What does Moral Philosophy have to do with IT?

I have three readings for this week for the topic of Moral Philosophy:

1.  1.  ¨What is Moral Philosophy?¨ by Louis Pojman.

Pojman describes 5 purposes of morality
1. To keep society from falling apart.
2. To ameliorate human suffering.
3. To promote human flourishing.
4. To resolve conflicts of interest in just and orderly ways.
5. To assign praise and blame, reward, and punishment and guilt.

I agree with these main purposes because I feel that we need to have moral values in our society to avoid unsuccessful situations. I think that society and culture creates our morality background even though not all our morality is regulated by the law. Sometimes we have laws to govern morality but on the other hand there are laws that stand aside from our morality. For example if we find that someone had an accident with a motorcycle, there is no law to tell us to help this person, but in many cases our morality tells us to go and help the injured person, we do this because we have some kind of morality.  From my point of view, I think that everyone in our society should have some sort of responsibility to create a better environment.  From the point of view of education, it is the responsibility of the parents along with the teacher to teach the children to differentiate from the wrong or right.  Everyone sees morality from a different point of view and many times the subject could be very multifaceted.

Based on this article humanity is not very good at resolving struggles in just or logical ways. The main idea of nonviolent resolution many times goes against the heart of "fight or flight". The theory of orderly conflict resolution with justice to all parties involved seems like a logical one, but actually it fails sadly in the real world. There will be no real justice in conflict resolution if we all have racial, social and fiscal differences in the world. 

2.  2.  ¨Searching for Moral Guidance about Educational Technology¨ by Randall Nichols.

In this article, Nichols talks about instructional technology and morality; there are many moral issues and on a regular basis we don’t even think about them.  For example, the author references to R. Rorty when he defines ¨solidarity¨.   Rorty sees solidarity is our ability to find traditional differences such as race, religion, etc. as irrelevant when we are comparing them with pain and humiliation. To make this effective, we need to look beyond how people are different and look for their similarities. Most people are in the look for differences among others, but we should focus in what we are similar. This is an example of morality that we mostly take for granted without thinking about the implications that we could carry on.

According to him, technology and morality is a cultural issue.  He talks about the morality and immorality influenced by technology.  But at the same time he thinks that technology is a good thing. 

3.  3.  ¨Augmented Reality:  A Class of Display on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum¨ by Paul Migram, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi, and Fumio Kishino.

This article talks about augmented reality which is a blend of reality and virtual world.  Virtual technology mixes with real world, so at this point virtual is an extreme and reality is the other extreme.  Augmented reality mixes both of these worlds and created a blended one.