10. Respecting Autonomy and Privacy
Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this module you should be able to:
Discuss if organizations are moral agents.
Identify the main threats to autonomous decision-making.
Discuss why respecting privacy is important.
Video Lectures:
10.1 Moral and corporate agency (15:28)
Moral agency is the capacity for moral accountability. It requires sensitivity to moral situations, responsiveness to moral reasons, and the ability to make decisions. Most adult human beings are moral agents. Through their officers and employees, complex business corporations possess vicarious moral sensitivity and responsiveness. Corporations employ highly organized holistic decision-making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K6SHH8r9KTM
10.2 Moral autonomy and excusing conditions (12:27)
Moral autonomy is the capacity to govern oneself according one’s own ethical reasoning. Coercive threats, deception, failure to disclose information, conflicts of interest, decision-making incompetence, oppressive conceptual frameworks, and emotional manipulation can diminish people’s capacity for moral autonomy. Severe cases of any of these conditions will excuse people from moral accountability for their decisions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Lom-BTY1bIs
10.3 Personal autonomy (12:52)
Personal autonomy is the capacity to decide how to live one’s own life and to revise one’s life choices when one chooses to do so. Personal autonomy is subject to the same potential difficulties as is moral autonomy. Modern market economies place a high value on personal autonomy because their economic justification presupposes that individual economic actors always make decisions that are in their own rational self-interest. Liberal democracies value personal autonomy because people are less likely to make mistakes about how to lead their lives than is a paternalistic government. Sustaining community membership and personal relationships requires that people do not readily revise their commitments, and both can be at odds with an overvaluation of personal autonomy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Iqtn1BvTZWc
10.4 Privacy (12:04)
Informational privacy requires that people are able to control access by others to information about themselves. Informational privacy is an efficient defence against social pressure to conform. People need to control intimate information about themselves in order to have different types of personal relationships. Self-ownership requires informational privacy because information is a financially valuable asset. However, market efficiency requires perfect competition, and perfect competition requires that consumers and producers always have full information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9sqBe5tY_uc
Case Study 10:
Should Jake Embed the Spyware?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OqjeMtKFr7g