Dear All,
Should we keep discussing the Prolegomena on info & ethics or should we
jump into the concrete questions about the contemporary revolution of info
technologies? Apologies for being focused again in the former, hopefully it
will help to produce more interesting answers about the latter...
If ethics is related to a collective dimension of an individual's
"fitness" (within a complex society), and if we suppose that fitness
itself is amenable to formal/informational treatments (or will be in a
foreseeable future), it seems difficult not to conclude on some form of
informational reductionism on ethics. However, I feel in a strong
disagreement with that apparent reductionist conclusion derived from my own
responses to the opening text. So, let me backtrack.
In a complex society, any individual's action may be subject to scrutiny on
very different grounds: say as immoral, unprofitable (non-economic),
unjust, unethical... The "moral" ground is usually understood as very
close to the core of human condition, related to human nature itself (that
"zoe" pointed out by Rafael), and then understood slightly different from
the classical view in philosophy. Religions have been the traditional
providers of the moral sense in almost every society: eg, the very clear
ruling in the Ten Commandments of Christianity. Going to the "economic"
ground, it is highly regimented and abstract, wrapped in strict accounting
procedures (curiously related to the historical origins of numbers,
algebra, symmetry...) and purports a high level of formal abstraction,
notwithstanding its apparent immediateness. Then the "legal system" appears
as another grid, formally structured too, which attempts to make a
procedural "map" of almost any human action, particularly in the situations
amenable to conflict.
Ethics would be different. Ethics implies the realization that none of the
previous grids to map human action has fulfilled its mission globally, in
achieving a "total" vision of the social behavior of the person. Some
concrete actions of a person may be moral, profitable, and legal---but they
may not be ethical after all. In bioethics (or in info ethics) we might
point out very concrete, contemporary cases.
Ethics means that the formal schemes of other disciplinary realms have
failed (either economic, legal, or moral---well, "moral", as least in the
common sense I have taken it, representing the proto-group acceptable
behavior for collective survival, is not necessarily formal after all, but
quite often it has little to say relating a complex social setting).
Overall those regimentations of behavior would have failed to provide
sufficient convergence or "closure" on the social interests. Actually any
human community becomes too complicated and variable to yield its "secrets"
to any bureaucratic, economic, legal, scientific, etc. formulae --am
following J.C. Scott, 1998.
Ethics, then, would explore the "irreducible" residues of the common good
which have not been detected by those other formal grids. Ethics explores
particularly the new phenomena, the new techs, the new problems, the new
achievements, as they impinge on the social fabric... those very events
that will be a matter of legislation and economic ruling in a pretty near
future. But, how could ethics achieve its focus on the unfocussed matters?
How would social collectives dramatize those new strange, unruled,
conflicting events? Drama, poetry, music... would they be a good social
tool in order to feel the unknown, to visualize it, to anticipate it? I
think so.
We are lead again to that discussion on "meaning and art" ... where I
subscribe a good portion of Lauri's dictum weeks ago: "arts are
technologies of ethics". Maybe it could be said differently, but the
exploration direction looks intriguing.
best wishes
Pedro
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