Ethics and e-Inclusion: A Disability Perspective
Presentation at 2008 e-Inclusion Ministerial Conference & Expo (PS13 - Inclusion 20/20: The Ethics of e-Inclusion)
Date: 30/11/2008
Venue: Vienna Reed Messe Congress Centre, Vienna, Austria
Article
There has, in recent years, been a trend towards extending theoretical rights and decreasing the budgets to enable people to enjoy them; notable in the ICT's field is the claim that Governments should legislate a right but that the market should be responsible for its enjoyment. This is clearly unethical for two basic reasons: first, the entity which wills the ends must be responsible for securing the means, even if this is not from its own resources; secondly, to subject the enjoyment of a right to a massive complex of arbitrary forces guarantees nothing.
I ought to say immediately that I do not regard any right as absolute; and it therefore follows that many of our rights present conflicts. That is why government is so difficult. There is, then a right by disabled people to enjoy access to ICT but there is also a right of commercial organisations to maximise shareholder value; if the public sector wishes to abridge the latter in favour of the former then it must arrange the means. After all, grocers are not asked to subsidise the poor! The kind of accommodation between rights will vary according to circumstances - there is no abstract template; for example, the recent action of governments and central banks to prop up the international financial system has necessarily abridged shareholder rights; and we are all, sadly, familiar with the powers which governments must necessarily take to deal with terrorism. It is, however, deeply hurtful for people like me to sit in EU discussions where my enjoyment of a right to access information is negotiated away in a package, as something which is marginal or even unnecessary.
The Bled workshop on ICT and ethics listed a large number of considerations which might be taken into account in drawing up a table of ethical issues. These can broadly be divided into two classes: those which protect citizens from harm caused by ICT's and those which relate to accessibility. From the user perspective, I want to focus on this second class of issues because Bled left out one vital consideration, namely, that all EU citizens pay value added tax - even beggars - and therefore the accessibility case is not based, as Bled implies, on moral grounds; it is firmly based, in my view on fiscal grounds. That is why the assumption that my accessibility right is tradable in a package is so offensive.
So, now I have reached my half way point, let me make some constructive suggestions on the ethics of access by disabled people to ICT:
- First, we must dispense with rhetoric and wishful thinking. If there is no serious intention of helping disabled people to enjoy our rights of access, then we must be honest and say so, and take the consequences; and, further, we should not consult if we have no intention of taking any notice of what we are told;
- Secondly, even if we are not prepared to make things better, we should not allow things to get worse. The current use of legislation - over-riding the market - to switch off the analogue television signal without ensuring access rights for disabled people, thus making them much worse off than they were before, is a scandal; and the failure of the public sector to come to grips with the consequences of its own carelessness - or is it callousness - is, if anything, an even greater scandal;
- Thirdly, in the absence of the ability to deliver a generic right of access, we should define particular rights, such as rights to citizen information and peer normative communications systems such as public service broadcasting; or, alternatively, we should declare a generic right and create a structure whereby organisations can claim exemption;
- Fourthly, we should not impose an obligation we are not prepared to accept for ourselves; the most critical infractions against the enjoyment of ICT accessibility rights are governments;
- Fifthly, we should only abridge shareholder value where this is proportionate in terms of social gain and the organisation's public purpose and capacity to deliver;
- Finally, in deciding how important it might be for people to enjoy a right, we should look at the consequences of denial; in the case of disabled people the lack of ICT access compounds an existing socio-economic disadvantage.
The value of this discussion is that it might rescue us from our defensiveness and wishful thinking and base ICT accessibility on a firm ethical footing.
The Final Report is available for download on the conference website in Word or PDF format.