ABSTRACT
This chapter presents four ethical paradigms for digital research: deontology (obligation or rule-based ethics), consequentialism (outcome-based ethics), postmodernism (critique-based ethics), and virtue ethics (virtue or character-based ethics). By conducting such a review, it describes the strengths and weaknesses of each before advocating for the paradigm of virtue ethics to address the intractable problems of pluralism and emotivism in our networked world. It addresses how habits, rather than strict rules or outcomes, are a contingent yet normative way to build ethics for digital case study research. It concludes by arguing that ethical case studies are the type of case study worth having.
