Exploring Macintyre's Virtue Ethics in Relation to Information Systems

There is still surprisingly little explicit consideration of ethics in relation to IS. This paper addresses this relative gap by arguing that MacIntyre’s critique of utilitarianism in bureaucratic organizations with its alternative ‘virtues-goods-practice-institution’ framework offers a fruitful approach for an analysis of ethical concerns relating to information systems. We cast the notion of ‘best practice’, as embodied in an information system, as a central ethical concern. We briefly describe an empirical study of a Customer Relationship Management system implementation reflecting on the ways that MacIntyre’s ethical framework may be a suitable approach towards the ethical analysis of information systems.