[peta.org] [goveg.com] [animalactivist.com ]

Status

• XSD Schema: early planning
• Software: early planning

Project Pages

• savannah ESP project administration

This project has the goal to allow people to describe their personal ethics in more detail and also allow to describe the development of their personal ethics over time.

Idea

• Ethical consumerism: What policies do I require from vendors and producers?
• Social ethics: What social services do I support and how?
• Income and property limits: How much money is enough for me?
• Time-sharing ethics: How much payed work is enough for me?
• Revenue ethics: What sources of incoming do I consider ethical/unethical and why?
• Investment ethics: What investments do I consider ethical/unethical and why?
• Donation ethics: How much do I donate, for what purposes and why?
• Memberships: What (ethically motivated) organisations am I a member of and why?
• Qualifications/Participations/Certifications: What (ethically motivated) qualifications do I have?
  (e.g. voluntary social year or voluntary ecological year)
• Web of trust: What are my criteria for signing a PEER trust certificate?
• Private ethics: What private behaviours do I reject as ethical/unethical and why?
  • What advantages do I consider explicitly fair advantages and why?
    • To what degree am I willing to exploit these advantages?
  • What advantages do I consider explicitly unfair advantages and why?
    • What measures do I employ to prevent exploitation of unfair advantages by myself and others?
• Background: What ideas or experiences motivate my ethical stance?
• Ethical goals: What influence could my ethics have, assuming a wider audience followed my example? Why is that desirable?
• Goals in life: What are my personal goals and why? Why is that desirable? What goals do I refrain from?
• Lifelong education: How do I educate myself? What relevant publications do I read? What and where do I teach?

PEER will allow to describe personal ethics with self-written journal entries and at the same time allow to approximate personal ethics with standardized policies, similar to ESP policies. The latter can be used to approximate the personal ethical stance with more widely accepted and, possibly, weaker positions.

A mechanism in the PEER web of trust could be that people who vouch for somebody else's integrity should generally be available to mediate or discuss a problem in case a third party puts doubt on that person's integrity. People who apply bad judgement or prejudices in a situation like that may find that their own peers revoke their signatures. This may sound like a modified social engineering scenario but it is something entirely different when people are free to choose their peers and thereby actually invite critics to contact them and use them as mediators in case of dispute: You are free to invite people to defend your integrity against people who doubt your integrity and their motiviation to be fair towards third parties is their own integrity. Putting this information into static, public and digitally signed certificates prevents anybody from expressing inconsistent views to different people or in different circles of society. I'm not quite sure if this idea is a bug or a feature but if you have an opinion on that I'd be glad to hear it (Bernhard.Fastenrath@arcor.de).

General rules could be that a single person shouldn't sign too many certificates (maybe with a maximum of 100), not sign certificates of people who are not or no longer in close contact with him or her and allow certificates to expire after, at most, ten years. A person should try to get between 5 and 10 signatures and also try to get certificates from membership organizations that are willing to participate with mediators. Giving new signatures to persons who already had signatures should require some validation:

• Why have previous certificate(s) been invalidated and how often does this person require signatures?
  • Reason: This is to prevent careless handling of certificates.
• Does the new certificate properly refer to the previous certificate and explain why the old certificate has been invalidated?
  • Reason: This is to prevent frequently changing identities.
• Does this person have any other relevant digital identities which are known to the signer but not referred to by the new certificate?
  • Reason: This is to bind together different digital signature standards.

Examples for personal ethical policies:

• PETA's Pledge 2B Veg.
• Lessor policy (to allow an understanding between lessee and lessor that can be specified as a search criteria for lodging search engines).
• Car Sharing/Car Pool Policy (a policy to prefer car pools and/or car sharing).
• Neighbourly Help Policy (a policy that advertises general willingness to be helpful to neighbours, which can be helpful in environments where neighbours do not necessarily know each other or towards new neighbours).
• Mediator Policy (a policy that advertises general willingness to act as a mediator).

Questions for analyzing personal ethics:

• What are the ethical positions taken?
  • What are the ethical positions taken in the past?
• When did somebody start a journal?
• How often does the journal change?
  • How are changes in position explained?
• What policies are referred to?
• Who signed the journal and what are their ethics?
• Are there any annotations to the journal?
  • What are their statements?
  • What is their individual credibility?

Network Neighborhood

• Friend2Friend
• xdi.org

• Augmented Social Network
• Trust metric

Authors

• Bernhard Fastenrath