Looking back at this semester, three things really stuck with me and actually changed how I think, not just what I know for a test.
1. Privacy and Google Street View — legal isn’t the same as okay
Before this module, if you’d asked me whether Google did anything wrong with Street View, I probably would’ve said something like “well, they were in public, so it’s fine.” That’s basically how I think about privacy stuff by default — did they break a law, did people technically agree to it. But working through Floridi’s idea of informational privacy and especially Grimmelmann’s idea of “contextual integrity” kind of messed with that. His point is that just because someone can see you doesn’t mean you agreed to be recorded and put on the internet forever for anyone to search. That sounds obvious now but I honestly hadn’t separated those two things in my head before — “visible” and “fair game” aren’t the same thing at all.
Using virtue ethics instead of just a legal lens changed the question I was asking. Instead of “did they break a rule,” it became “what does this behavior say about the kind of company they are.” Google blurring faces only after people complained, instead of building that in from the start, isn’t a company using good judgment (phronesis, as we kept calling it) — it’s a company doing the minimum and fixing it later when caught.
Takeaway: Going forward I want to stop asking “can I legally justify this” as my main test and start asking “what does doing it this way say about me/us as the ones doing it.” Legality is the floor, not the goal.
2. Manning and whistleblowing — loyalty isn’t really about the chain of command
Going into this one I expected to just pick a side — either Manning was a hero or she broke her oath, end of story. I didn’t expect to actually change my mind mid-paper, but I kind of did. Vandekerckhove’s idea of “rational loyalty” was the thing that flipped it for me: he argues loyalty is owed to an organization’s actual values, not to whoever happens to be above you in the hierarchy. So if the chain of command is covering something up that goes against the values it claims to have, following orders isn’t really loyalty, it’s just self-protection wearing loyalty’s clothes.
Oxley and Wittkower’s stuff on care added to that — loyalty built out of relationships (your unit, your team) is real and matters, but it can’t just override basic obligations to people outside that circle, especially when the in-group itself is acting messed up (like the cockpit audio being almost celebratory after killing an unarmed guy). That reframing let me see Manning’s leak as more loyal to what the military says it stands for than staying silent would’ve been.
That said, I couldn’t just fully sign off on it either. The practical wisdom piece — did she really exhaust other options, was dumping a giant unrelated trove of documents alongside the video really necessary — those are legit weak spots in my own argument and I didn’t want to just wave them away to make my thesis look cleaner.
Takeaway: Being right about the underlying wrong doesn’t automatically mean every part of how you responded was wise. I want to keep those two things separate instead of letting “I was right to be upset” excuse “I handled it perfectly.”
3. Information warfare — I had to apply my own logic to my own side
This is the one that shifted my thinking the most, probably because it made me uncomfortable. My gut reaction before the reading was: foreign countries messing with our elections is obviously bad, and if the US did something similar to another country that’s just… national security, different category. Working through Morkevičius’s framework and actually applying the same utilitarian logic to both sides made that double standard fall apart. If the argument against Russia/China/Iran is that this kind of interference destroys trust and corrupts people’s ability to make real political choices, then that exact same argument has to apply if the US did it too. Writing that sentence felt weird, but I think that’s actually a sign it was worth writing.
The other thing I learned here is that not every argument needs a perfectly clean ending. The realist objection — that just restraining ourselves while everyone else keeps doing it is basically unilateral disarmament — is a real problem and I don’t think I fully solved it in my paper. I used to think a good argument has to tie up every loose end or it’s “weak.” Now I think just admitting “this is a real hole in my argument and here’s my best attempt at an answer” is more honest than pretending everything wraps up neatly.