Before we can decide on moral responses to
specific problems generated by
widespread use of the Internet, we need to address a
more basic question. That
is the question of to what extent, if any, the Internet
demands fundamentally
new moral thinking. This paper examines that question
in the form of an
imaginary debate between the conventionalists, who hold
that existing moral
codes are completely adequate to deal with questions
of Internet morality and
the revolutionaries who hold that new moral principles
are required to deal
with new moral problems that are being generated by this
use of technology.
It is important to state at the outset that I am aware
of just how large is
the task of saying anything useful about Internet morality.
I am passionate
about the need to produce some clear thought in this
area, and equally
passionate about the need to do so from a thoroughly
cross-disciplinary
perspective. However, doing so must inevitably look as
though I have made many
simplistic assumptions within the various constituent
disciplines.
For example, for the philosophically literate, my free
and undefined use of
expressions like 'moral principle' and 'moral precept'
must look as if I have
begged the metaethical questions of 'what is a moral
principle?' and 'what
distinguishes moral judgements from other sorts of judgements?'.
I am aware
that modern metaethics is in a confused condition and
therefore have to
purloin these expressions for the sake of making some
progress. For those who
must have more detail before discussion, I should confess
to being impressed
by the ability of Utilitarianism to produce a clear conclusion
on almost every
question and consider that to render it far superior
to Intuitionism,
Emotivism, and Prescriptivism. In this respect I was
very influenced by R.M.
Hare's apparent late conversion to Utilitariansim (Hare
1979). This does not
mean that I accept the psychological assumptions of classical
Utilitarianism.
I am also impressed by modern social contract theorists,
in particular John
Rawls (Rawls 1972). I do not believe that the exact mix
of these metaethical
approaches has any bearing whatsoever on the following
arguments.
However, there are some metaethical positions which are
in conflict with the
discussion that follows. For example, if someone believes
that morality stems
directly from divine communication and that the application
of human reasoning
to moral questions is a dilution of that communication
- and this is a
commonly held view in some cultures - then they will
find my whole enterprise
here both unnecessary and morally wrong.
Similarly if someone believes that morality is an entirely
personal judgement
and that any attempt to establish common principles is
a manifestation of an
outmoded and oppressive metanarrative, then they will
find they will find my
arguments to be an abuse of power. Such post-modern analyses
of Internet
activity are relatively common and therefore relevant
to the subject at hand.
Obviously I disagree with both the post-modern and religious
metaethical
positions, but to justify this would take another paper
(if not a book).
The technically literate, on the other hand, may be angered
by may free and
undefined use of expressions such as 'widespread Internet
usage' which they
will claim could mean almost anything. I am aware that
the Internet grew from
the military technology of the ARPANET, that the world
wide web was developed
by nuclear physicists in order to enable them to pass
papers to each other.
Eventually these rather obscure technologies found a 'killer
application' in
the form of pornography, and usage of the web became
dominated by bored and
lonely teenagers and academics, almost all in the United
States. Only recently
have commercial organizations moved towards using the
web and with extremely
mixed results.
This strange and divergent mix of users means that one
can in practice make
almost any claim about what the Internet is being used
for and get evidence in
the form of a long list of URL's to support it. Worse,
the fast growth over
the past five years means that almost any speculation
about the future use of
the Internet can be made and supported. To pick an example,
and there are many
available, Margaret Wertheim, in a recent book, (Wertheim
1999) examines the
argument that use of the Internet has replaced the concept
of heaven in
Western religious thinking.
In spite of all these difficulties, it is clear that there
has been, in recent
years, more widespread and general usage of the Internet.
It is also far from
unreasonable to suggest that we need to develop some
general moral responses
to a number of consequent problems. These include, among
many others, already
existing problems like the use of the Internet to deliver
pornographic and
racist material; foreseeable problems such as the use
of the Internet as the
primary form of communication in international criminal
and terrorist
activities; and possible future developments such as
the replacement of
physical communities by virtual communities widely dispersed
in physical
space.
It would be convenient to be able to generate a comprehensive
list of
prescriptions and proscriptions along the lines of: 'Thou
shalt not post or
link to false information on thy web site' Similarly,
it would be convenient
to be able offer legislators a complete list of the required
laws and
respectfully wait for them to be enacted.
This convenient scenario does not seem to be in prospect,
however. Agreement
that things need to be done is not matched by agreement
over what exactly
should be done, or in some cases, by agreement that anything
at all ought to
be done. Questions such as how to resolve the competing
needs for privacy with
freedom of access to information and freedom of speech
with protection from
offensive material seem to generate a great deal of heat.
Some writers on the
subject even tend towards the view that any form of restriction
on the
technology at this stage is equivalent to the 'red flag
act' of British
motoring history. Such debates are further confused by
the need to secure
international and cross-cultural agreement and the open-ended
nature of
questions of enforcement.
Although I can offer no simple step to bring about the
convenient scenario, it
may help to dig deeper into the reasons for these difficulties.
One of the
most important reasons for this difficulty is the difficulty
in getting to
clear and consistent moral responses to the sorts of
phenomena that we observe
in contemporary Internet usage. (The problems of possible
future Internet
usage are correspondingly greater of course.)
In order to clarify these questions we can pose a debate
between two competing
groups of moralists. This should not be taken to imply
that such groups can be
readily identified, but rather that this division captures
an important part
of the debate about moral responses to Internet activity.
We may style the
groups: conventionalists and revolutionaries.
The conventialists claim is roughly that our moral response
to all Internet
activities can, at least in principle, be understood
and responded to under
existing moral theories. The revolutionaries claim, in
contradiction, is that
Internet usage poses problems of such novelty that existing
moral theories
are inadequate and that total replacement or substantial
modification is
required. When these claims are examined in detail, it
can be seen that both
have substantial arguments in their favour.
I shall further assume that each of these views subsumes
a further
prescriptive element. That is, that the conventionalists,
for example, also
claim that existing moral theories ought
to be employed to deal with moral
problems raised by Internet usage, and the revolutionaries
that they ought
not. It would be logically possible to be, for
example, both a descriptive
revolutionary and a prescriptive conventionalist or vice
versa, but these
seem rather perverse positions.
One of the most powerful arguments in favour of the
conventionalist position
might be called 'technological transparency'. A proponent
of this argument
would stress the unimportance of technological developments
to fundamental
moral arguments. There is no moral difference
between the wrongness of
injuring someone with a horse-drawn vehicle and injuring
them in a similar
fashion with a modern motor car. The wrongness of this
act stems from its
human consequences, not from the technological means
by which it is performed.
The technology in this case may be relevant to moral
discussion in that it may
provide a greater number of opportunities for immoral
acts to a greater number
of people, but the wrongness of the act is unaffected
by the nature of the
technology used to perform it. in short the technology
is transparent with
respect to the rightness or wrongness of what it can
be used to do. These
moral matters should be judged entirely on human consequences.
To move to an area closer to that of the Internet, consider
a possible moral
debate about stealing by means of networked computers.
In particular, let us
see how the conventionalist might approach an extended
discussion about the
morality of stealing from someone by hacking into their
bank account and using
a computer program to deduct small amounts of money which,
initially at least,
go unnoticed. This is, in fact, a familiar form of computer
crime, rejoicing
in the epithet 'salami method'.
To be a revolutionary about this would entail claiming
that it is an entirely
new form of crime and that its moral consequences are,
to a large extent,
dependent on its newness. The conventionalist would claim
that the technology
is transparent and a distraction from the moral debate.
In this case, the
conventionalist would undoubtedly claim that stealing
in this computer-based
fashion is morally no different from stealing by more
familiar methods.
A powerful way of supporting this conventionalist claim
would be to consider
certain intermediate cases. If we allow that the non-technological
counterpart
of 'salami method hacking' might be to routinely and
regularly remove small
amounts of cash from an unattended bag of money, then
we can look at various
ways of doing this. If, for example, the thief were unable
to enter the room
containing the bag and therefore used a long pole with
a grab to remove the
money, this would be of no consequence to the wrongness
of the act. We might
even fancifully imagine a thief training a small monkey
to enter the room and
remove the small amounts of cash. If we ignore questions
about the potential
mistreatment of animals, this method of removing the
cash would seem equally
wrong. Finally in the computer case, we have a technological
device similar in
some respects to the trained monkey and in some others
to the long pole, but
what is important for the conventionalist is that no
moral thresholds have
been crossed by consideration of these different means
of theft. The wrongness
of the act stems primarily from its being the willful
removal of some other
person's property. If we allow that this is morally wrong
then the
technological methods used to perform the act are completely
transparent with
respect to moral debate.
This point has been developed at length, because it is
necessary to establish
that technological transparency is a very powerful argument.
Indeed,
in the case of theft by means of a computer program,
it seems almost
unassailable. The revolutionary might introduce distracting
arguments about
differing degrees of opportunity and the level of technical
expertise
required, but these are clearly irrelevant to the moral
question. In the case
of theft by means of a computer program the conventionalist
should, ceteris
paribus, easily win the debate.
There are, however, arguments that the revolutionary might
make against the
notion of technological transparency in other areas of
new technology. These
we may, in general, style 'emergence'. Thus the revolutionary
would assert
that although individual technological changes in themselves
bring about no
step change in the moral consequences of a given action,
eventually there may
emerge from these small developments a new combination
which represents such
a radical change that our moral responses should change.
The fact that there
is no such emergence in the case of computer theft, does
not entail that this
sort of emergence might not happen elsewhere in new technology.
As an example of emergence the revolutionary might cite
the notion of 'virtual
crime'. This is a new area and definitions may be contentious,
but let us
assume that the revolutionary has in mind certain types
of computer-based
actions directed towards a virtual representative of
an individual (Note 1).
The most usually discussed cases involve such things
as the rape, imprisonment
or murder of an individual's representation within a
multi-user domain (MUD)
or similar contrivance within a computer or several computers
(ref). In such a
case the conventionalist will find it much harder to
make the argument from
technological transparency, because in this particular
example, technological
transparency would seem to impose moral conditions that
are too strong. To say
that virtual rape is equivalent to physical rape is unreasonable,
for the
wrongness of physical rape is contingent, in a large
part, on its physical
nature. On the other hand, the conventionalist would
be unlikely to argue that
the virtual nature of the offence makes it no offence
at all, since it involves at
least some amount of human suffering.
In the case of virtual crimes, the conventionalist is
likely to lose the
argument if she relies solely on the argument from technological
transparency.
It would seem that the revolutionary's claim that the
technology had allowed a
new class of moral offence to emerge would be difficult
to counter. The
revolutionary would appear to be correct in asserting
that virtual crime formed a
new class of crime that was clearly wrong, yet to a different
degree to (and
perhaps also wrong in a different way from) its physical
counterpart.
Emergence is not a threat to comventionalism in general,
however it does show
that the argument from technological transparency cannot
be applied in all
cases. The interesting question then becomes to what
extent can the competing
arguments of technological transparency and emergence
be applied in the
particular area of Internet usage.
The argument from technological transparency in the case
of the Internet might
run something like: All the Internet actually consists
of is people
communicating with each other. No matter how sophisticated
the technology, the
only morally relevant way to view Internet usage is as
communication between
humans. To the extent that we already have an elaborate
set of moral
principles dealing with human communication, we do not
need any extension or
alteration to deal with the Internet. For example, we
understand that lying is
wrong when it involves uttering false statements about
someone in a public
setting such as during a legal trial. We understand that
the wrongness of
this also applies in the case where the false statements
are made by being
printed as words on paper which is then circulated widely,
as in the case of a
newspaper. In the case of the Internet the false statements
might be made by
being made available in electronic form within the accessible
portion of a
computer, but this makes no moral difference. The wrongness
is independent of
the technology used to perform the act.
In this context the emergence argument would stress the
way in which changes
in communication technology have brought about tremendous
social changes. The
development of printing and of television would be obvious
examples. One of
the things that undoubtedly emerged from the introduction
of these
communication technologies was widespread social change.
However, the claim
that this entailed or should have entailed widespread
moral change needs
further support. One form of further support might come
from examining the
relationship between communication technology and various
forms of authority.
The effect of the development of printing technology
in Northern Europe from
about 1452 onwards was manifest primarily in terms of
conflict with the Roman
Church which controlled the flow of information at the
time (Note 2). The
Internet might well have a similar effect, but this alone
has no moral
significance unless it is supported by further arguments.
The most important
of these would be that widespread changes in authority,
particularly with
respect to the flow of information, necessarily involve
changes in moral
codes.
The core of the revolutionary's case here lies in the
invocation of necessity
in the preceding sentence. If the conventionalist allows
a necessary
relationship between change in authority controling the
flow of information
and change in moral precepts, then the revolutionary's
case is almost
trivially true. It is contingent only upon establishing
the fact that
widespread Intenet usage is a challenge to the existing
controls over
information flow. Although this might be challenged,
it seems, on the whole, a
relatively justified empirical claim.
It is much more likely that the conventionalist will refuse
to accept that
there is a necessary connection between changes in authority
and changes in
moral precepts. This may be based on a belief that moral
precepts have a
greater permanence than human institutions. If so we
have reached an impasse,
for the revolutionary case cannot be made at all against
the absolute
insistence that human activity is incapable of changing
moral precepts.
However, this is a highly unintersting claim that simply
makes conventionalism
true by fiat. If the conventionalist does not adopt the
absolute position,
then the argument depends upon whether or not this particular
change in human
activity - widespread Internet usage - is a member of
the class of changes
which can cause changes in moral precepts. This, of course,
was the point at
issue at the outset.
Although both technological transparency and emergence
are powerful arguments
it seems that neither have the ability to deliver a knock-out
blow to the
opposition. Both arguments work better in some contexts
and more poorly in
others. This means that a great deal depends upon exactly
how we describe the
various activities which constitute 'widespread Internet
usage'. With the
debate more or less a draw so far, we can consider further
arguments which
might be deployed.
At this point in the imagined debate both conventionalist
and revolutionary
are likely to resort to prescriptive arguments. If arguments
such as
technological transparency and emergence afford no clear
way to distinguish
one side from the other, what might be made of the moral
consequences of
adopting either the revolutionary or conventionalist
view? These are
prescriptive arguments because they derive their force
not from consideration
of whether or not widespread Internet usage will change
moral precepts, but
rather whether or not it ought to change them.
When it comes to prescriptive arguments, the conventionalist
has a strong
opening move. This might be stated as the principle of
'no change without good
reason'. There is no point in having or discussing moral
precepts if they are
to be modified or abandoned at every turn of events.
If it is possible,
therefore, to deal with Intenet usage under existing
moral precepts, we should
so deal. It is up to the revolutionary to show that there
is something to be
gained, in moral terms, by any change.
The conventionalist might challenge the entire class of
moral arguments
implied by the revolutionary's position. If something
extraneous to morality,
such as new technology, is to be allowed to change fundamental
moral precepts,
then these precepts, as held by the revolutionary, must
be too ephemeral to
count as moral precepts. However, this is another statement
of the absolute
position which led to the impasse at the end of the last
section. A more
moderate version of this argument might allow that moral
precepts can and
should change over time, but stipulate requirements that
preclude the
possibility of Internet usage bringing about such a change.
This might well be
something like the claim that moral precepts should change
only for moral
reasons. The use of technology, no matter how novel,
does not, prima facie,
constitute such moral reasons.
As has been seen, there is little point in the revolutionary
discussing the
absolute conventionalist position. Let us, therefore,
consider what responses
she might make to the moderate conventionalist position.
The conventionalist
will have to allow, at least the possibility, that usage
of new technologies
should change moral precepts in those cases where that
usage is sufficiently
morally significant. If this moderate position is not
to be simply the
absolute position in disguise, then the criteria of moral
significance will
have to allow the possibility that the area under debate
- Intenet usage -
might meet them. The moderate conventionalist insists
that it does not, rather
than that it cannot.
The revolutionary has to demonstrate that widespread Internet
usage is morally
significant to whatever degree the conventionalist requires.
However, as we
have seen, the conventionalist cannot set impossibly
high criteria without
falling into the trap of adopting absolute conventionalism.
It seems that the
revolutionary, if she picks her examples carefully, can
meet these strong
conventionalist arguments and perhaps even triumph.
The strongest example would seem to me to be the formation
of virtual
communities, united by their shared interests and or
views rather than by the
geographical restrictions on physical communities. Now
the formation of any
one particular such virtual community may or may not
be morally significant to
the degree required by the argument. However, the increasing
tendency for many
such communities to form, fostered by the technology
of the Internet, is an
example which it is difficult for the conventionalist
to resist.
As with virtual crime, virtual communities are not equivalent
to physical
communities. In particular, they do not fall under modes
of authority based on
physical boundaries. This might be a temporary situation
- global authority
was required and provided in, for example, aviation.(ref),
but it might well be morally
significant. There are other differences too: in particular
that one becomes a
member of a virtual community entirely by choice and
(as far as I know) can
choose to leave it at any time. This is most certainly
not the case of certain
physical communities. This example has many elements
that might pass the
conventionalist's criteria for moral significance. The
notion of community and
the importance of free choice are familiar components
of moral debate. It
seems to me an area where the revolutionary should win.
What can be safely concluded is that neither conventionalist
nor revolutionary
is adopting a weak or absurd position. It is to be hoped
that posing the
debate like this has helped to reveals the hidden agendas
of both sides. This
is particularly important where the debate overlaps with
questions about
authority over the flow of information.
In the end, the honours must go to the revolutionaries.
As we have seen, they
need to pick an area which helps their case. They also
need to compell the
conventionalists to accept criteria of moral significance
which their chosen
area can meet. However, neither of these things
are strctly impossible. Having
established that we should be prepared to revise moral
precepts to meet at
least one problem area thrown up by Internet usage, we
can look at the other
problems with this recognition in mind. The principle
of no change without
good reason still applies, but we have to accept that
there may sometimes be
good reason.
References
Hare J.M. (1979) 'What is Wrong with Slavery?' Philosophy
and Public Affairs,
Vol. 8, n.2., Winter 1979
Rawls J (1970) A Theory of Justice, OUP
Wertheim, M. (1999) The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
Whitby, B. (1996) Reflections on AI, Intellect pp.106-116