Hello: Though mostly a lurker here, I couldn't resist airing some thoughts on this one:
PT >> If there are universal ethics we can prove these on the Internet.
RG> whose ethics will be universalised do you suppose? and what kinds of
intolerances might that validate/legitimize?
Exactly the right questions - thank you, Radhika! And I would gently reply: I think we can propose an ethics that begins in >part with the universal value implicit in the suggestion here that "universal" claims have all too often in the past served as excuses for colonialism, imperialism. . . .
I would like to suggest that it is not only the concept of "universal" that we need to problematize in thinking about these issues, but the concept of "ethics" as well. Although the term can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, ethics in the modern sense of "the science of morals; the department of study concerned with the principles of human duty" (OED) may have grow out of the erosion of tradition as the primary guiding force of behavior beginning in the 14th or 15th century. Thus, a concern with ethics is a concern with codes of behavior, and not just with studying them (most of us in the social sciences study them, in some sense), but with prescribing them. And while the study of what we call ethical issues certainly exists and has long existed in other cultures, ethics per se, especially as separate from any sense of religion or at least the spiritual, may be a particularly Western abstraction. In modern usage, ethics often seem to be conceived of as context specific. Thus, "business ethics," "environmental ethics," even "net- or computer ethics." And certainly, as much of the on-going discussion here acknowledges, normative codes of behavior tend to be culturally and historically situated. Thus we should consider whether "universal ethics" constitutes an oxymoron.
Moreover, my more recent work (with the help, I must hasten to add, of many, many colleagues in these domains) on Information Ethics and Internet >Research Ethics in countries such as China, Japan, Thailand, and Korea also >offer grounds for optimism. For example, two recent examples of Internet >research in Japan demonstrate more or less perfect consonance with the AoIR >guidelines recommendations regarding informed consent, protection of >confidentiality, anonymity, and personal data, etc. Indeed, emerging conceptions of privacy and data privacy protection law in >these countries - while clearly retaining distinctive cultural "shape" in >their conception and application - are nonetheless recognizable cousins of >"Western" conceptions and laws. This suggests that even across the >considerable cultural differences, say, between the U.S. and Germany, on >the one hand, and China, Japan, Thailand, Korea, and Hong Kong, on the >other - there may be agreement on basic (universal?) values such as >privacy,
Following my reasoning above, I have to ask: could it be that there are similarities because of shared context that crosses cultural boundaries? When I think about privacy, data encryption and the like, my thoughts are also never far from government surveillance and trans-national corporate capitalism--contexts indeed shared across many nations and cultures.
I would add: this tolerance is not unlimited. Rather, I think it's quite >possible to endorse tolerance as a universal value - but not thereby be >committed to tolerating, say, fascist regimes and violent repression of >women and minorities. On the contrary, by proposing that rights to >integrity, autonomy, cultural identity, and so forth are, at the very >least, strong candidates for universal rights
Although I am sympathetic to being intolerant of intolerance, the ramifications of this scare me if you are talking about the net generally, as opposed to specific locales within it such as thus one. Even if it were possible to police the entire net, who should the ethical (moral) police be? i.e. who gets to decide what constitutes intolerance? Likewise, who gets to define "violence"? Contrast, e.g. Paulo Freire's definition of cultural invasion as violence with the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. on violence against the unborn, if you think defining violence is unproblematic. Finally, is cultural identity ever linked to systematic intolerance (history of the U.S. suggests this is the case!)? If so, where do we draw the line, and again, more fundamentally, who gets to decide this?
Indeed, I think we make more progress towards some sort of shared, humane >value system_s_ and ethics through such dialogues, rather than giving up >the effort, however much previous failures and disasters might tempt us to >do so.
The sentiment of this I can agree with (I think), but isn't dialogue, as an act of synthesis, with its potential for compromise, and even recognition of disagreement as opposed to consensus, fundamentally a different process from that of seeking to uncover some essential ethical nature that is already embedded in all of human culture, which seems to be the process implicit in much of the rest of what you say? Also, when talking about dialogue, it is important to remember, as Nancy Fraser and others point out, the difficulty/impossibility of bracketing status differentials so that those with less power come to the table "as if they were equals" with the holders of power. (Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp.109-142). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.) Perhaps there is no better approach than dialogue, but that doesn't mean we should let optimism become a cover for idealistic naivety (but perhaps my one-time Midwestern optimism has dissolved into Southern U.S. style cynicism). Christopher J Richter, PhD Assoc. Prof. & Chair, Communication Studies Hollins University P.O. Box 9652 Roanoke, VA 24020 Tel. 5403626358 Fax 5403626286 e-mail crichter@hollins.edu www.hollins.edu