Digital Recording and the Hazards of Unbounded Moralized Judgment

Abstract

In today’s techno-social environment, it is easy to make, store, and share digital recordings, such as photographs, audio fragments, and video streams, at an unprecedented scale. While there are often obvious immediate benefits to making and sharing digital recordings, serious hazards associated with these practices have thus far gone under-appreciated. We contend that today’s digital recording practices threaten to radically alter how we perceive and evaluate ourselves and others, producing an ongoing, socially and morally disruptive shift towards unbounded moralized judgment. The shift toward unbounded moralized judgment in turn poses several hazards, including widespread, difficult-to-restore reputation damage, negatively altered self-perceptions, and the stifling of morally right behavior. Our central claim is that in the current techno-social environment, every individual has a pro tanto reason to avoid being recorded and to avoid recording others. On the occasions where the reasons for recording outweigh those against, more must be done to counteract the hazards introduced by recording. We conclude the paper by outlining possible avenues for technical, regulatory, and societal approaches to mitigating the hazards of unbounded moralized judgment.