Ethics of Digital Technologies: Where We Are, Where We Are Heading Towards

The aim of the chapter is to explore the anthropological and moral implications connected with the new landscape digital technologies are bringing about. The digital era is changing our idea of ourselves and the world: we will explore the change that the notion (and the reality) of the environment has undergone, passing form a naturalistic concept to a synthetic one. The fuel of digital environment is data: therefore the “digital life” can be understood in terms of the rational model of Dataism—with its logic of correlation as opposed to the causal explanation—and its theoretical instrument, the macroscope. Since computation is not neutral action but instead embedded with choices, decisions and evaluation, we will try to explore its ethical dimension, that goes under the name of Algorethics. As a sort of synthesis and case study of ideas reviewed we shall see the concept of On-life, that keeps together the digital dimension with the day-by-day life in a ubiquitous and perennial present. The ethical question we will try to address is how it is possible for the human being to flourish in such environment: specular to the digital environment there is a human reality to consider carefully, a nature which is inherently analogical rather than digital, where time and space cannot be compressed to the point to disappear in a continuum flow of presence.