The Ethics Of Virtue Ethics And Virtue Ethics

Evidently, the development mentioned above inculcates into an issue of affecting privacy and confidentiality of patients’, whose medical information was passed on without consent. While some argue privacy is non-existent, others urge that there is a need to protect privacy now more than ever. What makes privacy quite difficult to define is that its value and meaning differs not only from society to society but also from person to person [10]; what one would regard as violation of his privacy, the other would disregard as trivial and insubstantial. What we can all agree upon is that fact that value of privacy needs critical rethinking, because the traditionally followed to privacy seems incapable to address the threat posed by Big Data, profiling, …show more content…
Virtue Ethics is an ethical theory that focuses on an individual 's character and regards it as pivotal to ethical thinking, in contrast to their consequences (referred to as Consequentialism) or the rules about the acts themselves (referred to as Deontology) [11]. In virtue ethics, what matters most are the motives and intentions of the agent being examined. The fundamental assumption when applying the virtue ethics is that the morally upstanding individuals will as a matter of fact act in accordance with the established laws and principles [12]. For example, a virtuous healthcare professional, from the virtue ethics point of view, would then be expected to act in confidentiality of patient regardless of the state of the health record (i.e. either paper or …show more content…
Current protection of privacy model suffers due to two noteworthy aspects; the focus on individual rights and the focus on individual interests. In analyzing huge sets of data, it becomes increasingly difficult to demonstrate harm to an individual’s interests [14]. Given the fact that data collection and analysis is so widespread, rather omnipresent, it will quite likely be impossible for an individual to keep track of every data process which may or may not include his data. If an individual finds out that it does include his/her data then he/she has to assess whether the data administrator follows the legal standards. If the administrator didn’t follow the legal bindings then an individual may file a case. And, for the sake of argument, if an individual does goes to court, he/she would need to prove a personal harm, which is a particularly convoluted notion when dealing with large scale Data collections and processes. For example, what concrete harm has NHS done by providing the patients’ medical records to Google for research in medicine? This illustrates the fundamental tension between the traditional ethical and legal thinking and today’s technological reality – while the traditional thinking is focused on an