Ethics of the internet

By Simon Longstaff

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 39 autumn 2000

For some people, the internet is an anarchic space in which even the criminal can roam freely. For others, it is a place of liberty in which citizens can swap information and ideas free from risk of censorship by any vested interest. At least for the time being, there is neither corporation nor government capable of controlling the net.

When it comes to exchanging ideas, Andrew Donovan's article on page four of this issue of City Ethics shows how effectively newly formed groups are using the net for lively and worthwhile online discussion.

Some people are concerned that the inability to regulate the internet will lead to it being dominated by the unscrupulous. That fear drives occasional flurries of activity in which governments are urged to ban certain online activities. Sensitive to public opinion, governments are eager to be seen as concerned and responsive.

This leads to the development of legislation that is supposed to prevent the worst excesses of internet culture and usage. However, legislation enacted for this purpose is almost totally ineffective and therefore, largely meaningless. Given this, how is society supposed to protect itself from the unethical use of the internet?

The first challenge will be to identify those things that should not be done online. This is easier said than done. There is, as yet, no consensus about what (if anything) should be prohibited on the internet. Even if a few clear examples could be agreed (a ban on using the internet to propagate biological weapons or to sell slaves, comes to mind), there would still be the problem of how to enforce and consensus about such matters. As noted above, nobody has the capacity to enforce anything on the net!

This has an extremely interesting implication for ethics. There are many people, especially in the developed world, who are quite content to leave the hard ethical issues to their elected representatives and government to solve.

Typically, an issue is addressed by parliament and a law is passed prohibiting certain specified types of behaviour. These laws are then enforced (at least to some degree) by police and the judicial system. However, none of this is currently possible on the internet. We are not even at first base and may never get there. The result of this is that we cannot 'outsource' our ethical obligations to the government. Instead, they remain with us and we are, in a sense, forced to take responsibility for how we engage with the medium and the content that it carries.

The same is true for those who publish content and who might wish to push the envelope of acceptable behaviour to the limit. Many people are used to working against the boundary of the law. There are many occasions when I have heard people attempt to justify their behaviour by saying, 'it is not illegal'. However, this 'defence' is not available in any environment in which notions of legality have little real meaning (because they cannot be enforced). Instead, content providers (and those who carry content), need to form their own view about what they should do. They too are back on the ethics 'hook'.

Some will feel considerable discomfort at the fact that the net necessarily depends so heavily on a regime of personal responsibility and self-regulation. They may even hope for a time when it is possible for others to regulate what occurs across this increasingly pervasive medium.

On the other hand, I rather hope that recourse to an external regulator is delayed at least long enough to see if we have the wit and the wisdom to let our considered choices determine what succeeds and fails on the net.

For example, I would like to see if campaigns develop to boycott sites that engage in unconscionable behaviour or that abuse the trust of the community. I would like to see if we can develop informal mechanisms capable of helping to distinguish the gold from the dross. For example, will some of the professions, that have a traditional concern about truth (accountants and journalists come to mind), play a new role in warranting that certain forms of information can be relied upon? Will this be an informal antidote to the problem of people using the internet to propagate falsehood?

I have no way of knowing how all of this might work out – except to observe that as we become more reliant on the internet, so we will have to develop effective mechanisms to preserve the integrity of a medium that is, in its essential form, extremely fragile.

I suspect that the only path to achieving this outcome will be to develop a capacity to engage with the ethical dimension of issues regularly presented to us online. The interesting thing to note is that this capacity to deal with ethical issues will need to be generic and not restricted to events occurring on the internet.

That is, an unintended consequence of the anarchy of the net may be an increase in our general ability to deal not only with 'virtual ethics' but also with the here and now issues that confront us on a daily basis.