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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 101-117 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Minds and Machines |
Volume | 14 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 2004 |
Keywords
- Epistemic value theory
- Epistemology
- Information ethics
- Intellectual property
- Philosophy of information
- Privacy
- Social epistemology
- Speech regulation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Philosophy
- Artificial Intelligence