Ethicomp and CEPE are major conferences in the field of computer/information ethics. Previous CEPE conferences themes include intercultural ethics, roboethics, social impacts of social computing, socio-technical and ethical change in ICTs, and social responsibility and ICTs. ETHICOMP, the conference series initiated in 1995 by Simon Rogerson and Terry Bynum, has likewise focused on the ethical dimensions of computing technologies. To support the missions of each entity, while providing a robust opportunity for innovative collaborative research and scholarship, Ethicomp and CEPE was partner in 2014.
Joint conferences was hosted by CERNA (Commission de réflexion sur l’Ethique de la Recherche en sciences et technologies du Numérique d’Allistene).
As well, the overlap day between the two conferences (Wednesday, July 25) is co-sponsored by ACM SIGCAS (Special Interest Group, Computers and Society), was focus on gender and technology.
Background
Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950) is a primary source for contemporary Information and Computing Ethics. Wiener framed his reflections on the possible uses and benefits of then newly emerging computational devices and networks within the key ethical norms of human well-being and flourishing – the core norms of virtue ethics. Contemporary computers and computer networks increasingly pervade and shape our lives, dramatically enhancing our communication capacities: they thereby foreground and amplify “the networked self,” i.e., our sense of selfhood, identity, and agency (including moral agency) as increasingly relational and interwoven with one another. Such relational senses of identity, selfhood and agency are in fact the beginning point of virtue ethics in its diverse expressions and traditions globally. Wiener’s foundational framework has thus proven to be profoundly prescient.
But certainly, there are multiple ethical frameworks within which questions of “the good life” – as focusing on our well-being and flourishing as human beings – may be couched. At the same time, alongside the undeniable boons of ICTs – recent developments such as the NSA surveillance scandals make critical reflection on the ethical, social, and political dimensions of contemporary ICTs and their array of uses all the more urgent.
Accordingly, for CEPE’14 we invite submissions – including panels – that address these core concerns with well-being and flourishing in an age of ICTs. We encourage research and reflection that approach these thematics from a wide array of viewpoints and with attention to specific foci including:
ICTs and development
technosecurity and cyber-warfare
robots and robot ethics for humans and humane lives;
social computing
global / cultural perspectives on ICTs and the good life
The programs link to the version of papers distributed to participants on USB sticks
