Author's accepted manuscriptThis paper contributes to the literature on cybersecurity governance by suggesting an approach based on pragmatism. As Jeffrey Sachs in his The Age of Sustainable Development, 2015, reminds us: “The essence of sustainable development in practice is scientifically and morally based problem solving”. Cybersecurity deals with problem solving in complex socio-technical settings where ethics and organizational learning are tightly related. The paper draws on pragmatism because from its earliest formulation, pragmatist thought was anchored to a dual interest in ethics and science. Under this lens, pragmatic ethics cannot exist as a set of rules or principles, but rather requires a cyclical, empirical process whereby ethical principles and context interact to promote justice among stakeholders in the research of reliable solutions during the unravel of critical events. As a result, an Ethically oriented Cybersecurity Approach (ECA) based on Pragmatic Ethical Reasoning (PER) is proposed for managing unexpected critical events when organizations must learn on-the-fly and improve their security profiles.acceptedVersio
