ABSTRACT
Equally important to issues of official regulation and the performance of modern transnational corporations is how online life is conducted – the question of ethics. Indeed, as writers such as Frost (2000) and Christians et al. (1991) have pointed out, ethics are frequently intertwined with regulation and commerce. Ethics are usually treated as equivalent to moral principles, although they are equally concerned with codes of (professional) conduct and, at the danger of oversimplifying, are usually considered philosophically as a question of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, or as an issue of duty, as in Kant’s categorical imperative, a moral act which I am obliged to follow. Such fundamental principles of ethics are rarely, if ever, transformed by the emergence of new media, but the implications of following an ethical code of conduct must be scrutinised and questioned as new practices and techniques develop. A particularly good introduction to the impact of new technologies on ethics (and vice versa) is Ermann, Williams and Schauf (1997).
