What do a bootleg download from Morpheus, the appearance of Hayden Christenson as Anakin Skywalker at the end of the 2004 remastered version of the film Return of the Jedi, and a strangely familiar undergraduate paper all have in common? This sounds like the start of a bad joke, and maybe in a way it is. All three are the products of digital technology and all three raise ethical issues that put strains on our conventional approaches to ethics. In their ethereal, protean, and mimetic way, these examples challenge traditional Western ideas of ownership, because property evolves over time as a concept emergent from particular economic, cultural, and social forces. Contemporary ideas of ethics are, well, contemporary, and have not always been this way. This ought to lead the cautious among us to conclude that they will not be this way forever after, either.

Understanding how digital environments challenge accepted practices of ethics requires an understanding of those practices. There are several commonly accepted ways of organizing the thinking about ethics, or Deontology. The two generally used in the professions, and in professional education at colleges and universities, are variants of deontology called Rule Deontology and Act Deontology. Rule Deontology is the area of ethics in which a set of guiding principles or maxims guide decision-making and behavior, such as the Ten Commandments or the Statement of Values and Code of Ethics for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Organizations. One such rule might be “never deceive.” Ideally, these rules transcend situations and may be applied consistently over time in any manner of circumstance.

Act Deontology, by contrast, is rooted in and arises from particular situations. The idea behind Act Deontology is that events may present circumstances in which prescribed rules do not adequately address or in which rules are not appropriate. This is sometimes called “situational ethics,” and derided as such by those who hold to a rules-based approach. On the one hand, Act Deontology can give the appearance of no guiding principles at all. On the other hand, one can certainly imagine situations in which following a seemingly appealing rule such as “never deceive” may lead to a poor ethical decision, for example a scenario in which a Nazi SS Officer asks a Belgian man if he is hiding a Jewish family in his home. Assuming that there is such a family concealed there, is it wrong in this situation for the man to deceive the Nazi? The situation seems to warrant suspension of an otherwise ethical rule.

Another approach to ethics that has especially strong traction in the digital age is Teleology. A teleological approach to ethics would think not so much about the rules or the act itself, but about the ends or results of that act, its consequences. To apply teleology to the same example, the question is not whether the “never deceive” rule is moral, or whether the act of deceiving is moral, but whether the consequences of deception are good or bad. To the teleological mode of approaching ethics, it matters more whether the concealed family is arrested than what the particular actions of the Belgian man might be. All three of these approaches, act deontology, rule deontology, and teleology, are helpful in understanding ethics in a digital age, but all three are challenged in new ways.

This challenge occurs because the digital media create a different set of ethical problems than analog media. The elements of the challenge seem to be tangibility (the extent to which content is tied to a particular physical manifestation), fungibility (the extent to which content is obligated to permanence), and verisimilitude (the extent to which content resembles nature). The tangibility problem arises from the fact that digital media and art lack the tactility and physicality associated with the forms that have preceded them throughout human history. Binary data, the stuff of digital media and art, cannot be seen or felt in the way that the stuff of their analog ancestors can be, the paint and paper and pen and ink and canvas and bow and string and video tape and so on that characterize how content producers did their work until recently. The fungibility problem arises from an essence of digital media and art that allows content to be endlessly manipulated without corruption of the original source material. Analog media are always in a sense permanent in that a particular iteration exists, some physical manifestation of the content that cannot be undone, whereas with digital media, nothing need ever be permanent, but is eternally adjustable in various iterations without affecting the original. So, fungibility is the property of being easily mutable. The verisimilitude problem arises from the ability of the digital media to mimic life, to appear “real” through the use of light and movement. Synthetic digital content is easily mistaken for nature itself, and the tools for the creation of an appearance of reality are only getting more powerful. These three aspects of digital media and art, their tangibility and fungibility and verisimilitude, in essence their ethereal and protean and mimetic natures, are the source of many ethical conundrums.

An example of the tangibility problem is seen when music lovers who would otherwise never think of shoplifting a CDs from a record store think nothing of downloading bootlegged MP3s from Morpheus. The consequences to the artist and manufacturer are essentially the same, yet peer-to-peer file-sharers can articulate any number of reasons why downloading is moral but shoplifting is not: my own students have argued that it isn’t really shoplifting if no “thing” is lifted (because, supposedly, digital data is not “real”); or that one little download is so insignificant as to be harmless; or that artists and record companies are too rich anyway and downloading their work without paying for it is a kind of noble theft a la Robin Hood. These eRobins seldom seem to share their downloads with the truly needy in their ‘Hood, however.

An example of the fungibility problem is the way that digital content lends itself to the insertion of things that were not there in the original content and to the removal of things that were there. The ability to place products and logos into images using digital technology raises significant ethical questions, especially in situations where the product placement was not originally there, such as the insertion of a logo into the backboard of a live baseball game that is not actually there to be seen by the fans in the stands, or the insertion of a contemporary consumer good into a classic film for the purposes of product placement advertising. The opposite is also possible: the digital elimination of something that was really there, such as when news companies blur logos of competitors that might coincidentally appear in a live shot, or in a more banal fashion, clean-up telephone wires in journalistic photos using Photoshop. The fungible quality of digital media also leads to the ability to tweak existing works of art or entertainment endlessly, such as the way George Lucas has refined and restructured the original Star Wars movies. Digital art does not need to quicken like the Mona Lisa into a particular manifestation, but can morph into endless permutations and iterations.

Examples of the verisimilitude problem are somewhat less plentiful because, unlike the essential qualities of tangibility and fungibility, which simply are inherent in the digital medium, the mimetic qualities of digital art exist on a continuum on which they continue to advance. In other words, the ability of digital technology to render nature accurately continues to get better and better. This raises interesting questions about what is real and what is not, about the whole notion of “real,” and about our obligations to the real. The use of digital sets in cinema production is now commonplace, as actors play out their roles in front of blue screens, or increasingly where the actors are supplanted by photorealistic versions of themselves for the more harrowing segments, or simply supplanted in their entirety. When children play a game of makebelieve, especially when parents play it with them, there is generally a duty to indicate that it is all pretend, that no one will really get hurt, that we can’t really fly, and so on: an obligation to say to the others playing the game, in a sense, that “this is not real.” The verisimilitude capabilities of digital media not only make the play seem real, but relax the duty to reveal that it actually is play. The fourth wall is rebuilt of pixels.

So, three different modes of doing ethics – rule deontology, act deontology, and teleology – confront three new and synthetic content epistemologies – intangibility, mutability, and falsification. From this confrontation emerges interesting new ethical problems unique to the digital world: the ethics of plagiarism in an era of sampling, teleological thinking that breaks down when applied to digital pornography, the ethics of forwarding and blind copying email, the ethics of convergent journalism, the ethics of open source code, and other deontological frontiers.

Ownership is one of the main concepts that tangibility, fungibility, and verisimilitude call into question, which makes sense, because ownership rights and responsibilities are a foundational aspect of many ethical systems. To whom do ideas belong? Who owns content? Do innovations in technology enable new ways of thinking about ownership, and therefore lead to inevitable conflicts between competing interests? Or is it the pressure to appropriate, to possess, driving the technological innovations?

The answers to these questions are deeply rooted in culture, as indeed are the systems of ethics and law we use to determine right and wrong. Skirting the arguments about transcendent ideas for a moment, certainly the codifications of ethics exist within and emerge from social, economic, cultural, and Digital Deontology even technological forces. There is a lively debate on which way the causality flows, but the consolidation of technologies that resulted in Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent rise of mass produced book certainly correlates with dramatic changes in Western culture, including the rise of literacy, Protestantism, the middle class, individualism, the nation-state and so on. Whether the book caused these changes, or was caused by them, or (more likely) coevolved in a set of particular responsive exigencies, is a debate best reserved for the next IDMAA national conference.

It is reasonable to conclude, however, that with the changes surrounding book culture came a new set of ethical considerations with regard to communication. Prior to the mass-produced book, the ownership of intellectual property was conceived of differently. As the culture transitions from mass analog communication to point-to-point digital communication, maxims derived through deontology or teleology will likewise undergo transformation. If the printed book coincides with a dramatic rethinking of communication ethics, then we might conclude that other innovations in technology likewise coincide with changes in normative ethics. The growth of television correlates with dramatic changes in Western culture, and as that culture changed, it is reasonable to suppose that ethical frameworks did, too. And if television correlates like the book does, then what of the symbiosis between ethics and digital technology: the deontology of the Internet, of video games, of digital animation?

To put it simply, if there were ideas and actions that were unethical before the development of the printed book that became perfectly ethical after its dissemination, or to fast forward in time, were “wrong” before the invention of television but are “right” now, or vice versa, migrating from moral to immoral as the culture changed, then what sort of similar changes in our ethical foundations are we undergoing at this digital moment? Digital technology certainly has different elements from other communication technologies that make it ripe for challenging our deontological preconceptions. For example, the digital world is characterized by content available on demand, the subsequent notion of entitlement to content, and the modeling of nature as discreet and not continuous. Do these cultural characteristics of digital media nudge us toward different ethical assumptions?

That bootleg from Morpheus, that jarring appearance of a new and improved Anakin, and that cut-and-paste undergraduate paper all compel us to consider whether our notions of theft, of permanence, and of authenticity can hold up in a media environment characterized by intangibility, fungibility, and verisimilitude. It’s no joke. The conversations about digital deontology had best begin.

Article Authors

Scott Robert Olson

Dr. Scott Robert Olson is President of Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. He has published two books, 30 book chapters, and 22 journal articles in publications in the United States, Canada, China, Korea, Poland, Russia, and India. He has delivered over 100 papers at conferences in Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Korea, Poland, Taiwan, and the United States. Through a $20 million gift from the Lilly Endowment, Dr. Olson helped create the Center for Media Design and the Global Media Network at Ball State University, which won a national award from the American Council on Education. He won an Emmy Award and a Cine Golden Eagle Award in 2004 as executive producer of a documentary film about digital learning. His Ph.D. is from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He grew up in suburban Minneapolis.