Digital Ethics: Beyond Utilitarian Frameworks

Overview

Digital ethics confronts the moral dimensions of our increasingly technology-mediated lives. While utilitarianism (maximizing aggregate good) often dominates tech ethics discussions, its limitations—struggles with quantifying values like privacy or dignity, justifying harms to minorities for overall benefit, predicting long-term consequences in opaque systems, and potentially excusing exploitation—necessitate broader perspectives. This theme explores richer ethical frameworks, including virtue ethics (Vallor), care ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa), contractualism (Scanlon), and the pharmacological perspective (Stiegler), to address complex digital challenges from AI bias to platform power and digital justice.

Historical Context

Emerging in the mid-20th century (Wiener, Weizenbaum), computer ethics formalized in the 1980s (Moor, Johnson), often using consequentialist analysis. The internet age brought new issues (privacy, IP, online community). The rise of social media, big data, and AI in the 2010s intensified ethical urgency, highlighting the need for frameworks beyond simple utility calculation, leading to renewed interest in virtue, care, duty, and critical theories of technology.

Key Debates

This theme encompasses several interconnected debates:

Ethical Frameworks: Which traditions (virtue, care, deontology, contractualism, critical theory) best illuminate digital moral issues? How can they be integrated?
Character and Flourishing: What "technomoral virtues" (Vallor) are needed to live well with technology? How do digital environments shape character?
Justice and Rights: How should fairness, rights (e.g., to privacy, cognitive liberty), and justice be understood and implemented in digital systems and data governance (Rawls, Scanlon)?
Care and Relationality: How do technologies transform relationships of care? What are our responsibilities for maintaining socio-technical systems and "more-than-human worlds" (Puig de la Bellacasa)?
Technology's Nature: Is technology a neutral tool, or an ambivalent pharmakon (Stiegler) that fundamentally shapes consciousness and requires ongoing critical assessment?
Design and Governance: What ethical principles should guide the design of platforms and AI? How can governance move beyond utility to incorporate justice, care, and respect for autonomy?

Analytic Tradition

Analytic philosophy contributes through conceptual analysis and systematic theory application.

Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues adapts virtue ethics, proposing specific "technomoral virtues" (e.g., honesty, self-control, humility, justice, care, perspective, wisdom) needed to flourish amidst "technosocial opacity."
T.M. Scanlon's contractualism evaluates actions and principles based on whether they could be "reasonably rejected" by those affected, offering a standard for judging digital consent mechanisms, manipulative designs, and algorithmic fairness based on mutual justification.
John Rawls' theory of justice provides principles for assessing the fairness of digital institutions and the distribution of technology's benefits and burdens.
Luciano Floridi's information ethics re-conceptualizes moral subjects as "inforgs" within an "infosphere," extending moral consideration.

Continental Tradition

Continental thought examines how technology shapes subjectivity, power, and ethical life.

Bernard Stiegler's pharmacological perspective views technology as inherently ambivalent (poison/cure). Digital technologies act as "psychotechnologies" that capture attention, shape desire, and can lead to "proletarianization" (loss of savoir) if not carefully managed through therapeutic practices.
María Puig de la Bellacasa's feminist care ethics extends care beyond the human, emphasizing relationality, maintenance, and speculative thinking for navigating complex socio-technical and ecological assemblages ("more-than-human worlds").
Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of the Other prompts questions about responsibility in digitally mediated encounters.
Hans Jonas' imperative of responsibility highlights long-term duties concerning technology's impact on future generations and the planet.

Intersection and Tensions

While analytic approaches often focus on principles, rights, and justifications, continental perspectives emphasize technology's transformative effects on experience, power, and the conditions of ethical possibility. Both critique utilitarianism's limits. Integrating them offers a richer picture: analytic tools clarify what duties or virtues apply, while continental/critical views reveal how technology shapes the context and why certain issues (like attention capture or data colonialism) are ethically charged. Tensions may arise between procedural justification (Scanlon) and the focus on character (Vallor) or systemic critique (Stiegler).

Contemporary Relevance

Developing robust digital ethics is urgent as AI and pervasive computing raise profound questions resisting simple cost-benefit analysis. Issues of AI bias, accountability, platform power, data exploitation, digital well-being, and the future of human agency demand frameworks attentive to virtue, care, justice, and technology's constitutive role. Ethical pluralism, drawing on diverse traditions, is essential for designing and governing technologies that support, rather than undermine, human dignity and flourishing in complex technosocial futures.