Ethics of “Digital Society”: New Conflict or New Balance

Abstract

The article examines the conflict and balance perspectives of ethical reflection on the digitalization challenges. Based on digital society conceptions by Manuel Castells, Tom Redshaw, Mary Chayco, the theory of communal and non-communal conflicts by George Simpson, the ethics of technology by Joseph Pitt and Peter-Paul Verbeek, the author suggests that the digital society is indeed a specific model of social relations with an ever-increasing connectedness and speed of exchange, which, nevertheless, realizes itself in the previously established and essentially unchanged socio-economic structure. At the same time, the consistently expanding digital intervention in the space of value interactions makes ethical reflection of digitalization necessary, which should realize itself not as an explication of digital ethics as a new morality, but by adapting the already existing body of theoretical and applied ethics to the conditions of the digital age. In this context, the article focuses to the conflict of values as the dominant way for ethical positions updating and a new moral balance achieving in order to effectively absorb the contradictions caused by digitalization. The article shows that such conflicts are communal; the options for their deployment do not contain a scenario of a structural crisis, due to the sufficient elasticity of the zone of disagreement, which makes it possible to accommodate a large number of compromise settlement strategies. On the basis of the identified substantial characteristics of the digital society, the author concludes that the speed of changes, the lack of localization, will contribute to the ethical institutionalization of the innovations results as a more flexible form of regulation.