Charles Ess - Digital Media Ethics

Lastly, our assumptions regarding identity and selfhood have immediate significance for how we begin to think about the nature of privacy – specifically, if what we feel and think we need to protect is a more individual and/or more shared or collective sense of privacy ( chapter 2). Similar questions hold for our understandings of who should have – and should not have – access to our intellectual property: i.e., whether we hold to more traditional (meaning, more individual and exclusive ) conceptions of property, so that we transfer rights to its use to others only in exchange for monetary or other sorts of considerations, or to more inclusive notions of property, e.g. as an inclusive good to be shared freely, as we routinely do when giving copies of our favorite music and films to friends, for example ( chapter 3). By the same token, our underlying notions of selfhood and identity will prove critical to our analyses of the issues surrounding friendship, death online, and democracy ( chapter 4) and those evoked by pornography and violence in digital environments, including sexbots ( chapter 5).

At first glance, developing such an ethics would seem to be an impossible task. First of all, digital media often present us with strikingly new sorts of interactions with one another. So it is not always clear whether – and, if so, then how – ethical guidelines and approaches already in place (and comparatively well established) for traditional media would apply. But again, as emphasized in the term “post-digital,” digital media remain analogue media in essential ways – the music arriving at our ears remains analogue, etc. And so the lifeworlds of human experience that digital media now increasingly define remain connected with the analogue lifeworlds of earlier generations and cultures: this means that there remain important continuities with earlier ethical experience and reflection as well.

In addition, digital media as global media thus force us to confront culturally variable views – regarding not simply basic ethical norms and practices but, more fundamentally, how ethics is to be done. In particular, we will see that non-Western views – represented in this volume by Confucian, Buddhist, and African perspectives – challenge traditional Western notions of the primary importance of the individual, and thereby Western understandings of ethical responsibility as primarily individual responsibility. That is, while we in the West recognize that multiple factors can come into play in influencing an individual’s decision – e.g., to tell the truth in the face of strong pressures to lie, to violate another’s rights in some way, etc. – we generally hold individuals responsible for their actions, as the individual agent who both makes decisions and acts independently of others. But, these days, our interactions with one another predominantly take place via digital media and networks. This means, more specifically, that multiple actors and agents – not only multiple humans (including software designers as well as users) but also multiple computers, networks, bots, etc. – must work together to make specific acts (both beneficent and harmful) possible. Hence, in parallel with the distribution of information via networks, our ethical responsibility may be more accurately understood in terms of a distributed responsibility (Simon 2015). That is, ethical responsibility for our various actions via digital media and networks is “stretched” across the network. This understanding of distributed responsibility is, in fact, not an entirely new idea; rather, it is one shared with both pre-modern Western philosophies and religions and multiple philosophies and religions around the globe.

Certainly, this is a Very Good Thing: it suggests important ethical norms and practices that can be shared among the multiple cultures and peoples now brought into digital communication with one another. But it represents a major challenge, especially, to Western thinkers used to understanding ethical responsibility in primarily individualistic terms.

These challenges are certainly daunting. Indeed, when we first begin to grapple with digital media ethics, especially with a view toward incorporating a range of global perspectives and changing notions of selfhood and responsibility, the tasks before us may seem to be overwhelming and perhaps simply futile. But both our collective experience with earlier technological developments and more recent experience in the domain of information and computing ethics (ICE) suggest that, despite the considerable challenges of developing new ethical frameworks for new technologies, we are nonetheless able to do so. Indeed, this experience provides us with a number of examples of ethical resolutions that “work” both globally (as they involve discerning shared norms and understandings) and locally (as they further involve developing ways of interpreting and applying shared norms in specific cultural contexts – and thereby preserving the distinctive ethical differences that define diverse cultural identities).

As a primary example: the European Union has drawn up and now implemented more rigorous privacy protections than were defined under previous data regulations (GDPR 2016; Berbers et al. 2018). In 2015, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) established an Ethics Advisory Group, assigned to develop a “new digital ethics” to help guide the specific implementations of the GDPR, including sustaining the rigorous EU privacy protections vis-à-vis the emerging Internet of Things and growing uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This new digital ethics, however, turns squarely on two ethical frameworks we have begun to explore here – namely, deontology (roughly, an insistence on human autonomy and thereby basic rights, including the right to privacy) and virtue ethics (briefly, a focus on achieving good lives of flourishing through the development of our best capacities). For example, the EDPS Ethics Advisory Group (EAG) foregrounds the central importance of autonomy and freedom, including as these are grounded in the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant (Burgess et al. 2018, 16). Similarly, both the EAG report and the more philosophical account of the key ethical pillars of a “Good AI Society” (Floridi et al. 2018, 689f.) foreground the central aims of virtue ethics – namely, flourishing, well-being, and good lives (Burgess et al. 2018, 21; Floridi et al. 2018, 690f.). At the same time, these ethical frameworks are (also) applied in a pluralistic fashion. So the EAG asserts that basic norms and values – such as autonomy, dignity, equality, and so on – are both central “to the European project” (Burgess et al. 2018, 16). Indeed, these are claimed to be universal – while recognizing that “these values must be understood and implemented in the social, cultural, political, economic and not least, technological contexts in which the crucial link between personal data and personal experience is made” (Burgess et al. 2018, 9).

Similar comments hold for the long-term experience of the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR’s) development of internet research ethics guidelines since 2000 (Ess 2017b). Taken together, these examples suggest that digital media ethics – as likewise requiring us to address the ethical dimensions evoked by developing new technologies, including how these implicate diverse cultural norms and traditions – is nonetheless a doable project.

Moreover: extensive evidence argues that with few exceptions, as enculturated human beings, we are already deeply ethical (at least by the time you are reading a book such as this). In Aristotelian terms, you are already experienced with confronting ethical difficulties; you are already equipped with important foundations and, most importantly, phronēsis as a central skill of ethical judgment (more on this below). Be of good courage!