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A Compass for What Matters: Virtue Ethics and Information Literacy
Timothy Gorichanaz
College of Computing & Informatics, Drexel University, Philadephia, USA
As we foray further into the digital information age, we seem to be searching for moral guidance. In recent years, discussions of information ethics have proliferated along with emerging fields of ethics regarding specific technologies (e.g., AI ethics); and increasingly, this work in the ethics of information and technology has implications for information literacy. Of the three main traditions in ethics (deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics), deontology and consequentialism have been the focus of the majority of work. But I suggest that of these three, virtue ethics is uniquely well suited as a moral guide in the digital age, given the pace of sociotechnical change and the complexity of society. That is because virtue ethics focuses on the traits, situations and actions of moral agents, rather than on rules (as in deontology) or outcomes (consequentialism). In this talk, I provide an overview of virtue ethics as relevant to information literacy, I discuss existing work that is already compatible with virtue ethics, and I suggest a future vision of a virtue-oriented information literacy.
