THE SIMILARITY OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND RESPONSIBILITY

Another reason for the popularity of responsibility, especially in business contexts, is that the root of the term can be found in its legal use. Legal responsibility is a clear concept in business that is commonly recognised to firstly set and enforce the rules and secondly solve conflicts. Most business students must attend some lectures about commercial law. Knowing and being able to apply the concept of legal responsibility makes it easy for economic subjects to transfer their knowledge to the idea of moral responsibility.

Another point is that responsibility as a moral notion has a more positive ring to it than most other words from the realm of ethics and morality. While businesspeople may object to the idea that they should act morally or consider ethical questions, they will generally agree to the suggestion that they are responsible. This is due on the one hand to the acceptance of legal responsibility and on the other hand may be caused by other types of responsibility such as role responsibility. Being a CEO or manager is often defined by the responsibilities involved. Engineers and technicians have technical responsibilities, and workers at the lower end of a hierarchy tend to know what they are responsible for.

Also, there are several material and structural similarities between IS and responsibility. The first one is that all of these terms are morally charged and that they point toward a consequentialist idea of morality and some underlying theory of the good life. Responsibility is a consequentialist notion because it uses the results of actions as the basis of ascription. Business as well as IT are consequentialist in that the end result is generally considered to be more important than the process of getting there. Business is justified by its promise of producing an efficient allocation of resources, which in turn is supposed to produce maximal welfare. Maximal welfare is usually considered morally good because it enables people to choose what they consider the good life. Similarly, technology is meant to facilitate everyday chores as well as more complicated work with the purpose of giving man freedom from labour, misery, etc., to allow him to live his life according to his wishes (Kissling, 1995, p. 424).

While all of our terms are compatible with a morality of the good life, they remain formalistic in that they do not tell people what exactly it is that constitutes a good life or how to achieve it. The ethics of responsibility thus corresponds to IS in that it is open . Responsibility ascriptions as social constructs are not unequivocally predictable. The same is true again for business where we know some organising principles, such as the principle that organisations in markets have to make profits ^[6] without knowing how to do so.

Another important point linking business, IT, and responsibility is their reliance on communication. All three of them are social constructs and social products and therefore are clearly dependent on communication. Furthermore, responsibility consists of communication and would cease to exist without it. IT on the other hand is generally understood to be an attempt to improve channels of communication, an effort to provide new means and to help reach this goal. Business, finally, is also a social construct that uses communication to reach its goals and depends on IT to do so.

Furthermore, all of the terms involved promise to lead to action. While ethics is often perceived as a hobby for philosophers , theologians, and other groups of people who have a lot of time on their hands, responsibility seems to imply immediate action and results. Again legal responsibility is probably the reason for this perception because it delivers results quickly and visibly. This appeals to businesspeople as well as technicians and facilitates the application of responsibility in the sphere of IS.

The summary of this chapter is that responsibility is a notion that holds the promise to facilitate the analysis and solution of ethical and moral problems in the area of information systems. This is due firstly to the fact that technical and social developments have culminated in a situation where traditional morality no longer seems to be able to fulfil its role. The decline in the relevance of traditional morality was accompanied by a rise of the importance and popularity of the term responsibility. Responsibility is perceived as a solution to modern moral problems because it allows us to deal with uncertainty and risk. On the other hand it is closely related to information technology, which is also a tool to reduce complexity. All of this takes place in a society where human interaction is increasingly mediated by social systems, the most important of which is probably the economic system. Responsibility holds the promise to allow us to discuss morality and facilitate ethical reflection, and it does so on a social basis. This helps it overcome the solipsistic attitude that was one of the reasons for the failure of morality. We see that this is a rather ambitious picture. Responsibility is supposed to help us in several highly contentious tasks that take place in an uncertain environment. The decisive question that this book wants to answer is: Is it possible that the notion of responsibility can live up to these expectations, and if so, what are the practical consequences? In order to answer this, we will use the next chapter to give a detailed analysis of the notion of responsibility and the theoretical problems it entails.

^[6] Whether they have to maximise profits is a different question to which we will return later on.