Abstract
The paper offers a solution to the problem of specifying computational systems that behave in accordance with a given set of ethical principles. The proposed solution is based on the concepts of ethical requirements and ethical protocols. A new conceptual tool, called the Control Closure of an operation, is defined and used to translate ethical principles into ethical requirements and protocols. The concept of Generalised Informational Privacy (GIP) is used as a paradigmatic example of an ethical principle. GIP is defined in such a way as to (i) discriminate specific cases in which an individual’s GIP can be infringed without accessing the individual’s data; (ii) separate unauthorised accesses to data that do not respect the right to GIP from access that do; and (iii) distinguish different degrees of GIP. Finally a camera phone is used to illustrate the proposed solution.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been partially funded by a PRIN project through the Università degli Studi di Salerno, and I wish to thank Roberto Cordeschi for his constant support. A previous version of this paper was presented at the European Conference Computing and Philosophy (E-CAP, NTNU, Trondheim, 22–24 June, 2006). I wish to thank all the participants, and especially Dan Burk, for their useful feedback. I also wish to thank all the members of my research group (IEG) for their comments and Luciano Floridi and Jeff Sanders for their crucial help in developing some of the ideas presented in this paper. Of course, I remain the only person responsible for any of its shortcomings.
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Turilli, M. Ethical protocols design. Ethics Inf Technol 9, 49–62 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-006-9128-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-006-9128-9