Ethical Decisions
Theories and Cultural Impacts of Media and Technology — Reflections from Week Eight
Is lying always bad?
The answer to this question may seem like a ‘Yes’ but it is not that simple.
One fundamental thing about ethics is that ethical decisions are context specific and situation specific
The word ‘always’ here is what complicates things. Lying may seem like a morally wrong thing to do, this is a question about Virtue Ethics, virtues are socially and culturally determined and hence you may look at a person who lies and wonder how that person sleeps at night, what about the guilt? I know people who lie, I lie, we all lie, and I do feel bad after I lie, every single time, because lying is supposed to be a bad thing.
But what if someone lies thinking about the good that it is going to do in the long run, what if lying in a particular situation seems like the right thing to do, what if lying was going make a dying person happy, would you lie? I would and I wouldn’t regret that. I know scenes in movies and tv shows where kids would lie to their parents about the kind of work they do just to make their old parents happy or parents would lie to their kids about the kind of work they do, if they have an unsafe job, they wouldn’t want to tell their kids about the amount of danger their job carries, they would lie to protect their kids.
You are roommates with your best friend’s girlfriend who is cheating on your best friend. You know this because you live with her, and you see things. Would you tell your best friend about this? Or would you want to protect your best friend? Would you want to protect your roommate because she is also a good friend? Would you stay quiet because you don’t want to mess things up?
My question is who makes these decisions? Who gets to decide if lying in a particular situation is right or wrong?
I guess everyone is allowed to have their own versions.
Abortion — who gets to decide?
I whole heartedly feel like abortion, as long as it is safe, should be the decision of only and only the birth giver, no one else, absolutely no one. It is only the mother who should get to decide, not even the father, not their family members, nobody else, solely because it affects the mother’s body. No one should be allowed to make that decision except the mother.
But then for a second, going back to the wicked problem of gender inequality, if I think about the conservative societies and people who treat boys and girls differently, who would give anything to have a baby boy and anything to avoid having a baby girl, what if the mother, once she comes to know the gender of the child, decides to abort because it is a girl? That would be dreadful and so wrong, again the word wrong is just the way I feel about this situation.
Social Media and Ethics in Technology
Thinking about privacy in social media, last year someone tried to impersonate me on Instagram. Someone made a profile with a different name but used all my photos and posed to look like me, they were also texting people on my behalf. I came across that profile and reported it to Instagram, but nothing happened for months, no action was taken. I had friends who could have hacked that profile and given me more information on who was doing that to me, would it have been right? I didn’t do anything because I believe that two wrongs don’t make a right, but that is debatable too, isn’t it? What if it was a bigger matter, considering the concept of deontological ethics, what if someone’s safety and security was at stake, would breaching someone’s privacy be right partly because they did the same?
Ethical Decisions in Accessibility, who is to Blame?
My professional work has always revolved around accessibility, I enjoy learning about accessibility and have been studying about it for a while. Last semester I had the chance to work with a community partner who had speech impairment and had issues talking to the customer care of shopping apps. Talking to someone on a phone call was difficult for her because people wouldn’t understand what she said and as a result she always had to rely on someone like her mom to make those phone calls for her. While doing our research, we found out about different shopping apps and websites, and we realized that there are so companies that are not following the accessibility standards. We tried talking to the customer care of all these companies ourselves and asked everyone about their accessibility options, we found out that none of those companies have any customer service executive who has been trained to talk to people with disabilities. How is this being inclusive? Some of those websites do not even have chat options, sometimes some websites would just redirect the chat to a call and that is when the issue occurred because there would be no one on the other end who is trained to talk to her.
Companies and businesses are seen to consider accessibility as an afterthought. I have heard a lot of things people in work environments say to push seeing accessibility as an integral part of development, like
“We know our users, nobody with a disability is going to use our app”
“It is expensive, we do not have the budget for it”
“Let’s talk about this later, maybe in the next iteration, we are currently on a very tight schedule”
Whose responsibility is Accessibility? I believe whoever designs something is responsible for making that thing accessible, but is an Associate Designer at a firm powerful enough to stand against the Project Manager? This somehow takes my mind to ‘Banality of Evil’ by Hannah Arendt, Evil is systemic, can we blame people who are merely following orders?
