2.2.1. What is Ethics?#

Have you ever paused to decide what to do in a situation, and found yourself wondering what would be the ‘right’ thing to do? Or perhaps you might think, as a good person, how should I handle this situation?

These questions are examples of ethical thinking. Ethics is a way of investigating these habits of thought about what is morally right and good, about what we should do, and about how the world should be. Most people have ethical beliefs; for example, many believe that stealing is wrong. When we stop and ponder why stealing is wrong, or what makes it wrong, or when it is wrong, we are doing ethics.

Because humans have pretty much always been interested in these kinds of questions, we already have several different ‘systems’ of ethical thought available to us as tools for thinking through how to guide ourselves in a course of action. These ethical systems vary in many ways, such as whether they focus on individuals or communities, or focus on rights or relationships.

Now, you might be thinking… isn’t ethics something that people NEVER agree on? We don’t exactly have firm answers, right? And more than a few wars have been fought over ethical disagreements that couldn’t be resolved. So how is ethics supposed to help us decide about how things should go in the world of social media? How does ethics help us to know what to do?

It might help to think about ethical frameworks as tools for seeing inside of a situation. In medicine, when doctors need to see what’s going on inside someone’s body, they have many different tools for looking in, depending on what they need to know. An x-ray, an ultra-sound, and an MRI all show different information about what’s happening inside the body. A doctor chooses what tool to use based on what she needs to know. An x-ray is great for seeing what’s happening with bones, but isn’t particularly helpful for seeing how a fetus’s development is progressing.

When we are trying to see inside the many complicated factors of a situation and decide what to do, there are various different kinds of information we might want to gather. When facing a moral decision, we might want to know about:

  • how a certain course of action would impact other people. Will more people be hurt if I take this or that course of action?

  • what course of action would leave us feeling okay with ourselves and our desires to be good people. Maybe I could cheat in a situation and many people would be helped or spared pain, but could I live with myself knowing I had cheated?

  • what course of action should we take, if it will be carried out by many different people across an organization? When I need to depend on others to act in certain ways to achieve a good outcome, what course of action can be accomplished even when some of those different people disagree about what should be done?

One question many people have about using ethical reasoning as a tool for analysis is: what about cultural disagreemnts? What about the idea that there is no absolute truth, that a moral claim is only true for me or you, or for my culture or your culture? In an increasingly globalized world, there is an opportunity to learn to respect and accommodate the differences between cultures and values, and this is a good thing! It means that we have even more tools at our disposal for thinking through the ethical considerations packed into a situation, as we learn from those who see things differently.

In this class, you will be building up a ‘toolbox’ for thinking about ethics. We won’t get into the more abstract philosophical side of questions about ultimate moral truths or where they come from (that discussion is called metaethics, and it is fun, but quite a brain-twister). When using ethical tools to analyze a situation concerning social media and automation, you will be encouraged to always choose at least two different ethical frameworks and compare them. This is not about finding one theory you like and sticking with it. Rather, it’s about learning how to use multiple tools to see multiple different factors in a situation (using an MRI and an x-ray), getting a more complete picture of what is going on and what is at stake.

So, with that said, let’s get to know some of the tools that will be in your toolbox!