ORIGINAL PAPER Respect for persons, identity, and information technology Robin S. Dillon Published online: 3 April 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract There is surprisingly little attention in Infor- mation Technology ethics to respect for persons, either as an ethical issue or as a core value of IT ethics or as a conceptual tool for discussing ethical issues of IT. In this, IT ethics is very different from another field of applied ethics, bioethics, where respect is a core value and con- ceptual tool. This paper argues that there is value in thinking about ethical issues related to information technol- ogies, especially, though not exclusively, issues concerning identity and identity management, explicitly in terms of respect for persons understood as a core value of IT ethics. After explicating respect for persons, the paper identifies a number of ways in which putting the concept of respect for persons explicitly at the center of both IT practice and IT ethics could be valuable, then examines some of the implicit and problematic assumptions about persons, their identities, and respect that are built into the design, implementation, and use of information technologies and are taken for granted in discussions in IT ethics. The dis- cussion concludes by asking how better conceptions of respect for persons might be better employed in IT contexts or brought better to bear on specific issues concerning identity in IT contexts. Keywords Respect Á Autonomy Á Information technology Á Identity Let me begin by saying that ‘‘information technology’’ is an area of contemporary human life that I participate in but that, until recently, I participated in thoughtlessly, which is to say that it was until recently an area of human life that I did not think much about, either philosophically or non- philosophically. I paid attention to it only so far as I needed to in order to use it to do whatever I needed to do: write papers, buy things, communicate with other people, teach my classes. My philosophical thinking has been focused on respect for persons and self-respect as moral concepts, and while I’ve increasingly made use of numerous information technologies in my philosophical work on respect and self- respect, it had not occurred to me before that there might be any connection between these concepts I think and write about and the technologies I use in thinking and writing, let alone with any other information technologies. Apparently, the thought that there might be connections between respect and self-respect and IT ethics has also not occurred to many people. For online searches for docu- ments, articles, books, chapters, etc. that address respect and information technology turn up relatively little beyond institutional ‘‘IT ethics’’ documents on university and government sites, which declare, among other things, that the responsible use of IT requires that users and system administrators should respect three things: (1) the rights, privacy, and intellectual property of IT users, (2) copy- rights and licensing agreements, and (3) the integrity of data. But there is little mention and discussion of respect for persons, either as an ethical issue or as a core value of IT ethics or as a conceptual tool for discussing ethical issues of IT. In this, IT ethics is very different from another An earlier version of this paper was presented as a keynote address at the Ethics, Technology, and Identity Conference, sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in June 2008. I am grateful to Noemi Manders-Huits for inviting me to participate in the conference and to conference participants for helpful questions and discussions. R. S. Dillon (&) Department of Philosophy, Lehigh University, 15 University Dr., Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA e-mail: rsd2@lehigh.edu 123 Ethics Inf Technol (2010) 12:17–28 DOI 10.1007/s10676-009-9188-8