Interpretative pros hen pluralism: From computer-mediated colonization to a pluralistic intercultural digital ethics

Abstract

Intercultural Digital Ethics (IDE) faces the central challenge of how to develop a global IDE that can endorse and defend some set of (quasi-) universal ethical norms, principles, frameworks, etc. alongside sustaining local, culturally variable identities, traditions, practices, norms, and so on. I explicate interpretive pros hen (focal or “towards one”) ethical pluralism (EP(ph)) emerging in the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century in response to this general problem and its correlates, including conflicts generated by “computer-mediated colonization” that imposed homogenous values, communication styles, and so on upon “target” peoples and cultures via ICTs as embedding these values in their very design. I contrast different kinds of ethical pluralisms as structural apparatus for understanding what differences may mean and allow for, as these emerged in the 1990s forwards with EP(ph). As interwoven with phronēsis, a form of reflective judgment and virtue, EP(ph) more radically preserves irreducible differences and so fosters positive engagements across deep cultural differences. I show how EP(ph) emerged in the context of empirical research on “Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication” (CATaC) beginning in 1998, and then in specific applications within Internet Research Ethics (IRE) beginning in 2000. I summarize its main characteristics and trace how it has further been taken up in ICE, IRE, Intercultural Information Ethics, and virtue ethics more broadly. I respond to important criticisms and objections, arguing that EP(ph) thus stands as an important component for a contemporary IDE that seeks an ethical cosmopolitanism in place of computer-mediated colonization.