Stephen Downes

Discussions of ethics of technology in learning often focus on the three schools of ethics - virtual theory, consequentialism, and deontology. They rarely mention contractualism, which tells me simply that their foundations in actual ethical theory are slight. This essay, a well-written and accessible review of T.M. Scanlon's collection of essays, Morality and Responsibility (itself behind a paywall, sadly), helps address that deficiency. Scanlon's work reshapes some core assumptions about ethics: the idea that what counts as 'ethical' is contextual and based in relationships, and the idea that attributions of responsibility and consequences do not require a foundational theory of free will. "An action or policy is wrong," says Scanlon, "if any principle that permitted it could be reasonably rejected by someone affected adversely by that principle."