Otto / Gräf 3TH1CS

A reinvention of ethics in the digital age?
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-944362-33-5
Verlag: iRights Media
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 270 Seiten

Should we ban war robots or are they something we might want? What can computer games tell us about our morals? Is it OK to love a robot? What is ethical design in the digital world? How do we need to regulate the algorithms that impact our lives? The digital transition puts our ideas about morality to the test, presenting us with new questions in all areas of life: politics, economy, social life, communication, entertainment. In twenty contributions, experts from Europe, America and Asia rise to the challenge of finding answers to some of the new issues confronting us. The authors offer new perspectives on topics like robots for eldercare, autonomous vehicles, personal drones or data ethics. They present their ideas on how we, as a society, can deal with the digital challenges to our ethics and values. Their contributions provide insights into highly topical reflections on what is morally right in our digital era. Above all, they are an invitation to think and to join the discussion.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Otto, Philipp

Gräf, Eike

Leseproben

Digitalization as ethical challenge

Interview with Rafael Capurro

Mr.Capurro, digitalization encompasses—and changes—our everyday lives more and more. Does it also affect our understanding of ethics, developed as it has over centuries? Has something like digital ethics already emerged?

If you understand ethics to be our diehard conventions and practices, then the answer to this question is yes. Those behaviours characterized in Latin as “mores” are not carved in stone, but have over time constantly been subjected to change. We adapt them when our living conditions change.

Given modern-age changes in society, economics, politics, art, science and engineering, the digital revolution is comparable to that which began in 16th century Europe, reaching a summit with the 19th century industrial revolution, and continuing with the scientific, technical, political, economic and cultural upheavals of the 20th century. This change deeply affected the European self-image. No longer was God at the centre of things, but rather the human being. The human being was no longer in God’s image, but was instead an autonomous, self-defining, world-shaping being. He understood himself as a subject relative to everything (himself included) becoming an object of empirically quantifiable research. With this, the ambivalent victory march of modern technology took its course. The subject-object dichotomy shaped the modern European, and made the scientific and technical conquest and exploitation of the world possible. This was not just about using and exploiting nature on the basis of technical innovation, but rather how to rule all peoples politically, economically and culturally. For this, the framework of moral conceptions assumed from the ancient world to the middle ages—and the forms of legal and political legitimation based on them—had to be altered. How are morals possible without religion? How does state violence legitimize itself where there’s no longer a king by God’s grace? How is the relationship between state and church to be understood without the unity of throne and altar? What are the possibilities and limitations of action for the European man when there are no unquestionable, dogmatically decreed commandments and prohibitions from a higher authority? On the basis of what processes and through what institutions are they determined, justified, evaluated and carried out?

In the last twenty years, digitalization and in particular the digital connection of the world have brought about a new anthropological and cultural global revolution that has spread with breath taking speed. Just as the modern Europeans constituted themselves as subjects, so do we (but who are “we”?)—paradoxically expressed—understand ourselves as networked subjects and objects. Through this, questions regarding freedom and autonomy are altered, as indeed they were altered in modern times relating to an independence from state and church heteronomy, and the heteronomy posed by a deterministically understood nature.

Digital ethics in the sense of a critical reflection about a good life in a digitally shaped world had indeed already emerged in the 1940s. At that time, one spoke of computer ethics, often meaning a professional ethics for computer scientists—although it was clear that it in fact concerned the total societal impact of computer technology. The expression “digital ethics” is of course somewhat more recent. I have used it since 2009, with the Institute for Digital Ethics at the Stuttgart University of Media Studies beginning its work in 2014.

The debate concerning information ethics is not merely an academic one, however.

No, the ever-increasing media reports show that there is a total societal discussion underway because digitalization charts and changes our way of life both locally and globally. The expression “ethics” should however be reserved for the philosophical discipline whose object is mores in the sense of experienced customs and habits. Otherwise there is the danger that one confuses the reflection with its object. Well-known examples of this are the economic sciences and the economy. The task of ethics is the problematizing of morals.

By definition, ethics should assist us in making moral decisions. How well does this function in an ever-faster, ever-more opaque digital world?

The manner of assistance that ethics, that is ethical theories and analyses developed in different cultures and epochs, can provide is that of elucidating modes of action and their effects on actors in their particular world. The rich diversity of ethical reflections over two-and-a-half thousand years of Western history show how complex this discipline is. It also demonstrates how different the elucidations are when they uncover prejudice, when they problematize a seemingly clear concept, when they analyse different courses of action and their repercussions, when they are responsive to different perspectives other than that of one’s own language and culture. Above all, they do not lessen the responsibility of the actors when it concerns their moving in one direction or the other, as well as the weighing up of advantages and disadvantages for themselves as well as for other animals (and for nature too).

It is critical that ethics does not lessen anyone’s responsibility to go their own way, or influence what advantages and disadvantages their actions have for their own lives and the lives of others. It does not give you a free pass. This is even more crucial when the relations defining everyone’s life change so rapidly that morals and legal norms suddenly exhibit dysfunctional traits.

When our assumptions and agreements regarding the good life become problematic due to technical or social changes, then it is time for an ethical reflection that provides both the society and the legislator with food for thought. When we’re ill, we are happy to have medical research, good doctors and hospitals to recommend how we should live our lives differently. If we no longer know how to manage the digitazed life, we need well-informed ethical research. You can’t get that at the touch of a button. You need time to think.

Let’s talk about privacy: what are the consequences when businesses, employers, friends and relatives know everything about us? Is our freedom in danger? What are the downsides of too much surveillance?

It always depends on how we define “us”, and what is meant by “our freedom”. Privacy is neither a relict from civilized society, nor is it a hopeless fight against windmills in a restless and consistently data-hungry information society. Rather, it is the relationship between public and private in the sense of an open social game of hiding and revealing oneself. I see this as a constant (with many variations) of all human cultures that is worth analysing in more detail.

We desperately need global rules of fair play for the digital networking of the world, as well as corresponding national and international agencies to ensure compliance with these rules. This can’t happen on a “once and for all” basis because technical developments always throw up new questions. We need different modes and institutions of political dialogue and accompanying academic research centred on ethical and legal questions of the information society. When we speak of private and public, nothing less than the definition of human freedom in the 21st century is on the line.

Today, we post and tweet around the clock. Is the intensive use of social networks and online platforms an expression of the human requirement for recognition?

Without a doubt. But it’s not just that. It appears to me that the opportunities provided by social networks and online platforms often give rise to narcissism, exhibitionism and voyeurism. It’s also very clear that interactive media has given us possibilities of self-expression that formerly didn’t exist. But today’s reality of social media and online platforms is more complex. This is not just due to the use and misuse of personal data, but also to different moral and legal norms that inform these media and their dependence on political, economic, legal and cultural interests and frameworks.

Through analysing the ambivalence of social media in an African context, I established that these networks follow an ethical imperative: uninterrupted communication for all, always! This imperative is only effective when carriers promise not to share (without consent) personal data with third parties—something that, at the latest, Edward Snowden disproved. This apparently total communication leads paradoxically to a situation defined by the American sociologist Sherry Turkle as “alone together”. Human freedom means the freedom to hide or to reveal who we are. One imperative of the “total reveal” is just as inhuman as the “total concealment”.

Obviously, imagining an online life as being separate from physical existence leads to pathological situations. It is very similar to being dependent on drugs. We need ethical and medical research concerning the pathologies of the information age.

According to this, our online life is not separate from the physical world?

It appears evident to me that we’re not talking about two worlds here—one physical and one digital. The digital world network shapes life in the physical world to an ever-larger extent. As an example, just think about the internet of things—TV sets, radios, fridges, surveillance cameras connected to the internet and forming their own networks.

Through the digital interconnection of physical things, they are not what they were before their digital networking. When the ontological mode of things changes, we...