Utilitarianism: Ethics For The Information Age

With the tremendous amount of data that companies, governments, and even individuals have access to today, it is important that this information is used for good. It can be incredibly easy for someone to take this data and use it maliciously against a person. If we are reaching the point where companies can accurately predict our actions even before we commit them, how do we know that they won’t use that to manipulate our ideas or share that with outside parties that we’d rather not know our life story. Businesses have been significantly better in this regard in the last few years, namely by making privacy policies and consumer rights more mainstream, or in some cases a legal requirement. But the bigger question we must ask is how do we insure

Utilitarianism is the idea that, “An action is right (or wrong) to the extent that it increases (or decreases) the total happiness of the affected parties.” Quinn 73. The main idea behind this ethical framework is to apply morals that do the most overall good regardless of their negative effects. In this theory, all the negative consequences of an action are acceptable if it results in a higher net worth for happiness. The principal of rule utilitarianism is only slightly different and that is due to it focus on rules being established rather than an act per act basis. As defined in Ethics for the Information Age, “Rule utilitarianism is the ethical theory that holds that we ought to adopt those moral rules that, if followed by everyone, lead to the greatest increase in total happiness over all affected parties.” Quinn 78. This has several advantages over regular utilitarianism, or act utilitarianism. Firstly, by adopting moral rules, you can have a consistent set of acceptable actions or conditions and not have to figure out if each individual action is ethical or not, thus saving time. Secondly, rule utilitarianism gets rid of the moral uncertainty that come from unusual circumstances by only considering what typically happens against the ethical standard, thus preventing the disposal of a rule just because of one bad incident. So, how can this framework be integrated into our society and

Some notable examples would be schools that use the principals to ensure that their rules are fair for the student body. Of course, not everybody would be happy with the rules, but that does not matter if the rule generally improves happiness for the clear majority. I can draw some clear examples from my personal life where these principals are in fact used. At my personal job, a strict code of conduct is enforced to help protect both our customers and our staff. This code concerns ethics in many ways even though they may just seem like ordinary rules. For example, we allow our customers to eat while they wait because of the long wait times that can be associated with our line of work. By allowing them to eat it increases their overall happiness by not being hungry and ours by making them less irritable. Although they can potentially make a mess, the benefits of having a happy customer outweigh the negatives, thus making it a moral rule. As an example, more related to the introduction of this paper, concerning the use of data, our workplace also has rules in place concerning the privacy of customer and employee data. Ethical rules have been put in place to prevent us from potentially abusing any customer’s data to our own benefit. The same goes for data on the employees, we’re protected from customer’s seeking out our private info out of convenience or even malice. These rules insure the