Ethics and Technology

Ethics and Technology



Ethics and Technology

Jeremy Hart was a software engineer employed by Citadel Systems, Inc. (Citadel), a leading software and database applications developer. His colleagues and supervisor considered him one of the brightest and most insightful employees working with database applications. For the past several years, he was a member of a research team designing a sophisticated new database management system. In the course of building and refining its database management tools, Citadel developed unique protocols to solve a variety of technical problems. These protocols were not widely known or easily observable by Citadel's customers and competitors

Labor theory of property

The work idea of property or work idea of appropriation or labor idea of ownership is a natural law idea that retains that property initially arrives about by the exertion of work upon natural resources. It is furthermore called the principle of first appropriation or the homestead principle.

In his Second Treatise on Government, the philosopher John Locke inquired by what right an individual can assertion to own one part of the world, when, according to the Bible, God provided the world to all humanity in common. He responded that persons own themselves and thus their own labor. When a individual works, that labor enters into the object. Thus, the object becomes the property of that person.

Locke contended in support of one-by-one property rights as "natural privileges". Following the argument the fruits of one's work are "his" because he had worked for it. Furthermore the laborer should also contain a natural house right in the resource itself because - as Locke accepts as true - exclusive ownership was directly necessary for production.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau subsequent admonished this second step in Discourse on Inequality, where he competently argues that the natural right argument does not continue to assets that one did not create. Both philosophers contain that the relative between work and ownership pertains only to property that was unowned before such labor took place.

Land in its initial state would be considered unowned by anyone, but if an individual applied his work to the land by agriculture it, for example, it becomes his property. Merely putting a barrier round land rather than utilising the land surrounded would not bring house into being according to most natural regulation theorists.

For example, economist Murray Rothbard asserted (in Man, finances, and State):

If Columbus lands on a new countries, is it legitimate for him to proclaim all the new countries his own, or even that sector 'as far as his eye can glimpse'? Clearly, this would not be the case in the free humanity that we are postulating. Columbus or Crusoe would have to use the land, to 'cultivate' it in some way, before he could be asserted to own it.... If there is more land than can be utilised by a restricted work supply, then the unused land should simply stay unowned until a first client arrives on the scene. Any attempt to assertion a new asset that somebody does not use would have to be ...