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Introduction: Ethical Hacking and Hacking Ethics
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp 1-8
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Summary
There are ethical hackers. Usually they work for the security industry or as independents who find it rewarding and honorable to discover bugs and just plain bad code in the prolific offerings of the commercial software industry. Many don't get paid for their efforts or are even exposed to intimidation and threats by the software vendors whose sloppy and irresponsible work they uncover. What motivates them is usually pride in their ability to discover what others have overlooked. Some are interested in enhancing their reputation. Still others prefer to remain anonymous. Anonymity is often helpful because ethical hackers often make enemies on both sides. The criminals don't like them, because they spoil their profits, and the software industry doesn't like them, because they reveal their failures. Ethical hackers find themselves in a peculiar “outsider” position. Their activities oppose them to established regimes, whether legal or criminal. Explicitly or implicitly, they seem to stand in the tradition of anarchism, since any position beyond the confines of established power appears as radical freedom, independence, and creativity. Concerning the digital, this is a tradition that goes back to the early days of the Internet, where many envisioned a virtual world of freedom and uninhibited self-expression, of democracy and equality. The famous Hacker Manifesto of McKenzie Wark, although published much later in 2004, derives from the early vision of a free and unrestricted Internet. It proclaims optimistically that hackers are inheriting the world since human creativity cannot be suppressed by any ruling class or oppressive regime.
Although Wark places hacking in the Marxist tradition of revolutionary and emancipatory labor, his definition of what hacking is and what it means to be a hacker goes beyond any ideology of class struggle. For Wark, hacking does not consist of merely breaking into computer systems or databases. More radically, hacking is the construction of meaning in any form whatever. Meaning, or information, is always opposed to mere redundancy. Hackers break into the status quo, established systems, taken-forgranted patterns, accepted forms of order, and unquestioned codes; change things; and create new forms out of the old. Hackers “produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data” (Wark 2004, [002]).
Contents
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp v-vi
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Chapter One - The Exploit
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp 9-88
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Summary
We Do What We Are and Not What We Ought to Do
We all know what we ought to do. We ought to quit smoking, stop drinking, eat less sugar, exercise more, lose weight, drop the party scene, not waste food, buy organic, switch to bicycling, drive electric, reduce the carbon foot print, vote, be civically responsible, give to charities, maintain a healthy work-life balance, spend more time with the family, turn off the television, refrain from speaking badly about others, obey traffic laws, keep promises, recycle waste, read serious books, improve our skills, not cheat on taxes, think positively, not steal anything, tell the truth, think of others first, not hurt anyone, lend a helping hand, do our homework, respect teachers, persons of authority, and institutions, be humble, trustworthy, and reliable, overcome our prejudices, avoid discrimination, support the needy, not waste time, clean the garage, and much much more. Some of the time, we do manage to do some of the things we ought to do. But mostly, we don’t. And never will. Why not? Why can't we be what we ought to be? The answer is simple. Because we do what we are and not what we ought to do. No amount of ethics, moral reprimands, supervision, sanctions, rehabilitation programs, hard words, pangs of guilt, or social pressure will change this situation. Because it can't be changed without changing what we are.
What does it mean to be called upon to change what we are and not only what we do? This is a philosophical question and not merely a practical matter. How can something become other than what it is without losing itself along the way? If we try to imagine what kind of person we would be if we did do everything we ought to do, there would almost certainly be something strange about this person, something that does not belong to us. What is it like to be a saint? Surely, a burden of guilt and remorse would fall from our shoulders, but these would no longer be our shoulders. They would belong to a person we could hardly imagine. This is not because we cannot change our ways, as it were, turn around, which is the original meaning of the word “conversion.” It is also not because we cannot be virtuous, that is, act on the basis of a good character.
Frontmatter
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp i-iv
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Chapter Two - The Breach
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp 89-186
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Summary
The Philosophical Mythology of Humanism
The Philosophy of Information and Information Ethics The network theory of order that ANT proposes opens new possibilities for understanding what ethics and morality can mean in today's world. The shift of perspective that we have been documenting began with the sociological interpretation of ethics that Durkheim, Luhmann, and Latour developed. These developments potentially place ethical discourse on a fundamentally different terrain than traditional philosophical anthropology with its assumptions of free will and fundamental distinctions between is and ought and subject and object. Furthermore, these developments raise the question of what kind of discourse is the proper home of ethics since neither traditional philosophy nor the social sciences have made it into the twenty-first century unscathed. Ethical discourse at the beginning of the twenty-first century finds itself on a terrain that could be called “posthuman,” since the focus has been shifted away from human nature as an immediately knowable given from which ethical obligations and norms can be derived. Neither the bounded, unitary human individual nor a bounded, unitary social whole seems to still be credible. After Luhmann and Latour, ethics can no longer argue that because human nature is so, this or that ethical norm must be respected. Nevertheless, despite the theoretical advances that the past decades have witnessed, humanist individualism is still the usual form of moral discourse, for example, in discussions of human rights and the moral obligations derived from them. In a posthuman age, however, not only does human nature no longer offer a universal foundation for ethics— who knows what human beings are and what freedom and rationality mean— but also morality must be reconceived to include the agency of nonhumans.
The subject of moral discourse in the twenty-first century is no longer the autonomous rational individual, but complex socio-technical networks. For Luhmann, agency is the operation of an autopoietic and operationally and informationally closed system and not a matter concerning the free will of autonomous individuals. For ANT, the network is the actor, and the network is always made up of heterogeneous, hybrid actors, both human and nonhuman, physical, biological, and technical.
Series Editors’ Introduction
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp vii-x
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Summary
As lead editors, we are excited to write this introduction to Belliger and Krieger's Hacking Digital Ethics, the second authored volume in the Anthem Press Ethics of Personal Data Collection Series. We appreciate ongoing cooperation with the acquisitions editor Megan Greiving, whose initial communication with Colette inspired our cooperation after speaking with the publisher Tej P. S. Sood.
The series builds on a special issue of Genocide Studies and Prevention organized by Colette at the invitation of Professor Douglas S. Irvin-Erickson, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Virginia, and Yasemin Irwin-Erickson, with funding for workshops at New York University provided by a grant from the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart, Germany. We are most grateful to Carolin Wattenberg, senior manager to the board of management, and Dr. Stella Voutta, program director, at the Bosch Foundation, as well as Anda Catharina Ruf, advisor for private foundations and philanthropy, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH (German Corporation for International Cooperation GmbH), for their helpful and timely assistance in Germany.
Belliger and Krieger have been at the bleeding edge of thought on ethics and technology for the past few decades. Our earliest memory relative to this series was Belliger's publication On Networking: A Hermeneutics for the Digital Age (2012). Our aim is to explore the ethics of personal data collection because we identify personal data as the most microscopic measure of our information state. More specifically, we understand data as the new matter. Our expectation is for a data point to be identifiable with every piece of physical matter. Via data we are identifying the essence of what we are. In their exploration of network theory during the 2010 decade, Belliger and Krieger had to examine the methodological interpretation of philosophical texts like those of ancient religions, including the Abrahamic beliefs.
James recalls becoming familiar with our coauthors after giving a talk at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference in 2010, sponsored by the Mormon Transhumanist Association at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. After a presentation titled “Integrationalism: Spiritual Disincentives for Humanity,” James was approached by Common Ground Publishing to expand his paper into a book (published in 2012) and was directed to Belliger's paper.
Index
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp 265-271
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Bibliography
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
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- Anthem Press
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- 06 April 2021
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- 23 April 2021, pp 257-264
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Chapter Three - The Redesign
- David J. Krieger
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- Book:
- Hacking Digital Ethics
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
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- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021, pp 187-256
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Summary
Network Norms
Luhmann based society on the mutual recognition of persons as equally capable of communication. Only then could the other be seen as alter ego. Without this recognition, why should anyone listen to what anyone else has to say? Once society emerged as a system of people listening to what other people say, that is, as a system of communications; the consequence was that not only human individuals but also things, artifacts, technologies, and indeed everything that was not communicating were banned from the social system into the environment. Nonetheless, as it turns out, all these banned entities returned through the back door of information. Communication needs information. As we learned from actor-network theory (ANT), information is constructed by humans and nonhumans symmetrically. The social system is not based upon exclusion, but inclusion of everything in the world. Indeed, society is not a closed system, but an open network. What is, is information. This is basically a posthumanist worldview. Society does not consist of human beings, but of communications, and communications are themselves based upon the translating and enrolling activities of both humans and nonhumans. Whatever human individuals might be, this is constructed by society and is situationally and historically relative. There is no such thing as human nature, given and eternal, and even if there were, historical societies would continuously interpret it differently.
Since the world consists of actor-networks, society, as well as nature and everything else within the world, is information in action, that is, information in the process of networking, associating, binding things together into collectives. Instead of systems, we have networks. Instead of communications, we have networking. Instead of closed systems, which are constituted by radical exclusion, we have open and flexible networks of both humans and nonhumans, all of whom are made up of information. This is where we stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What does this mean for ethics and, specifically, for digital ethics?
Equipped with this question, we hacked into the current discourse of digital ethics. Floridi, as we saw in the discussion of the philosophy of information, attempted to answer this question by declaring everyone and everything to be information, and nothing else. In the end, however, some information turned out to be more equal than other information.
Hacking Digital Ethics
- David J. Krieger
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- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 06 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 23 April 2021
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This book is not a critique of digital ethics but rather a hack. It follows the method of hacking by developing an exploit kit on the basis of state-of-the-art social theory, which it uses to breach the insecure legacy system upon which the discourse of digital ethics is running. This legacy system is made up of four interdependent components: the philosophical mythology of humanism, social science critique, media scandalization, and the activities of many civil society organisations lobbying for various forms of regulation. The hack exposes the bugs, the sloppy programming, and the false promises of current digital ethics, and, because it is an ethical hack, redesigns digital ethics so that it can address the problems of the global network society. The main idea of the book is that the social world of meaning is based on information, which, because of its relational nature, must be understood more as a common good than as private property. A digital ethics that relies upon humanistic individualism cannot address the issues arising from the global network society based upon information. This demands a complete revision of the philosophical foundations of current digital ethics by means of a redesign of ethics as a theory of governance by design.
Contributors
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- By Douglas L. Arnold, Laura J. Balcer, Amit Bar-Or, Sergio E. Baranzini, Frederik Barkhof, Robert A. Bermel, Francois A. Bethoux, Dennis N. Bourdette, Richard K. Burt, Peter A. Calabresi, Zografos Caramanos, Tanuja Chitnis, Stacey S. Cofield, Jeffrey A. Cohen, Nadine Cohen, Alasdair J. Coles, Devon Conway, Stuart D. Cook, Gary R. Cutter, Peter J. Darlington, Ann Dodds-Frerichs, Ranjan Dutta, Gilles Edan, Michelle Fabian, Franz Fazekas, Massimo Filippi, Elizabeth Fisher, Paulo Fontoura, Corey C. Ford, Robert J. Fox, Natasha Frost, Alex Z. Fu, Siegrid Fuchs, Kazuo Fujihara, Kristin M. Galetta, Jeroen J.G. Geurts, Gavin Giovannoni, Nada Gligorov, Ralf Gold, Andrew D. Goodman, Myla D. Goldman, Jenny Guerre, Stephen L. Hauser, Peter B. Imrey, Douglas R. Jeffery, Stephen E. Jones, Adam I. Kaplin, Michael W. Kattan, B. Mark Keegan, Kyle C. Kern, Zhaleh Khaleeli, Samia J. Khoury, Joep Killestein, Soo Hyun Kim, R. Philip Kinkel, Stephen C. Krieger, Lauren B. Krupp, Emmanuelle Le Page, David Leppert, Scott Litwiller, Fred D. Lublin, Henry F. McFarland, Joseph C. McGowan, Don Mahad, Jahangir Maleki, Ruth Ann Marrie, Paul M. Matthews, Francesca Milanetti, Aaron E. Miller, Deborah M. Miller, Xavier Montalban, Charity J. Morgan, Ichiro Nakashima, Sridar Narayanan, Avindra Nath, Paul W. O’Connor, Jorge R. Oksenberg, A. John Petkau, Michael D. Phillips, J. Theodore Phillips, Tammy Phinney, Sean J. Pittock, Sarah M. Planchon, Chris H. Polman, Alexander Rae-Grant, Stephen M. Rao, Stephen C. Reingold, Maria A. Rocca, Richard A. Rudick, Amber R. Salter, Paula Sandler, Jaume Sastre-Garriga, John R. Scagnelli, Dana J. Serafin, Lynne Shinto, Nancy L. Sicotte, Jack H. Simon, Per Soelberg Sørensen, Ryan E. Stagg, James M. Stankiewicz, Lael A. Stone, Amy Sullivan, Matthew Sutliff, Jessica Szpak, Alan J. Thompson, Bruce D. Trapp, Helen Tremlett, Maria Trojano, Orla Tuohy, Rhonda R. Voskuhl, Marc K. Walton, Mike P. Wattjes, Emmanuelle Waubant, Martin S. Weber, Howard L Weiner, Brian G. Weinshenker, Bianca Weinstock-Guttman, Jeffrey L. Winters, Jerry S. Wolinsky, Vijayshree Yadav, E. Ann Yeh, Scott S. Zamvil
- Edited by Jeffrey A. Cohen, Richard A. Rudick
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- Book:
- Multiple Sclerosis Therapeutics
- Published online:
- 05 December 2011
- Print publication:
- 20 October 2011, pp viii-xii
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Sex Selection by Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) for Nonmedical Reasons in Contemporary Israeli Regulations
- RICHARD V. GRAZI, JOEL B. WOLOWELSKY, DAVID J. KRIEGER
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- Journal:
- Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics / Volume 17 / Issue 3 / July 2008
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 May 2008, pp. 293-299
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We report here on recent developments in Israel on the issue of sex selection for nonmedical reasons by preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Sex selection for medical reasons (such as in cases of sex-linked genetic diseases) is generally viewed as uncontroversial and legal in European and American law. Its use for nonmedical reasons (like “balancing” the gender ratio in a family) is generally illegal in European countries. In the United States, it is not illegal, although in the opinion of the Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), it is problematic. This position is undergoing reconsideration, albeit in a limited way.
Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak
- April Alliston, Elizabeth Ammons, Jean Arnold, Nina Baym, Sandra L. Beckett, Peter G. Beidler, Roger A. Berger, Sandra Bermann, J.J. Wilson, Troy Boone, Alison Booth, Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan, Marie Borroff, Ihab Hassan, Ulrich Weisstein, Zack Bowen, Jill Campbell, Dan Campion, Jay Caplan, Maurice Charney, Beverly Lyon Clark, Robert A. Colby, Thomas C. Coleman III, Nicole Cooley, Richard Dellamora, Morris Dickstein, Terrell Dixon, Emory Elliott, Caryl Emerson, Ann W. Engar, Lars Engle, Kai Hammermeister, N. N. Feltes, Mary Anne Ferguson, Annie Finch, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Jerry Aline Flieger, Norman Friedman, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sandra M. Gilbert, Laurie Grobman, George Guida, Liselotte Gumpel, R. K. Gupta, Florence Howe, Cathy L. Jrade, Richard A. Kaye, Calhoun Winton, Murray Krieger, Robert Langbaum, Richard A. Lanham, Marilee Lindemann, Paul Michael Lützeler, Thomas J. Lynn, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Michelle A. Massé, Irving Massey, Georges May, Christian W. Hallstein, Gita May, Lucy McDiarmid, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Koritha Mitchell, Robin Smiles, Kenyatta Albeny, George Monteiro, Joel Myerson, Alan Nadel, Ashton Nichols, Jeffrey Nishimura, Neal Oxenhandler, David Palumbo-Liu, Vincent P. Pecora, David Porter, Nancy Potter, Ronald C. Rosbottom, Elias L. Rivers, Gerhard F. Strasser, J. L. Styan, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Gary Totten, David van Leer, Asha Varadharajan, Orrin N. C. Wang, Sharon Willis, Louise E. Wright, Donald A. Yates, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Richard E. Zeikowitz, Angelika Bammer, Dale Bauer, Karl Beckson, Betsy A. Bowen, Stacey Donohue, Sheila Emerson, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Jay L. Halio, Karl Kroeber, Terence Hawkes, William B. Hunter, Mary Jambus, Willard F. King, Nancy K. Miller, Jody Norton, Ann Pellegrini, S. P. Rosenbaum, Lorie Roth, Robert Scholes, Joanne Shattock, Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Alfred Bendixen, Alarma Kathleen Brown, Michael J. Kiskis, Debra A. Castillo, Rey Chow, John F. Crossen, Robert F. Fleissner, Regenia Gagnier, Nicholas Howe, M. Thomas Inge, Frank Mehring, Hyungji Park, Jahan Ramazani, Kenneth M. Roemer, Deborah D. Rogers, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Regina M. Schwartz, John T. Shawcross, Brenda R. Silver, Andrew von Hendy, Virginia Wright Wexman, Britta Zangen, A. Owen Aldridge, Paula R. Backscheider, Roland Bartel, E. M. Forster, Milton Birnbaum, Jonathan Bishop, Crystal Downing, Frank H. Ellis, Roberto Forns-Broggi, James R. Giles, Mary E. Giles, Susan Blair Green, Madelyn Gutwirth, Constance B. Hieatt, Titi Adepitan, Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., Emanuel Mussman, Sally Todd Nelson, Robert O. Preyer, David Diego Rodriguez, Guy Stern, James Thorpe, Robert J. Wilson, Rebecca S. Beal, Joyce Simutis, Betsy Bowden, Sara Cooper, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Tarek el Ariss, Richard Jewell, John W. Kronik, Wendy Martin, Stuart Y. McDougal, Hugo Méndez-Ramírez, Ivy Schweitzer, Armand E. Singer, G. Thomas Tanselle, Tom Bishop, Mary Ann Caws, Marcel Gutwirth, Christophe Ippolito, Lawrence D. Kritzman, James Longenbach, Tim McCracken, Wolfe S. Molitor, Diane Quantic, Gregory Rabassa, Ellen M. Tsagaris, Anthony C. Yu, Betty Jean Craige, Wendell V. Harris, J. Hillis Miller, Jesse G. Swan, Helene Zimmer-Loew, Peter Berek, James Chandler, Hanna K. Charney, Philip Cohen, Judith Fetterley, Herbert Lindenberger, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Maximillian E. Novak, Richard Ohmann, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Reynolds, James Sledd, Harriet Turner, Marie Umeh, Flavia Aloya, Regina Barreca, Konrad Bieber, Ellis Hanson, William J. Hyde, Holly A. Laird, David Leverenz, Allen Michie, J. Wesley Miller, Marvin Rosenberg, Daniel R. Schwarz, Elizabeth Welt Trahan, Jean Fagan Yellin
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 115 / Issue 7 / December 2000
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 1986-2078
- Print publication:
- December 2000
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