Digital Morality

I am a huge etymology nerd.  I think the stories behind how our words evolved and the meanings they have taken on over the centuries are deeply fascinating. So naturally I was disappointed when the chapter from Ethics and Moral Reasoning blew right by one of my favorite bits of etymology with only a passing comment.  Our words “ethics” and “morals” come from two different languages – Greek and Latin, respectively – but the roots of the words both mean “habit” or “custom.”

I grew up hearing about morals as supernatural, coming to us straight from the mouth of God.  I quickly learned that there is no single, magical list of moral imperatives for every human ever born.  Morality and ethics are deeply tied to specifics of culture – the etymology of the words suggest it, and research proves it.  The Pew survey on moral acceptability clearly shows that different cultures have different ideas of what is morally right or wrong, or even what issues involve morality at all.  Every culture has habits and customs of thought, often leading to different conclusions about morality.

Nobody needs me to summarize cultural relativism for them. Whether or not moral absolutes do or should exist is a rabbit hole I don’t intend to dive down at the moment.  What interests me most about the texts we read this week is this: if morals and ethics are part of a culture, does that apply to digital culture, too?

At this point in the semester, I’m not even sure I can put together a clear definition of “digital culture,” but let’s say on its most basic level, the phrase means “how people act and interact across electronic media.”  So is there morality out there on the web?  Is there a code of online ethics?

I’m not sure.  On one hand, parts of the digital world are largely amoral by traditional definitions.  There are many dark corners of the internet, where nobody bats an eye at child pornography, human trafficking, the fetishization of extreme violence, and more.  Anonymity and a lack of personal accountability mean the only community guideline is “don’t get caught.”

But there are other parts of the internet which are almost aggressively moral – the rise of public shaming, for example.  In Adam Grant’s piece on raising a moral child, I couldn’t help thinking of Justine Sacco when Grant described the distinction between “shame” and “guilt.”  In the digital world, it is often seen as morally right to make someone feel shame - that deep sense of worthlessness which Grant suggests is destructive and counterproductive - as punishment for something inappropriate.  This, too, may be related to the lack of personal accountability online – shaming someone is a lot easier to view as right if you don’t have to share relationship or community with that person.

I wonder if that interpersonal distance - anonymity, lack of face-to-face interaction - can ever allow for digital culture to develop its own fully-formed set of ethics.