about the morality of actions but about the goodness and desirability of things and events.   Much attention in theories of the good goes the question of what a good life is, and what is worth having and doing in life.

                In computer and information ethics, almost all research has focused on ethics of the right.   For example, studies of censorship, privacy, intellectual property and security tend to focus on rights, obligations, harms, and moral imperatives that all belong to the domain of an ethics of the right.   Little work has been done that focuses on the question whether the Internet actually makes life better, whether mobile phones improve the quality of society, and on the characteristics that information media should have to contribute to well-being, questions that belong to the ethics of the good.

                There exist, to be sure, academic critiques of information technology in various fields that do focus on the goodness of IT.   These critiques include positions like Jean Baudrillard's theory that electronic media have erased the distinction between representation and reality, causing a loss of meaning and apathy in the masses (Badrillard, 1995); Aaron Ben-Ze'ev's assessment that the Internet can do people good by allowing them to have fantasy-rich online relationships (Ben-Ze'ev, 2004);   Langdon Winner's claim that virtual communities are unreal and provide us with surrogate experiences while undermining real communities (Winner, 1997);   and Jean Virilio's argument that electronic media have sped up the process of production and consumption so as to create a culture of speed that causes feeling of incarceration in the world (Virilio, 1994).

                What these critiques, both popular and academic, have in common is that they comment on the goodness or badness of particular societal implications of new media.   They contain or imply normative statements of the form "X is (not) good (for Y)" and "X has (no) quality."   Specifically, they are concerned with the goodness of new media for individuals, for society as a whole and for elements of society.   In other words, they concern implications for the quality of life of individuals (or the good life), and the quality of society (what makes a good society).   Henceforth, I will call such studies quality analyses.   When they concern the quality of life, I will call them individual quality analyses, and when directed at society social quality analyses.

My focus in this talk will be on individual quality analysis.   I will consider the three dominant philosophical theories of quality of life and investigate how they would provide different analyses of the worth and goodness of different kinds of new media.   I will then try to come to an assessment of what a future ethics of the good could look like for computer and information ethics.

Theories of the quality of life are generally recognized to come in three basic kinds (Parfit, 1986): hedonist, desire-fulfillment and objective theories.   Hedonist theories hold that only pleasure is intrinsically good, and pain is the only intrinsic bad.   A prominent objection to hedonism has been proposed by Robert Nozick, who hypothesis an "experience machine" that simulates a nonexistent world in which one has all experiences of whatever kind one finds most enjoyable (Nozick, 1974).   Many agree that it would be undesirable to plug in to such a machine, since one's experiences are not based on actual events but on simulations, and therefore less valuable.

                Desire-fulfillment theories hold that well-being lies in the fulfillment of one's desires. This approach is favored by some over hedonism because it is capable of avoiding the "experience machine" dilemma: if one desires to be loved by friends, and an "experience machine" simulates loving friends, then one's desire is not fulfilled, and this experience is therefore less valuable than one that really fulfills one's desire.  

Objective theories , finally, hold that well-being is the result of a number of objective conditions of persons rather than the subjective experience of pleasure or the fulfillment of subjective desires.   They propose that some things contribute to our well-being even if they do not give us pleasure or correspond to our desires.   Conditions that have been proposed as part of such a list of conditions include knowledge, friendship, the development of one's abilities, having children and being a good parent, the awareness of true beauty, and moral goodness.   Perfectionism is an influential kind of objective theory that proposes that what makes things constituents of well-being is their perfecting human nature (Hurka, 1993).   humans are held to have a telos or end that can be attained if the right conditions are met.   When they are met, the person has attained a state of well-being.   One famous perfectonist theory is Aristotle's theory of eudaimonia, of which the capabilities theory of Nussbaum and Sen (1993) is an important recent version.

In recent decades, philosophical studies of the good life have been successfully applied in different areas of applied philosophy like medical ethics (Brock, 1993), studies of development (Nussbaum, 2001) and evaluations of implications of modern technology for the good life (Borgmann, 1984; Higgs, Light and Strong, 2000).   Philosophical conceptions of the good life can, I argue, also offer a normative basis for judgments of the value of new media for the good life and.   I will discuss several examples that illustrate how theories of the good life can provide illuminating normative analyses of our relationship to information technology.   These will include a study of virtual reality as a test-case of our intuitions on hedonism, a study of critiques of cyberspace that dismiss it as an escapist alternative reality that has little value, a study of the value of virtual communities as substitutes for geographically local communities, and a study of the appraisal of the Internet in orthodox Judaism.

I will conclude by arguing that there is room for a computer ethics of the good next to a computer ethics of the right, and that some defininitions of computer ethics already provide this room.  For example, Jim Moor’s definition of computer ethics as “ the analysis of the nature and social impact of computer technology and the corresponding formulation and justification of policies for the ethical use of such technology” (Moor, 1985: 266) is compatible, I will argue, with an inclusion of quality of life issues.  I will also argue a computer ethics of the good can provide accounts of a number of issues that are now inappropriately discussed as belonging to a computer ethics of the right, and that it also introduces substantially new and important issues to consider for computer and information ethics.

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