Applications to Digital Media Ethics

Moreover, in emphasizing the importance of webs of interdependent relationships, in contrast with a prevailing emphasis on individual rights, feminist ethics thereby supported and developed alongside (then) new forms of environmental or ecological ethics. Briefly, such ethics extends the modern Western focus on the rational individual human being as the primary moral agent who deserves moral status, so as to argue that non-human entities, including not only living beings but the larger ecological systems they constitute in relationship with the natural order, also deserve and require moral status and respect in our ethical reflections.

In these ways, feminist ethics helps us move to a more inclusive and comprehensive account of how we may come to grips with the ethical challenges we face.4

Applications to digital media ethics Arguably, an ethics of care is already at work in a number of choices and behaviors associated with digital media. As we’ve seen, for those who enjoy using digital media to copy and distribute songs, videos, etc., that they enjoy, “sharing is caring.” That is, it would appear that a primary motive in such sharing is our pleasure in giving to friends and loved ones the chance to enjoy the same music and videos that we have enjoyed. In particular, insofar as a sense of self as a relational autonomy likewise entails an emphasis on care and caring relationships, such care is consistent with the inclusive sense of property rights we saw at work in such sharing.

More specifically, care ethics is explicitly invoked in the design of so- called carebots – that is, robots intended to take over various chores of health care.

At the same time, it’s important keep in mind an important limitation to an ethics of care. Insofar as care ethics stresses the role of our emotional bonds with one another, it thereby runs the risk of restricting our ethical focus too narrowly – that is, upon a relatively small circle of family, friends, and loved ones. Taken to its extreme, an ethics of care could thus justify our ignoring whole populations around the globe because, simply, we do not experience a relationship of care with such populations. But in a world ever more interwoven via digital media – unless these media help us learn how to care for others beyond our immediate circles – the ethics of care runs the risk of an increasingly inappropriate provincialism.