[uoaei]

We should be concerned with those who pretend that historical precedent is a thing when it comes to questions of ethics, indeed anyone who conflates ethics with legalistic frameworks.

IMO the largest barrier to progress today is that too many people think the point of laws is to dictate ethics. This leads them to believe that legal things are good and illegal things are bad, and then you get horribly circular arguments like those above.

[jruohonen]

So privacy is now an ethical question but not a human right?

Historical precedents no longer matter, so we as a humanity can again commit all the atrocities of the past? Lunacy.

Sorry to disappoint you: we ("people") should be especially worried about technologists eager to define what is ethical and trying to overcome laws with their own interpretations. No wonder many companies are constantly in courts because of their "ethics".

Besides, the interplay between ethics and law runs through the whole Western philosophy.

[uoaei]

> So privacy is now an ethical question but not a human right?

Privacy is a human right precisely because of its weight in the question of ethics. I would hazard against playing false-dichotomy games, for they can only be lost, never won. I would say that your error appears to be in giving undue primacy to legal definitions over other kinds as holding some kind of authority. It is true that governments use laws to justify their violent actions but I don't think that gives them any more metaphysical weight over other forms of judgment. (To anticipate a quibble: judgment is inherently metaphysical, to claim metaphysics is irrelevant is to claim opinions are irrelevant and we get nowhere on questions of ethics and rights.)

> Historical precedents no longer matter, so we as a humanity can again commit all the atrocities of the past?

This is such a perversion and misinterpretation of what I said that I'm struggling to see your response as anything but a troll's. Regardless, I will continue.

> we ("people") should be especially worried about technologists eager to define what is ethical and trying to overcome laws with their own interpretations

I agree -- the direction we both seem to be advocating for, then, despite your insistence that we argue about it, is that neither laws nor random technologists can define ethics for the entire society. It must be a bottom-up process of popular, consensual decision-making, as has been demonstrated in the past through mass political (dare I say populist) movements. There is no ethical way for a small group to impose such things on the populace without their input and control in that process.

> the interplay between ethics and law

This is just another variation of the "historical precedent defines ethics" argument, which has already been addressed.

[jruohonen]

> I would say that your error appears to be in giving undue primacy to legal definitions over other kinds as holding some kind of authority.

While I have nothing against ethics as such, it is a reality that digital rights have been advanced only through jurisprudence. I am quite disappointed with technology ethics in particular: despite immense amount of research and advocacy within companies and across society, technology ethics have not achieved anything of practical value.

> It must be a bottom-up process of popular, consensual decision-making, as has been demonstrated in the past through mass political (dare I say populist) movements. There is no ethical way for a small group to impose such things on the populace without their input and control in that process.

That is a long characterization for a single word: democracy.