Although virtue ethics has received attention in computer and information ethics before (e.g., Grodzinsky 1999), the emphasis in previous discussion has been on virtue ethics as a means to instil moral values and behaviours in computer professionals and computer users through character formation.   In this paper, I want to take a different approach that emphasises individual human flourishing – although moral values and behaviours will also be discussed in the context of this approach.   I want to investigate to what extent virtue ethics can ground a conception of the good life and, correspondingly, the good society, in relation to uses of information technology and new media.

This paper forms part of a wider research project entitled Evaluating the Cultural Quality of New Media: Towards and Integrated Philosophy of Human-Media Relations, funded by NWO (Netherlands) and hosted by the University of Twente in The Netherlands. The project’s key aim is the development of a framework for a normative analysis of new media culture, paying particular attention to notions of ‘the good life’ and ‘the good society’. The idea is to use recent work from both philosophy and science and technology studies to improve upon currently available – and somewhat limited – accounts and assessments of the relative ‘goodness’, ‘badness’, ‘harmfulness’, and ‘benefits’ implicated in new media such as the Internet, video games, and virtual reality (Brey, forthcoming).

            The question of what a good life consists in has been asked in philosophy since at least Plato and Aristotle.   Yet, the question has not often been asked in relation to the major changes that have been occurring in modern societies, where people adopt lifestyles that are very different from those in traditional societies.   In particular, it has not been asked often in relation to the emergence of a new media culture and information society, which have brought very significant changes in human practices and ways of living.   Little work has been done in computer and information ethics on how we can normatively evaluate the relation between particular forms and uses of information media and particular conceptions of the good life.  

In this paper, I aim to critically examine one approach that promises to make such normative evaluations possible: Virtue Ethics.   The key questions that will be asked are: (1) Which available accounts exist within ethics that may be analysed as to their potential role in developing accounts of ‘the good life’ and ‘the good society’ in relation to new media culture? (2) On which grounds might it be feasible to posit Virtue Ethics as a potentially superior candidate for such accounts, and (3) on which grounds might such a suggestion be critiqued?

Two specific reasons present themselves at inception in support of positing Virtue Ethics as a particular object of inquiry in the context of this paper. First, Virtue Ethics has recently experienced a novel degree of academic and policy-related attention in contemporary and ongoing work in the fields of political philosophy, freedom and development studies, media and culture research, and economics. Originally revived and re-introduced into moral philosophy by Elisabeth Anscombe around 1958, Virtue Ethics is currently a central element in the work of, for instance, Nussbaum, Sen, Foot, and Solomon. Where it does not form a fundamental part of inquiry it is nevertheless receiving critical attention (e.g. Baron et. al 1997). What is more – and as the paper will argue and endeavour to show – there are some complimentarities between Virtue Ethics and the other dominant methods of ethics, particularly some versions and elements of Kantianism. However, salient methodological and analytical incompatibilities will also be highlighted and examined.

Second, Virtue Ethics has one unique feature which lacks in the other major ethical methods and which renders it particularly interesting to the present inquiry. This feature is its central concern with an areatically and ontologically conceived ethical subject and her ‘flourishing’ by means of what is variously presented as the formation of virtuous ‘habits’ or a virtuous ‘character’. By critiquing deontological approaches and strictly universal rules-based accounts of ethics, Virtue Ethics is particularly agent-focused and agent-based. This arguably means that a Kantian moral dilemma in which an ethical subject must choose between two first-order moral rules and necessarily, therefore, violate one of them can at least be conceptually addressed by Virtue Ethics in that attention is paid to the mechanisms and the underlying moral virtues by which a subject might decide over and between different courses of action. That said, such a perspective invites the problems associated with (ethical) relativism, and this challenge will be quite explicitly highlighted in the proposed paper.

Nevertheless, Virtue Ethics does afford the moral theorist the perhaps only contemporaneous ethical account that might address the crucial questions over the ways and processes in which an ethical subject might come to be ethical. In other words, it is important to ask in relation to all major ethical traditions how and why an agent might variously choose to enter into a given social and moral contract, or embrace universal rule-based moral systems, or indeed become virtuous. Ethical subjects have histories and futures, they are engaged in development, identity- and value-formation and self-reflection. And it is here that the recent work which relates to Virtue Ethics is beginning to have some impact in a number of disciplines. It will be useful to extend these applications to new media and information technology.

By way of brief illustration, Utilitarian accounts have historically posited the notion of ‘Prudence Only’ as the centre-piece of any desirable moral philosophy. In Rawls, and also in Kant, the notion of Justice is added. More recently, Martha Nussbaum has argued for an inclusion of the notion of Love as well, and this is echoed by the work of Irene van Staveren (2002) and her insistence on including the concept of ‘care’ in ethical accounts. But Deirdre McCloskey powerfully argues that all so-called ‘seven virtues’ need to be cultivated and active in the ethical subject (and, presumably, the ethical society): Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Courage, Faith, Hope and Love.

A major problem is how other-regard, or altruism, impacts on the ethical system under consideration. Another challenge is, as was mentioned, the problem of how any rejection of a rule-based moral philosophy can safeguard itself against the justifiable charge of relativism by salvaging some moral principles out of its subjectivist approach to moral reasoning. A third problem is methodological in nature: How does one get from the individual to the aggregate, or, put differently, does a society consisting in the majority of virtuously acting individuals automatically become virtuous itself? Any attempt to grapple with this last question must open itself up to the examination of available explanatory approaches and methods; from methodological individualism to invisible hand explanations, among others. A fourth point of interest concerns the debate over the discovery versus the construction account of identity-building (Sen 1998); and this is particularly relevant to the domain of new media where cultural practices and values are often seen to be enmeshed with conceptions of ‘identity’. Finally, all of the above are intimately linked to questions concerning the analysis of freedom (Carter et. al), and the paper will ultimately seek to incorporate this perspective within both its broader approach and its more specific inquiries into the analysis of ‘the good life’ and new media culture.

In summary, the paper wishes to apply and discuss Virtue Ethics in relation to new media and some of its specific phenomena. These might include virtuality and online identity as well as the impact, use and effect of Internet-mediated alternative media from news reporting to leisure consumption. Any such discussion could perhaps be understood through the question of what quality of life is in relation to new media and about whether new media can support or harm one’s flourishing. Virtue Ethics, through such discussions, might then provide a perspective on why some ways of using new media could be said to be ‘good’ for the quality of life, whereas others might not.

References

Baron, M.W., Pettit. P. and Slote, M. (1997) Three Methods of Ethics: A Debate, Oxford: Blackwell.

Brey, P. (forthcoming).   ‘Theorizing the Cultural Quality of New Media,’ Techné. Research

in Philosophy and Technology .

Carter, I., Kramer, M. H., and Steiner, H. (forthcoming; eds..), Freedom. A Philosophical Anthology , Blackwell: Oxford.

Grodzinsky, F. (1999).   The Practitioner from Within: Revisiting the Virtues. Computers and Society 29(1), 9-15.

McCloskey, D. (2006) The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, University of Chicago Press.

Nussbaum, M. (1993) Non-relative virtues: an Aristotelian approach’, in Nussbaum, M. and Sen, A. (1993) The Quality of Life, Clarendon Press: Oxford.

Sen, A. (1998) Reason before Identity: The Roman Lectures for 1998, London:Oxford University Press.

Van Staveren, I. (2001) The Values of Economics: an Aristotelian perspective, Routledge: UK.