Ethical Agency and Moral Choices

In slightly different terms, this means that our engagement with SNSs inextricably ties us (including our ethical agency and moral choices) in with an extensive “web of relationships” that extends across the whole range of actors and agents (including artificial agents) knotted together by these networks. This would further seem to mean that our ethical choices and responsibilities are thereby “distributed” or likewise shared across such networks. In fact, philosophers such as Luciano Floridi and Judith Simon argue that we must consider carefully the implications of such distributed and shared responsibility – i.e., beyond more traditional emphases on our individual responsibility – as an inevitable dimension of our lives as enmeshed within such networks.

If you did not already take into account the distributed nature of our ethical responsibilities in your first responses to the above questions, take some time to reflect on that now. In particular:

Does the distributed nature of ethical responsibility change any of your utilitarian calculations and/or decisions/judgments regarding what utilitarians would ethically recommend in terms of the continuum of possible engagements with SNSs (including no use at all)?

Does the distributed nature of ethical responsibility change any of your deontological analyses and/or decisions/judgments regarding what deontologists would ethically recommend in terms of the continuum of possible engagements with SNSs (including no use at all)?

(We will explore these questions in more concrete detail by way of the Fairphone case-study below.)