QAs

Strategies for Answering Discussion and Essay Questions

Chapter 10

X: Strategies for selected Discussion Questions and Essay Questions in Chapter 10 (see

page 326 in the textbook)

A. Strategies for Selected Discussion Questions in Chapter 10

1. If cybertechnology is a vital human resource as Jeremy Moss suggests it is, then having

access to that technology would seem to be very important. And if access to that technology is

as vital and as important as Moss claims, then it would seem to follow that developed nations

in the West have some moral obligation to provide developing nations with better access to

cybertechnology.

2. We have seen some of the paradoxical characteristics of race and the Internet. On the one

hand, the Internet is “color blind” in that Internet users are not conscious of race in terms of

the kinds of physical characteristics that are apparent to people when they interact in

geographical space. On the other hand, the Internet can and has been used as a tool to promote

and spread racist speech. European nations, especially France and Germany, have been more

interested in censoring race-related hate speech (such as neo-Nazi propaganda) and have been

less concerned with censoring pornography. The US, on the other hand, has been less

concerned about censoring speech involving hate and racial prejudice than with controlling

pornography as a form of speech.

3. Within the US, there is some debate over whether universal service for cybertechnology is

a necessary condition for receiving a public education. In Chapter 10, we saw that in the US,

access to free public education from grades 1 through 12 is considered a “positive right.”

Hence, that the US government is legally obligated to provide access to public education for

all school-age children. And some argue that if having access to cybertechnology in homes is

a necessary condition for one’s acquiring that education, the US government must ensure that

all school-age children attending public schools have such access in their homes.

4. With respect to the goal of providing cybertechnology to the disabled, we saw that the

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

This initiative has mandated that accessibility features for disabled persons be built into the

design of all Web interfaces for computer systems.

We also saw that some have argued that improving access for the disabled is good, because all

people (disabled and non-disabled as well) will benefit. There may indeed be some truth to

this argument. However, the danger in proceeding with that kind of utilitarian-based argument

is that it assumes that greater benefits for the majority of users will continue to be realized.

What if it turned out that, at some future date, non-disabled persons would not necessarily

benefit from improvements made to access for the disabled? And further suppose that these

improvements were also very costly. In this case, it would seem that if we followed the

utilitarian analogy we would be justified in not continuing to improve technological access for

disabled persons. But would this be the right thing to do from a moral point of view? You can

probably see the danger of proceeding from a utilitarian perspective on this issue.

B. Strategies for Selected Essay Questions in Chapter 10

1. In trying to make sense of the question, “Who should be held responsible for the actions of

ES systems?” it would be helpful to return to our discussion of the problem of “many hands”

in Chapter 4. There we saw that in the case of the Therac-25 malfunctions, several parties

could be held accountability. For example, we saw that moral responsibility is not an

“exclusionary” concept. That is, because X is responsible for Z, it doesn’t follow that Y also

cannot be held responsible for Z. So it would seem that in the case of an ES involving an

“expert doctor,’ the following parties could each bear some level of moral responsibility: the

hospital that uses the system; the hospital employee who may have entered incorrect

information into the system; the manufacturer who sold the system to the hospital; and the

software and hardware engineers who built the system for the manufacturer.