Conflicting Values and Norms

The development within information technology has raised a number of ethical issues. These issues involve seemingly conflicting values and norms under some ethical framework. In order to be clear over to what extent we are dealing with a real ethical problem with an actual value / norm conflict we need to explicitly clarify the meaning of the ethical concepts used and the ethical framework within which we are discussing these issues.

When we have clarified the framework and concepts, the next question is whether we can actually solve such ethical conflicts or problems. For that we need som meta-ethical approach to how we should view ethical values and norms and whether they are the kind of ‘thing’ that we can have better or worse reason to subscribe to or not.

In the presentation a possible meta-ethical position that will enable the ‘solving’ of ethical value and norm conflicts will be presented. Furthermore a few different ethical framework that can be used as a starting point for the solving of these conflicts will be presented, ending with a possible ‘compromise’ suggestion for how different frameworks can be incorporated with each other.