Rights, Moral Practices, and the Design of the Web

• In Event: Algorithms and Democracy

Abstract

Rights, it is often said, constrain what can be done to any person in pursuit of some social good. So, for example, we cannot permissibly force people with O- blood to donate blood regularly, even if doing so would save many lives. But in some cases — in which preventing some terrible bad or accomplishing some great good requires violating the rights of one or a few — many of us think, if somewhat begrudgingly, that morality or justice most ultimately tolerate the violation. There are easy and hard cases, and there is endless disagreement about which are which, but most agree these cases can arise.

In this paper I suggest that many questions about the design of the internet are plausibly among these cases, for reasons that have not been fully appreciated or even clearly articulated. When considering whether pertinent rights are bear decisively on the design of the internet, we must often weigh them against an important set of social goods, namely, the protection and cultivation of what I term our moral-communicative practices and of the processes of (1) individual socialization, particularly the development of moral capacities and healthy dispositions, (2) group integration, and (3) moral-language reproduction these practices ground.

The central aim of the paper is less to do the weighing than to identify the weights. To this end, it offers a number of interwoven and, so far as I know, novel hypotheses about how the internet is changing our moral-communicative practices — I focus primarily on communicative coordination and moral address — and about how we should expect these changes to affect (1)-(3).

Because the internet is a discursive sphere that is at some, often considerable, remove from ordinary action contexts, the practical pressures that shape moral communication are rather different online than they are off-. This feature, I contend, selects for moral talk that is geared primarily towards criticism rather than coordination. And if the conditions in which and reasons for which a normative language is used — thereby reproduced — at least partially determine the content of that language, we should then expect the internet in general and social media in particular to produce poorly coordinative, highly critical normative languages. This is exactly what is happening.

So, basic structural features of the internet select for criticism rather than coordination. Other features in turn select for certain kinds of criticism and associated practices of moral address — like blaming (closely related to criticizing), praising, apologizing, and forgiving — which, I think will be obvious through the discussion, are often somewhat pathological. I focus here on criticism and blame, relying primarily on Miranda Fricker’s recent account, and argue that other structural features of the internet select for a frequently pathological mode of blaming that I term third-personal resentment-blame. I spell out potential implications of a proliferation of this mode of blaming for moral socialization, group integration, and the reproduction of our moral languages.

To generate these hypotheses, I rely on an approach closely akin to the method of counterfactual genealogy recently articulated by Philip Pettit. But, pace Pettit, I do not attempt to develop a plausible, if counterfactual, story of the emergence and resilience of the moral-communicative practices in question. Rather, I begin from influential reconstructions of these practices — from Jürgen Habermas, PF Strawson, and others — and ask how we should anticipate the introduction of new media of communication resembling the internet to change the practices as they are reconstructively described. I then consider how these changes would in turn change the processes of socialization, group integration, and moral-language reproduction the practices plausibly ground. Then I test my hypotheses against existing empirical work.

If the hypotheses match the empirical work — which, I argue, they do — this should have considerable payoff. It should help to explain the empirically observable phenomena by providing a plausible account of how these phenomena might have arisen — really, an account of why we should have predicted them to arise, give the changes in question (new media of communication) to the communicative practices in question. This explanation of the phenomena is not in terms of contingent features of the internet’s design, but rather features of the internet that are plausibly inherent to the form. This suggests that pathologies of communicative practice online cannot be designed away, but must simply be minimized or designed against.

This brings us back to rights, the other major normative considerations bearing on the design of the web. To conclude, I suggest that in many cases, rights and the protection of our moral-communicative practices weigh against each other. Though I cannot do the weighing here, I hope I have better clarified the stakes.

Author

• Atticus Carnell, Princeton University