Ethical obligations to share and the ethics of information disclosure

Coral Reefs

One of the first lessons that nearly every one of us learns is that it is important to share. We are told to share our snacks with our fellow kindergarteners and to share our toys with visiting cousins. We are told to share the dinner table conversation and our good wishes. And these admonitions are generally cross-cultural: Different cultures and different religious traditions all ask that their members act generously in the world or that they cannot consider themselves to be good people.

But what is it that we are ethically obligated to share? Certainly anything that we can live without that does not harm another living creature. We must share food unless we or those under our care are starving. We must donate blood in times of crisis unless to do so would harm us. We must offer water to those who are laboring in the sun, and warmth to those who would otherwise starve.

The people who make the least money are much more likely to give to charity, and this is entirely relevant here. Those who know firsthand what it is like to do without are those who are the first to step up and give to others.

We are not enjoined by laws to give so deeply and certainly not to strangers or those to whom we owe nothing in a formal sense. But if we would like to consider ourselves to be ethical beings, we must pay what we can into the communal pot so that any who are hungry may eat. Even if it is only a smile to someone who is sad, we must each pay what we can afford to pay.

Question Two

The phenomenon of Wikileaks is as important for the ethical questions that it raises as for the information that it has released. As Marshall McLuhan said in a different context: The medium is the message. For partisans of Wikileaks, the fact that information can be so carelessly and anonymously collected necessitates a shift in how we each look at the responsibilities that we have in relationship to what we know. The ability that so many people now have to expose so much about others makes it very hard for most of us to understand how serious that information is.

There is so much information about each one of us that this diminishes the seeming importance of each fact. This is not, of course, true. This is also, however, not the core of the ethical issue here. Privacy remains important even when there are tens of thousands of facts recorded about each one of us in computers across the world. However, simply because privacy remains important in the digital age, it is less important than preventing harm from being done to wider society.

Individual rights will always be important. And individuals must always be protected. But it is of even greater importance is the courage to taking responsibility for assessing in any given situation whether individual privacy trumps larger social good or the reverse. Ethical decisions are indeed situational. In this case it seems to me that the information should be released. There is moral hazard in doing so, but this is almost always the case. Releasing the information means preventing further harm by doing something morally problematic. Doing harm to prevent greater harm is certainly an ethically defensible position. However, it does leave one with dirty hands.

Question Four

Facebook has indeed become the face of Big Brother. This is not what Orwell probably imagined when he wrote about a world in which we are always observed, and the differences between what he imagined and what has come to pass are illuminative because the differences between Big Brother and Facebook can tell us how to parse the differences in ethical behavior by different entities. It would be simpler (at least it would seem to be simpler) if we each could come up with a unified set of ethical rules for ourselves and apply them wherever we go.

However, an ethical perspective must be fragmented like a fly's eye to work. We rightly bring one set of standards when we interact with public officials and another when we interact with private businesses. Facebook can act by very different standards than the government can, that is, than Big Brother can. Facebook has been criticized and brought into court repeatedly over its privacy policies. In most cases it has triumphed for the reasons that business do when they are behaving legally, if only just. We are willing to put up with the fact that Facebook could at any time use information about us in ways that we would be very unhappy with for the simple reason that the business provides a service that we very much want.

So long as Facebook provides a service that is valuable and unparalleled it can act any way it wants within legal limits without much fear of a negative reaction. In a world in which corporations are people, that's probably enough.