The Need for Cyber Ethics

The cyber world has become a most important part of our everyday lives. We spend an increasingly significant portion of our lives in it and use it to communicate with friends, acquaintances, loved ones, and business associates. We make use of our computers and Internet connectivity to look for and purchase all kinds of goods and services. We use the web and all its powerful resources to educate ourselves and to gain knowledge. We are able to look for, join and keep up with special interest groups and to discuss topics of interest to us. We research serious as well as mundane issues on line. In summary, cyberspace has become an interactive world that many of us have fully integrated into our lives. There is dark side to this phenomenon. The ease and anonymity by which we are able to perform all and many more of these feats of contact and access with an entire universe of places and people have created a dilemma: the need of cyber ethics.
Ethics is a branch of philosophy that deals with what is considered to be right or wrong. Definitions of ethics have been widely proposed, such as “codes of morals of a particular profession”, “the standards of conduct of a given profession”, “agreement among people to do the right and to avoid wrong”. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines ethics as “the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation”. In more simple words, it is the study of what is right to do in a given situation, and what we ought to do. It is important to note that what is unethical is not necessarily illegal. In our everyday life, many individuals and organizations faced with common ethical problems. There have been developments in biology and cybernetics that lead to a comprehensive theory of morality in which the rational nature of ethics can more easily be explained. Not only can the rise of ethical systems be linked to biological concepts, but ethics can be tied to mathematical concepts as well by way of cybernetic