Towards a theoretical mashup for studying posthuman/postsocial ethics

Date13 March 2017
Pages74-89
Published date13 March 2017
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JICES-06-2016-0021
AuthorMarcelo El Khouri Buzato
Subject MatterInformation & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information & communications technology
Towards a theoretical mashup
for studying posthuman/
postsocial ethics
Marcelo El Khouri Buzato
Department of Applied Linguisticis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
Campinas, Brazil
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to propose a theoretical arrangement for the study of applied computer and
information ethicscarried out in an interdisciplinary and a democratic manner by whichthe information and
communicationstechnologies are seen as an ethical environment, and human-computercouplings are seen as
hybrid moralagents.
Design/methodology/approach New ethical issues emerge dynamically in such environmentwhich
must be interpretedaccording to human sentience and computer ontology.To attribute moral meaning to acts
perpetrated by human-computerhybrids, a hybrid of two semiotics must be likely used that bridge the gap
between signsand things from opposite directions.
Findings The author argues thatecosocial dynamics and material semiotics can be harnessed togetheras
in a theoretical mashup for that purpose, and that such harnessing will allow us to engage with a
posthumanist/post-socialethics here and now.
Originality/value The originality of the proposal resides in bringing hybridity to the center of the
picture, forcing interdisciplinary teams to engage with one unied, even if hybrid, agency regardless of
conictingontologies and epistemologies.
Keywords Ethics, Semiotics, Computer-mediated communication, Posthumanism
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
This paper departs from the received notion that ethics is a set of universal norms or the
result of utilitarian modes of reasoningwhich can ultimately lead to a happy life for human
beings in general, and movestowards ethics as a context-sensitive discursive formationthat
articulates culturally and historically ongoing relations among artifacts, persons and
activities in such ways as to orient the appropriateness, fairness, utility and teleology of
human agency and political actiontowards a better future [1].
Even if (shortsightedly) seen as a mere collection of artifacts, globally interactive
information and communications technologies (ICTs) are clearly ethical entities implicated
in new kinds of ethical issues that challenge our usual forms of moral reasoning (Fox-
Brewster, 2015). However, inasmuch as they mediate and distribute human cognition and
agency by affording human metaphysical presence and moral conduct (Miller, 2012), I
suggest we look at the ICTs and their human users as one (hybrid) ethicalenvironment.
An ethical environmentis dened by Blackburn (2002, p. 1, emphasis mine) as:
[...] the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live [which] determines what we nd
acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible [also] our conception of when things are
going well and when they are going badly [and] our conception of what is due to us, and what is
due from us as we relate to others.
JICES
15,1
74
Received 17 Ju ne 201 6
Revised5 August 2016
Accepted13August2016
Journalof Information,
Communicationand Ethics in
Society
Vol.15 No. 1, 2017
pp. 74-89
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1477-996X
DOI 10.1108/JICES-06-2016-0021
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1477-996X.htm
We, in this case, should refer to all humans who design, construct, use and are used by
networked computers and computer-like devices on a daily basis, wecitizens of smart
citieswhose companion smartphonesrequire as many power outlets in publicspaces as
our pets require plastic bag dispensers, and our bodily subsystems requirewater fountains
and public restrooms; in short, wecyborg citizens [2] who have access to previously
unavailable chronopaths[3] of our own activity, which allow us to ask new questions
about what it means to be human today, and what kind of post-human creatures we might
become in our co-developmentwith cybernetic artifacts.
Identity theft,cyber bullying,porn-revenge,black-hat hacking,social
engineeringand aming,are a few examples of issues that tell us things are going badly.
But they are also things that basically could not happen, at least not in the same way,
with the same consequences, were we not part of networked human-computer peers acting
together at previously unthinkabletemporal and spatial scales. Yet, many of us still think of
the ICTs as if they were a technical network, such as a railway system that can be used to
transport either medicine or poison,either produce or disease, but cannot be seen as a moral
environment in itself. Likewise, we tend to see human beings as autonomous self-reexive
ethical agents capable of controlling the ethical effects of their acts through the right
intention and adherenceto universal golden rules.
Hayles (2006) calls the cognitive-semiotic-emotional environment that emerges from the
material-semiotic activity of networked cyborgs [4](Haraway, 1991)the cognisphere. For
her, the metaphor of a fundamentally computationalworld has important ideological effects.
While many a cultural critique willinsist on a binary choice between reality as equivalent to
a physical description thatcan be expressed computationally or reality as a human reading,
for Hayles, insisting on either side of suchbinary is to miss the point of our current cultural
dynamics, summarized, by her (Hayles, 2006, p. 163) in the aphorism: What we make and
what (we think) we are co-evolve together.
To the extent that morality and moral evolution are intrinsic to what humanists dened
as the human condition(Braidotti, 2013), and that humans co-evolve with the artifacts
they produce and use (Ihde, 2011), one who wonders what kind of humans, or post-human
subjects, we are becoming needs to delve into the mediationsthat bridge socioculturally and
historically situated human moral meaning-making and the new moral phenomena that
exist by virtue of the cognisphere.
By feeding the cognisphere with our cultural semiotic resources on a daily basis, we
multiply the possibilities of complex ethicalmeanings being made, which is to say that the
ethical effects of semiotic acts become ever less predictable. Yet, the agencies that we
constitute as we act in couplings withcomputers have consequences in the material world.
Sentient creatures are affected by the ethically uncertaineffects of our interconnected,
collective material-semiotic activity. This situation summons a new kind of politics which,
in turn, should be informedby smarterapplied ethics research (Buzato, 2016).
The relationship betweenethics and politics is more complicated than this statementand
may lead one to believe, for ethics informs politics by providing it with constrains and
challenges that need to overcome heterogeneous interests to be met. On the other hand,
moral codes are key instruments of social coordination and control that legitimize political
actions. Unfair or ill-informed moral codes are thus related to destructive political action;
illegitimate political actionfails to nd support in fair moral rules. It is usually believed that
while ethics relates to the private/individual realm, politics relates to the public/collective
realm. But in the ICTs, the public/private distinction is blurred to a large extent, most
individual actions are about publicizing something, whether knowingly, and it is the
collective work of human-computer peers that provides the context for individual action.
Towards a
theoretical
mashup
75

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