Abstract
This paper examines the idea that digital societies lack an ethical framework for understanding and mitigating the impact of digital technologies on human flourishing and the consequent diminishing of human agency. The authors examine how selected works of C.S. Lewis address man's moral responsibility while living in a developing society and call for a grounding in metaethical frameworks prior to any outcomes of applied ethics. Each of the authors contributes from his own field of expertise - Mahrik on nanoethics and Neal on digital media - while Lewis' writing corpus is the shared interest as well as the basis for their research. Writing and thinking from within a metaethical framework he terms the Tao, or natural law, Lewis offers an approach to the dehumanization of digital culture through his own approach to one of the oldest technologies: that of language. This offers the beginning of an infrastructure for thinking about and reacting to digital society in an ethical manner.
Highlights
Ethical challenges of technologyA main concern of this article is to understand what prevents us from creating ethical frameworks on which to build our digital culture and how we might begin to construct such frameworks in a way that values our humanity rather than dehumanizing us
Though our culture continues to embrace a language which is debased, but lacks objective value and meaning, Lewis calls us to step back, to implement the historical imagination and remember the world as it was for thousands of years, governed by the moral framework of the Tao
The language component is so important that Ellul went so far as to say that discourse and conversation in relationship is our main strategy against the juggernaut of technology and we most effectively are opposed to its values when we engage in this way. Both Lewis and Ellul agree that we will never stop the advances of technology, but that we can make a difference in our own spheres, small or large they may be
Summary
A main concern of this article is to understand what prevents us from creating ethical frameworks on which to build our digital culture and how we might begin to construct such frameworks in a way that values our humanity rather than dehumanizing us. As Lewis suggests, our society has adapted a stance outside of the Tao and apart from any objective value, that society lacks a framework with which to appropriately use its technologies Does it lack a framework, but because it has been educated and conditioned to remove value judgements from language, it no longer has the capacity to recognize the need for a framework or to possess a language to create such a framework. Though our culture continues to embrace a language which is debased, but lacks objective value and meaning, Lewis calls us to step back, to implement the historical imagination and remember the world as it was for thousands of years, governed by the moral framework of the Tao. Unless we possess a system of objective value, we cannot properly understand how to respond to our technologies; our responses to them will not be ordinate based on the thing they are, but merely conformist based on the thing society has shown them to be. Lewis offers us a path, rooted in the Tao, through a right understanding of and relationship with language
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