Epistemic Value Theory and Information Ethics
Minds and Machines, Vol.14, No. 1, pp. 101-117, 2004
28 Pages Posted: 19 Nov 2009
Date Written: April 7, 2003
Abstract
Three of the major issues in information ethics - intellectual property, speech regulation, and privacy - concern the morality of restricting people’s access to certain information. Consequently, policies in these areas have a significant impact on the amount and types of knowledge that people acquire. As a result, epistemic considerations are critical to the ethics of information policy decisions (cf. Mill 1978 [1859]). The fact that information ethics is a part of the philosophy of information highlights this important connection with epistemology. In this paper, I illustrate how a value-theoretic approach to epistemology can help to clarify these major issues in information ethics. However, I also identify several open questions about epistemic values that need to be answered before we will be able to evaluate the epistemic consequences of many information policies.
Keywords: epistemic value theory, epistemology, information ethics, intellectual property, philosophy of information, privacy, social epistemology, speech regulation
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