Abstract
This chapter summarizes the arguments of this book, situating them amidst the booming literature on information ethics that has emerge over the (too) long process of writing. Unfortunately, nothing like a full theory of information justice has emerged from this, but we can now see important considerations for how we might think about information within what we already know about justice. That presents several possibilities for theoretically-informed action and action-oriented theory. I also suggest a range of possible principles, policies, practices, and technologies that are worthy of a deeper look that can engage data scientists, citizens, and governments. Ultimately, however, information justice (like political justice generally) is not likely to be something that can be established solely by easily executable principles. It will necessarily involve an information justice movement.
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Notes
- 1.
That is, of course, artistic license on an author’s part. I wrote the preface the day before I wrote the conclusion, so it was easy to make 4 years of writing appear to cohere nicely. Both, however, genuinely do reflect my intentions in writing this book.
- 2.
In addition to the published approaches I discuss here, there are approaches that are currently in working form, such as Taylor (2017), that I look forward to seeing in final form in the near future that, out of fairness to a work in progress, I will refrain from critiquing here.
- 3.
Rarely do I parse punctuation, as authorial intent isn’t not usually an issue that is critical for the kinds of philosophical questions I ask. But in this case the comma really does appear to matter. Rawls (2005), for example, argues that primary social goods such as rights and liberties are to be distributed according to the greatest equal liberty principle, while material goods are to be distributed according to the difference principle. It would be hard to understand how data is a primary social good. Though one might argue that privacy is, that place emphasis on restricting data flow and thus would be inconsistent with Heeks and Redken’s arguments about the ubiquity of data.
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Johnson, J.A. (2018). Toward a Praxis of Information Justice. In: Toward Information Justice. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70894-2_7
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