I personally think that, csr and values in design are not really trying to put ethics into places. it is more that they are trying to redefine the goals of the people trying to act ethically, trying to redefine the community those people’s ethics serve and i had a third one, but ehh, it slipped when i was editing. It is the ‘insider/outsider’ dialectic and the tendency of communities to, in the face of being challenged, strengthen their current standpoints, even if they aren’t good ones that has undermined csr. The assumption that there isn’t an ethics there is also very demeaning, so we need to be careful about that and we should assume, I think, that people are trying to do the right and good thing for their community(as they define it), that they actually are ethical and not normative nihilists like ivory tower folks*joke.

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I thin we do have a claim to our identity as a claim of the right to our body, from which rights of our mind, like rights of conscience, privacy, etc. derive. (granted… i don’t think there are rights really, but it is a handy shorthand). I don’t think this is a ‘do not hear’ us, but we do have norms there too. In the U.S.(as it varies culturally) we have a wide variety of body signals that allow us to indicate private conversations are occurring and others should not intervene, and we use those in public spaces. However, that doesn’t mean other people don’t hear, what it indicates to other people is that we don’t want them to hear. so there is a ‘claim’ there, and kindness tends to respect it.

as for companies breaking the law…. i think we have a real social problem in relation to law breaking in that i don’t think most people care, and if they do, they lack the capacity to sustain that care unless a direct harm has been done to them. people don’t seem to have the passion for punishment and retribution that one finds in other cultures, and we have even less of a passion for rehabilitation(which is the saddest part). Don’t get me wrong, i think people empathize with those who have crimes perpetrated against them… but the news and other media tends to turn it into a drama, and i think that when it turns from people to stories about people, a little switch turns off and we feel unobliged or our obligation fades faster over time.

This brings me back to a question I wish I had raised in my post. Do we actually have any sort of claim over “our information” as created in a third party? If we speak in a real-world public, we can’t reasonably ask individuals to unhear us. Why do we expect the same in a digital public? It seems like this is a fundamental part of the question, yet I haven’t seen anyone address it.

(That said, Noemi Manders-Huits and I have an article coming out soon outlining that challenges of mixing “ethical intelligence” with “business intelligence”)

If you want such a code of ethics, there is only one way of doing it really… and that is through legislation. You’ll find that if any given state adds ethics that are seen as burdensome without benefit, then the corporations just take their tax-base and leave and go to a state without that burden. So this has to be done nationally, but first thing that would probably happen is that someone would sue because information is a commodity and these ‘codes of information ethics’ if improperly formed as actually ethical would certainly be a restraint on trade that likely wouldn’t be constitutional for some interpretations of the commerce clause and understandings of federalism. We need proper privacy laws in this country, and we need all corporations to be bound by those laws. But while, I’m sure the idea of encouraging corporate citizenship is a good thing, it is just a very hard thing to do in neoliberal capitalism.

Michael, thanks for the pointer. I really do hope that Facebook considers something along these lines. They are not unreasonable (if my local newspaper has an Ombudsman, then certainly a company that represents 175 million users should), and I think they would be an excellent step forward for the company.