Idea
An ethics-enabled search engine can act as a complement to the well-known
price search engines (a topic I have been working on earlier) and turn ethical
considerations into an easily advertisable advantage.
A search engine can store imprint and ethics of organizations that publish
them and allow users to find organizations adhering to the desired ethics
and also to verify these ethics or the public feedback of organizations or
individuals that verify those ethics and an organization's adherance to
its ethics in detail.
Users of this system can demand ethics and support non-government
organization that try to uphold environmental, social or other ethics.
Gathering data from user profiles is expected from search engines as
users specify the ethics they are looking for and the policy providers,
certification agents and verification agents they would like to see.
A search engine must return hits according to the quality
of matching ethics, if no other criteria was specified to supercede this.
Unsatisfied users can post tickets in a well-defined format to
policy providers or verification agents to remind policy implementors
to adhere to the ethics they have published. Policy providers and
verification agents can declare a published social contract document
as (partially) invalid or revoke (self-) certifications.
Users can also annotate policies or social contracts and inform others
about their private opinion about the adherence or non-adherence of a
policy implementor. Mediators should be used to mediate in case of dispute
as legal steps are frowned upon (there is a base policy that disallows
legal steps where mediation would be appropriate) and can increase the
number of negative annotations.
Policies can extend policy schemes (inherting the structure
of an empty policy) or extend another policy that has not been declared
final. A final policy is not open to be extended. Extending a policy means
that paragraphs can be overridden or appended.
The implementation of a policy refers to the use of a policy in
a social contract.
In an analogy to the Java language one could refer to policy schemes as
interfaces and policies as classes but where Java nomenclatur would be
to implement a scheme (instead of extending it), the term "implement"
refers to what would be the instantiation of a policy in Java, because
a policy implementation is the act of adding a policy to one's
social contract. Such an "instance" of a policy is parametrized by
a single argument, which is the implementation level. Further
parametrization may be added in the future, when the search facilities
for policy parameters are sufficiently standardized.
Policies should be structured to describe concisely what is
required by a policy, not why it is required or how
it is to be implemented. It should be considered good style to add
links to external web pages describing the why and how
to every paragraph that requires further explanations. Explanations
should preferrably come in different degrees of verbosity and
sophistication but aim to explain the connection to
Kant's
Categorical Imperative.
Roles
- Policy Scheme Provider
- A government agency or non-government organization providing a scheme for
an ethics policy, that can be used by policy providers to follow a common
structure and, possibly, common implementation levels but allows policy
providers to place different demands on policy implementors. The structure
of the policy scheme can be seen as a catalogue of questions that need to be
answered by the policy provider.
- Policy Provider
- A government agency or non-government organization providing an ethics
policy.
- Policy Implementor
- An organization adhering to a set of policies (a social contract)
and advertising the implementation of these policies.
- Certification Agent
- An organizaton certifying the implementation of a policy.
This can be the policy provider itself.
- Verification Agent
- An organization verifying complaints about failures to
implement a policy. This can be the policy provider itself.
- Search Engine, Yellow pages or Trade Register
- An internet service that allows to search for organizations
based on advertised ethics.
- Annotation space operator or network
- An annotation space is any storage that is accessible to
search engines and stores annotations about entities with
any type of registry number. One type of annotation can be
another web page (B), linking to web page A by a meta tag that
contains the URL of page A as its content. As this requires
the publisher of the annotation to have a web page and
page A to remain the page of the entity in question this is
the least recommended type of annotation for social contracts.
- User
- The individual in search of ethics.
- Mediator
- A mediator agency that acts as a mediator between any two parties
that require mediation. Search engines or registries can act as mediators.
The extension or implementation of widely known policies or schemes will
allow more intelligent search and filtering strategies and will increase
the visibility of the policy implementor to interested parties.
