Ethics in and during technological research
an addition to it ethics and science ethics
pp. 35-49
in: Paul Sollie, Marcus Düwell (eds), Evaluating new technologies, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
Although IT ethics deals with interesting ethical issues that are of importance in and during technological research and development, these ethical issues are not always relevant for the individual researcher developing new technologies. I identify four reasons why ethical issues raised by IT ethics might be relevant for the goal of a project as a whole but not for the individual researchers working in the project. There are other ethical issues that are relevant for individual technological researchers. Based on the results of a case study a list of ethically relevant questions is developed that should help individual researchers to address the ethical issues he or she can address during research. This list should be seen as an addition to, not a substitution of, IT ethics and science ethics. Researchers can use the internet to find information about the ethical questions. However, they should keep in mind the issues concerning the reliability of the information on the internet. Using some examples I will show that researchers can obtain information about the ethical questions in the list relatively easily and they should be able to judge the reliability of the gathered information.