It is my philosophical hypothesis that one thing always stays true about human ethics .The fundamental conditions of humanity, and thereby the ethics it chooses to abide by, are universal and unchanging across time.Keeping this baseline in mind, we look at the manner of which technology changes the display of human ethics, not necessarily the ethics themselves. To demonstrate this, we will investigate the effects of anonymity on human ethics. A core value of the internet is that an individual can be who they choose to be, and thereby have a limited accountability for their words and actions. However the idea of anonymity effecting human ethics is far older than the concept of the internet and truly understand it we must look to ancient Greece.
In the year 360 BCE. Plato wrote a crucial piece of philosophical literature entitled “Republic.” Here he investigates whether or not a man can be ethically righteous enough that he could resist the temptation to perform any act while possessing anonymity. He suggested that our morals and ethics are a societal product, and thus when the societal pressure is removed morals and ethics vanish like smoke.
“For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.”— Plato's “Republic”, 360 BCE
This lack of accountability altering human behavior has become a reality through the invention of the internet, demonstrating this everlasting flaw in human ethics on a wide scale. Like Plato's protagonist, and Frodo Baggins, our culture has become determined to hold on to this anonymity, as shown by what happens when a massively popular online game attempts to take that anonymity away. Technology may not be the cause of this ethical principle in humanity, but it is the means for the behavior to occur. This leaves us with the question of why human ethics are constructed in this fashion, and more so, what happens when people are aloud to act freely on these impulses. We shall dive further into the effects of anonymity next week, exploring how strongly individuals will fight to protect their anonymity.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30zhuo.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15257832
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/07/world_of_warcraft_real_names.html
http://blog.iternalnetworks.com/2011/anonymity-on-the-internet/
No comments:
Post a Comment