Seminar on Ethics and the Internet

About

This one-day seminar will stimulate and deepen awareness and understanding of ethical issues concerning the Internet at a workshop at the Royal Academy of Engineering, London. It will involve:

• High profile presenters with engineering and professional media experience.

• Prepared visual material from a professional film maker.

• Philosophers with experience of making ethical issues comprehensible and engaging.

Workshop Goals

• Animate an engineering audience to participate in active discussion of engineering-related ethical issues over and above ‘professional codes of conduct’.

• Bind this discussion to their professional development and ensure some of the participants actively present their own views on these issues through mechanisms described below.

• Develop novel media methods to secure this active participation, not simply making use of standard presentations of issues.

• Relate the issues above to public policy issues implied in the development of the Internet.

The question underlying the seminar is ‘What, if anything, is ethically specific to the Internet?’

The workshop arises from a number of related and familiar intuitions:

• Ethics is now a growth industry in the professions – why?

• Codes of conduct have hollowed out ‘old ethics’ and natural responsibility.

• People feel alienated by this split.

• We must therefore reintegrate.