Untitled CONTEXT: INFOETHICS

Context: Infoethics

What is attempted in this chapter is to raise normative questions in relation to emerging technologies, in particular ones that are triggered by fundamental rights. This is one step in a much wider analysis that should be undertaken, namely to investigate the normative – ethical and legal – questions raised by emerging technologies. This wider context can be designated as Infoethics, a term also used in a recent UNESCO paper that deals with similar questions as this chapter. The fact that UNESCO is investigating infoethics only serves to prove the increasing importance of technology-related questions with regard to human rights and freedoms [Radoykov et al. (2007)].

As the UNESCO paper explains, infoethics is the application of ethical principles with regard to the development and use of information and communication technologies. Such technologies seem to keep on emerging and form one of the basic structures of the European information society. They have thus a tremendous impact.  

Infoethics is broader than ‘law’. Because of the super-fast development in ICT and the unstoppable experimentation in society itself, the traditional mechanisms of law – that work via policy makers or legal politicians who command legal text writers or legal technicians to write law according to their politics – can only intervene at the moment a particular technology with all its short-term advantages at micro-level has been put in the market. Since the law can often intervene only after technology has been put in the market, the intervention with regard to the possible negative impact on a long term macro-level, should in order to be effective not be purely legal at a post-production level, but should also take place in an earlier stage during the production of the ICT and at different levels. This can be achieved by actions that go beyond law alone. Examples of infoethics instruments to be used by policy makers, lawyers, scientists, developers, economists, CEOs, sociologists and even the consumers themselves, are self-regulation, industry standards, ethical codes, codes of conduct, user awareness programs and so on. In this chapter, we investigate one part of this broad field: the role of fundamental rights for emerging technologies.