Abstract
Intercultural Digital Ethics (IDE) faces the central challenge of how to develop a global IDE that can endorse and defend some set of (quasi-) universal ethical norms, principles, frameworks, etc. alongside sustaining local, culturally variable identities, traditions, practices, norms, and so on. I explicate interpretive pros hen (focal or “towards one”) ethical pluralism (EP(ph)) emerging in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century in response to this general problem and its correlates, including conflicts generated by “computer-mediated colonization” that imposed homogenous values, communication styles, and so on upon “target” peoples and cultures via ICTs as embedding these values in their very design. I contrast different kinds of ethical pluralisms as structural apparatus for understanding what differences may mean and allow for, as these emerged in the 1990s forwards with EP(ph). As interwoven with phronēsis, a form of reflective judgment and virtue, EP(ph) more radically preserves irreducible differences and so fosters positive engagements across deep cultural differences. I show how EP(ph) emerged in the context of empirical research on “Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication” (CATaC) beginning in 1998, and then in specific applications within Internet Research Ethics (IRE) beginning in 2000. I summarize its main characteristics and trace how it has further been taken up in ICE, IRE, Intercultural Information Ethics, and virtue ethics more broadly. I respond to important criticisms and objections, arguing that EP(ph) thus stands as an important component for a contemporary IDE that seeks an ethical cosmopolitanism in place of computer-mediated colonization.
Highlights
Construed, ethical pluralisms (EPs) are conceptual frameworks for how we are to interpret or understand what difference means—in this article, primarily differences between diverse ethical frameworks as well as between diverse norms, beliefs, practices, and so on that define cultural identities
Inspired by Hongladarom’s initial example (Hongladarom 1998), we developed first versions of EP, beginning with one defined as allowing us “to recognize a range of specific ethical positions as legitimate, rather than either insisting on a single ethical value or giving up on ethics altogether and embracing ethical relativism” (Ess 2002b, 181)
Further developments—both within Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication” (CATaC) and subsequent Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) work, in Information and Computing Ethics (ICE) more broadly (e.g., Ess 2004), as well as in the emerging field of Intercultural Information Ethics (Capurro 2007; Ess 2007b)—helped test and refine what I articulated as an interpretive pros hen ethical pluralism (EP(ph))(Ess 2006)
Summary
Ethical pluralisms (EPs) are conceptual frameworks for how we are to interpret or understand what difference means—in this article, primarily differences between diverse ethical frameworks as well as between diverse norms, beliefs, practices, and so on that define cultural identities. These highlight important limitations of EP(ph): briefly, it is by no means the only element required in an ethical toolkit aimed at sustaining irreducible cultural differences alongside possible connections, and its use is at best a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for successful resolutions of these difficulties Given such caveats, EP(ph) stands a useful concept in the ongoing development of Intercultural Digital Ethics, as EP(ph) addresses its thematic interests in countering the still prevailing dominance of “Western ethical perspectives, to the exclusion of broader ethical and socio-cultural perspectives”—precisely as “the ethical norms and values designed into these technologies collide with those of the communities in which they are delivered and deployed” (Aggarwal 2019, 1). EP(ph) reinforces Shannon Vallor’s emphasis on civility (2016, 140–145) and, ideally, a twenty-first century cosmopolitanism countering what appears to be increasing conflicts and fragmentation still inspired by new forms of computer-mediated colonization
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