Postmodern Ethics of Information

Papers Wanted
1

Lots of great scholarship in information science takes the view that our beliefs are socially and historically contingent. How do we take a normative stance, say “that’s right” or “that’s wrong,” without undercutting the insights gained from these approaches?

Joe Tennis and I took a first stab at this in [1] within the domain of classification theory, but there’s much more to be said.

I want to cite a paper that makes this case more generally. We need ethical tools that don’t take us back to absolutism.

[1] Hauser, Elliott, and Joseph T. Tennis. “Ethics for Contingent Classifications: Rorty’s Pragmatic Ethics and Postmodern Knowledge Organization.” In Proceedings from North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization , 112–19. Vol. 7. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Digital Library, 2019. link here

2

I only read one of the below book’s reviews, but I think it (or the subject of it) can be relevant here for two questions/issues:

  1. How ethics of information/information ethics position itself in relation to ethics in general or comparative/applied ethics.
  2. How to understand/work with the pluralistic nature of information ethics without resorting to universalism or relativism.

I took a class with Professor Wong at Duke, and has been greatly inspired/informed by his work.

David B. Wong, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism , Oxford University Press, 2006, 312pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195305395.

And the review I read is: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/natural-moralities-a-defense-of-pluralistic-relativism/?fbclid=IwAR3sRwggyOUKfioouRpXVAy6AqOVrGopmc29TchiL34thadD09Q1QGp2dEw

1 Like
3

Thanks! I also took a seminar on ancient and modern ethical thought with Prof. Wong at Duke, long ago. I remember him being an excellent teacher, but wasn’t reading independently in philosophy at the time (and by long ago I mean before this book was published).

Judging from the review you linked to, Wong’s work is definitely relevant here. I’ll check it out. I particularly like that he critiques individualists like Rawls and Nagel, though I remember being an staunch individualist myself when we covered them during the seminar.

Maybe there’s a collaboration to be had here? How might Wong’s ethical thought interact with, e.g. Mai’s call for pluralism as a foundation of classification practice?

Mai, Jens-Erik. “The Modernity of Classification.” Journal of Documentation 67, no. 4 (2011): 710–30. link