Technology and the Limits of Ethics

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Everyone--or almost everyone--knows the Golden Rule. It's some variant of: Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you. There's the negative form of Confucius:  What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. The Ten Commandments tries to lay it out in a bit more detail with its well-known thou shalt's. In fact, many people have tried to show that all ethics are really rooted in the principle of reciprocity. Whether or not this is true, it does not tell us whether or not ethics should be about reciprocity. Why shouldn't ethics evolve over the course history, much in the way science has? Is there anything technology can teach us about ethics, or ethics about technology?

Philosopher of technology Hans Joas argues that, despite the vast differences between religious beliefs and traditions, ethics principals typically share the following four features. See if you agree.

• First, they are usually anthropocentric. The Golden Rule is explicitly about humans and their relation to other humans. Any consideration of animals, ecosystems, geographic formations, or interstellar bodies must be for the sake of humans.
• Second, ethical principles typically refer to immediate actions and problems we currently have . They don't mention future generations or even our future selves. The Ten Commandments says to honor thy father and thy mother, but not your children or children's children.
• Third, ethical principals are about the things we do, not the beings that we are. You cannot turn the Golden Rule into a statement about being, such as become who'd others would want you to be. 
• Finally, ethical principals treat technology as ethically neutral or ignore it entirely. Technologies are simply means to ends. It is the ends that are important--the means can be ignored.

Joas argues that recent technological developments have put all of these assumptions into question, and for two reasons. First, technology has increased the range of consequences beyond immediate human interactions. For this reason, knowledge has become essential to being ethical. Today many ethical arguments start with questions like, "Did you know that your chicken comes from..." or "Did you know those clothes are manufactured by the people in..." or "Did you know that such-and-such company gives funding to..."  It is no longer sufficient simply to consider the situation at hand.

Second, technology has made the future of humanity uncertain. We can eliminate human life forever or we can extend it indefinitely (at least, in principal). We will soon be able to create genetic superpeople. Even everyday actions like driving or eating implicate thousands of people around the globe and may have consequences for future generations. And it's not just about people. It is no longer a given that the Earth can heal itself no matter what we do.

What would ethics grounded in the reality of today look like? It's hard not to think that the future of ethics is politics--both state-centered politics involving legislation and treaties as well as as decentralized collective decision-making about the world we want to leave for the future. The latter is already happening at the water cooler and on blogs. Is this enough? Is ethics fine the way it is? Or do we need a prophet of a new set of commandments for the Internet Age?