"Ethics in Education"

The ethics article that I read was Jeremy Moss' "Ethics in Education." This article basically explores the tension that often seems to take place between community moral standards and free speech, especially as it relates to emerging technologies like the Internet, chat rooms, etc. A large portion of the article is given to difficult case studies showing different places this tension might occur.

One of the difficult questions that emerge from this article is: who judges what is to be censored and what is not? This is an especially difficult question to answer since most of our technology, like the Internet, is global. Our country may have certain moral standards, while another country's standards may be completely different. Actually, even within our own country this would be an almost impossible question to answer. I think the best way to address this situation lies in improving software that can censor specific information on individual computers or computer systems. Then smaller communites can decide for themselves how they feel about the issue. For instance, a person might work at an office, attend a university, go to a church, and go home and at each destination have a computer with different content filters. I think this is the best solution. Along with this local level content filtering, I'd advocate taking steps to make Internet Service Providers more accountable for what content they allow.

My own personal view would likely involve more censorship than will ever happen becuase I think many who abhor censorship believe that as long as someone out there thinks something or wants to do something that makes it ok--objective moral truths do not exist in their thinking. Others, I think, place less weight on the moral side of the scale than they do the practical side. For instance, it is ok to view this information, however morally offensive or dangerous it might happen to be, as long as it helps you get your school paper done. I don't have any expectations that this view of mine will be shared by enough people for it to actually happen though.

For a global technological community, there aren't easy answers to these (supposedly) hard ethical questions and they aren't likely to be answered satisfactorily in everyone's eyes anytime soon. We just need to keep working toward better understanding of the issues and better answers.