Ethics Final Project - first draft

Situation: Congress votes to overturn rules created by the FCC requiring that broadband providers receive permission before collecting data on a user’s online activities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/technology/congress-votes-to-overturn-obama-era-online-privacy-rules.html?_r=1

Claim: I believe this is an unethical decision

Argument: This decision clearly indicates that capitalism is more important than protecting constituents and politicians are in the pockets of big business. The statement that the FCC's rules would put broadband providers "at a disadvantage relative to internet companies like Google and Netflix" further demonstrates that the right to make money is more important than a person's right to privacy.

Principle: The underlying principle of my argument is that the government is supposed to protect the public from harm and make concerted efforts to secure their well-being.  Maintaining the new FCC rules would have given consumers the power to stop such companies from making money off their private information but this decision puts people in harm’s way by exposing their data to be sold to the highest bidder.

Contextualization:

http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3172&context=dlj

Philosopher Steven Heyman, in his article The First Duty of Government: Protection, Liberty and the Fourteenth Amendment, argues that the founders of our government believed protection is the primary purpose of government (521).  Heyman demonstrates that early Americans were influenced by British concepts of common law and Social Contract Theory.  Social Contract theory is the belief that “society is formed to obtain the advantages of association by others” (517).  Hence the idea that the role of government is to protect the people in their personal liberty, personal security, and rights of private property became an important concept in American Constitutionalism (521,544).  As States developed their own constitutions, they declared that “government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people (VA Declaration of Rights)” (523).  States even began to establish police forces to ensure the protection of the people against acts of violence.  This concept of the government’s role in the protection of its citizens is at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Heyman effectively establishes that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment believed the government’s primary purpose is to protect the people but that the States had failed to do so, therefore requiring its inclusion in the Federal Constitution (542).   Heyman writes, “[u]nder the original Constitution, the responsibility for protecting life, liberty, and property was left largely to the states”, but that the “history of slavery and suppression in the South before the [Civil] War, together with the torrent of violence after…convinced the Thirty-Ninth Congress that states could not be relied upon to protect the rights of all persons” (571).  

The government has interfered in commerce before to protect the people by prohibiting Monopolies and allowing the establishment of unions to protect the rights of workers.  A precedent has already been made that the government’s job is to protect the people; therefore the idea that the FCC was overstepping their bounds by establishing rules for broadband companies is outrageous.  The FCC was doing its job and Congress should be ashamed that they put Capitalism before the security of its citizens.