Book Review: The Impact of the Internet on Our Moral Lives

Abstract

This collection of essays has a very promising, but slightly misleading, title. The Internet is becoming the medium for a large variety of activities and relations, is transforming our perception of time and distance, and is spreading new ways of communicating and cooperating while undermining old ones. No doubt it is transforming our lives, but how much and how deeply is it transforming our values and demanding new principles and virtues? Such are the issues broached by this book. With the exception of the first essay – which in my view remains rather alien to the project – the contributions in Part I tackle some familiar moral problems and the way in which they present themselves in cyberspace. The essays are recognizable instances of applied ethics: they illustrate concrete problems and try to suggest possible solutions. In so doing they show how moral and legal questions such as copyright, plagiarism, pornography and trust present themselves in the online world. The first two issues have admittedly gained new prominence by the advent of the Internet, and they are very good examples of how a new, powerful and widespread medium can bring back to the fore ethical issues that might have looked more or less morally settled and hence ‘cold’. Both Spinello’s chapter on copyright and Hinman’s on plagiarism among students offer a good deal of factual information about the impact of the Internet on these issues, and do so with clarity. I am less convinced by their normative solutions. Spinello takes too much of a conservative approach and fails to appreciate how practices and possibilities that emerge with the digital media do in fact challenge our intuitions and sensibility and remind us that our normative horizon might be neither timeless nor unquestionable. In this respect, the more historically and socially aware approach taken by Nissembaum in her chapter on hackers (in Part II) shows how important it is to have a bigger picture in order to appreciate and reveal the ethical implications of new technologies. Hinman adopts a strongly Aristotelian position in putting forward a list of virtues that would support an effective fight against students’ plagiarism. I don’t have any objection in using an ethical theory for analytical purposes, to highlight the moral issues and stakes raised by digital technologies, but when ancient ethical theories are used as sources of normative prescriptions many serious questions arise. Our world and Book Reviews