Ethics: Practical Morality
Many people have written about blog ethics as bloggers, but I do so as a reader. I expect ethical behavior, not passively but assertively. Not naively expecting ethical behavior, but as always demanding it one way and another.
To start off let me point to a diary by teacher ken which mentioned an article. I liked teacherken's comments better than the NYTimes which said little worth reading.
But teacherken, you seem to span a dichotomy upon which one cannot be on both sides.
First, codes of ethics have to a large degree become meaningless.
I am not arguing for an ethics free environment. I do not believe that a code of conduct is universally applicable in the blogosphere.
But we can't have it both ways, either we will commit to making blog ethics work or we will not claim to want them.
Update [2005-5-9 22:27:40 by pyrrho]: This is far too long, but everything in it is correct... or so I gather, but let me tell you a few things... you are free to leave a comment of your own, there is no required reading... there are bulleted lists but I apologize to the USA Today readers for a lack of color graphics...
To Be Fair
Teacherken, you make a fair point but I think it needs to be more incisive. I may be mistaken but to be honest it seems to me there is a little of the blogger defensiveness in the position presented... It is a presentation of broad reasons to suspect ethics won't work for blogging, even though you "don't want an ethics free environment". But you can't have it both ways, either we will commit to making blog ethics work or we will not claim to want them.
I believe teacherken, you are reaching for a better answer, no offense intended that I start by trying to clarify this dilemma with a more clearly pro-ethics position.
Ethical People Are Always Faced with Unethical Foes
Ethics is not weak. It's strong. It's practically strength of character itself, doing what is right because of how it affects other people, in situations where you can "get away with it".
It's not that ethics has "become meaningless"... not at all, every ethical agent ever has faced the issue of having to compete and deal with the unethical opponent. It's not that there cannot be a universal ethic... yes, there are differences between bloggers (does the blog allow comments? Does it allow "diaries", and many other things) but this doesn't mean there is no universal ethic. Some lawyers don't go to trial, but that doesn't mean there can be no ethics for lawyers that involve trials, it's just that some of the ethical concerns may not apply to some lawyers. The ethics are still universal. A psychiatrist ought not seduce their patients as an ethical matter, but the fact that some psychiatrists are not attracted to their patients doesn't bear on that, they did not require the ethics to behave as thought decent, but the ethics were still universal.
Ideas which weaken the belief that an ethical environment is even possible is a dangerous perspective. It's not merely a conservative perspective, but an ultra-regressive perspective of the sort that supposes the same about all ethics... "it's really not worth sorting out... light the competition decide, the market for merit, and let the mighty victor write ethics from the formula of their own success".
My Demand As a Reader
The most general of ethical demands:
Honesty and Disclosures: I want to know that the idea I'm reading is a real idea. I don't want a Bush supporter pretending to post in favor of Kerry. I don't want to read an idea that is a strategy hack presented as an expression of moral indignity. I want honesty. And for honesty I want disclosure.
Legality: ethics is not directly related to criminality, I do not think the unethical behavior generally requires legal remedy, there should, instead, be professional remedy. A lawyer can be disbarred, a psychiatrist can lose their license to practice, and a blogger can lose their credibility.
Mythos Affecting Blog Ethics
Myths of blogging ethics:
- Blogging is egalitarian: Anyone can blog! You can have the same voice as anyone else! This is the mythos of the meritocracy... no one really thinks that we all speak with the same authority, no one really thinks we can speak with the same volume, to the same number of ears, no one thinks "anyone" can go start their own Daily Kos, it is special. It is an accomplishment and if equaled by another person still could not and would not be equaled but us all. What people are really saying when they think this way has to be understood as something different - they are saying that the people with the majority of eyeballs deserve them! They earned them. Therefore their disproportionate voice is legitimate. If you go start a blogger.com blog you will not get that voice... and you don't deserve to until... you prove yourself in the meritocracy. "The big bloggers deserve their extra voice." AND I agree actually, I think there is a lot of meritocracy to blogging, and I think people like kos and atrios deserve the channel of communication they have cultivated. People listen to Kos because they want to. But it does mean this egalitarian utopianism about blogs is not a real justification that ethics are not needed, that somehow finally in this media a laissez-faire attitude is going to serve perfectly well using invisible hands. Anyone can start a newspaper too so the New York Times deserves it's voice. Anyone can get video equipment and anyone can start Sinclair Broadcasting... but that doesn't mean Sinclair Broadcasting is not bound by ethics. It does not mean they can use their voice merely as they see fit. Their success has not proved that they ought to be allowed free reign.
- Cost of blogging is negligible: the cost of running a high impact, high bandwidth blog is not negligible. Pointing out the zero cost of starting a blogger.com blog doesn't affect this. You can't run scoop there. And you can't collect the eyeballs, you can't sell advertising until your traffic is far greater than what you get for free. High bandwidth web sites COST MONEY, lots of money, and unless done as a philanthropic effort by a wealthy person, they have the same corporate issues regarding how to pay for the enterprise. Pretending blogging is free is just an excuse to subtract money issues from the media and pretending they no longer important. It's just an excuse to pretend the rules of ethics that arise from economic pressures won't apply, but of course they do now as they have for thousands of years.
- Blogging Exceptionalism: Just in general, this is an extension of the idea that the Internet is exceptional. It is not fundamentally exceptional, rather it is evolutionary. You can call the Internet "exceptional"... as in "an exceptional achievement", but calling it exceptional in the sense that it deserves exceptions from the rules of the regular world, either business logic or ethical considerations is no better than teen-agers thinking they've invented sex. It's not so new as you think dear. The law of money in communication has not changed. Oh, it's been reshaped by the internet, it's been EVOLVED by the internet, and it has gotten still more peer to peer characteristics, but the invention of the mimeograph was a step on that path too, even the printing press in the first place, so the Internet was not the invention of this broadening of peer to peer communication, just the latest most impressive expansion of it. But none of this changes the fact that the eyeballs are not evenly distributed, not expect to become so, and not infinite in number. Money still buys ads. Ads still buy exposure. People still need money to survive. All the tools required to "manufacture consent" using the internet are still quite firmly in place.
So we need clear blogger ethics and we as readers have to be the ones to demand and define them.
I want honesty, and to a large degree, I want disclosures. I don't fear your bias, I fear when you hide your bias or worse... don't appear to know you have a bias. I like daily kos because the bias toward progressivism has always been stated. I'm not a partisan, I'm a philosopher, but I still appreciate the statement that kos views daily kos as a partisan effort... that declaration is useful to me. When kos worked for Dean, he declared so... I appreciate that knowledge. With that sort of disclosure I don't need to see eye to eye on every single issue and understand the sentiments I read. Rather than think kos has sold out when he supports a Democrat with different positions, I know this is part of his partisan perspective on progressive strategy, I can agree or disagree on the merits and not worry there is an ethical problem, per se. We can debate the philosophy and strategy, seek errors there, rather than have the ethical worries that we might be being manipulated or lied to.
I think all blog ethics that I personally care about probably fall from this demand for honesty and little else. Mostly all I want is to know that when I read an idea from a poster it's a real opinion, not a clever ploy, not some stupid or clever manipulation, yes, let the buyer beware, and when we detect what we are being wary of, let the buyer also make ethical demands, and demand better. Let's not even wait, lets tell our bloggers what we expect and what will earn them our disrespect. There are many details left over which may follow from my concern.
e.g.:
- should a blogger disclose a source?
- should a blogger disclose financial interests?
- should a blogger have correction policies?
- should a blogger acknowledge evidence contrary to their point?
- what are the types of blogger... teacherken brings this up and it's a good point, of course, a commercial blog is not the same beast as a non-profit blog, a blog with comments is different from one without, and so on. I believe there is a universal ethic available in blog-honesty rather than blog-objectivity, but we still have to figure out which ethical demands to make of which type of blog.
The Unethical Blogger
That was my proactive comments on ethics. Answering, "where will the positive statement of ethics come from?", and "how do we find reasonable rules of thumb for good clean blogging?"... but it's much easier with these and all ethical issues to describe the unethical examples. Generally it is in response to such examples that practical ethical systems develop. A problem with ethical systems is often that they address things done wrong in the past, and they are forever open to new unethical tricks and facing these new threats is how we refine our ethics. So what follows are some blogging practices I would call unethical by example.
Unethical Blogging
- to change your position because of an undisclosed payment
- to change your position because of a disclosed payment
- to pretend to have an opinion you don't have
- to intentionally misinform
- to lie about your standards (e.g. even if you real standards would otherwise be ethical)
- to plagiarize (ie. by not giving credit, quoting is of course very bloglike)
The Moral
Listen, I'm not moralizing here. I'm bringing up food for thought. I have a strong opinion that ethics is important, I am willing to moralize about that kernel of truth against those that think ethics are pointless restrictions on "being tough". But I also have a relativist's attitude about how difficult it is to find a good ethical system... it's not easy and automatic, it's subject to debate and practical considerations (ethics is, in a way, "practical morality"). But I know these are not reasons to step back from ethical question, that these are not reasons to wait for ethical failure to consider the question (that's a slow and regressive approach I believe).
Especially at dKos where there is a good example of practical ethics in play! Rather than argue that blogger ethics don't pertain we ought to abstract from dKos and other ethical blogs to find and define for the Thune bloggers out there what goes and what doesn't. In general, the price of violating ethics is to lose your good standing. In blogging, you can still blog without good standing, that's the egalitarian part, but if we are clear on acceptable ethics then we can have some confidence that an ethical failure has no real credibility.
As with all things progressives we should not wish there are no standards, we do not need protection for a laissez-faire attitude so that some day we might be not impeded by a "rule of ethics"... we are confident that we will be ethical, we seek clarity on ethics, we are confident such rules help the quality of the endeavor, and to state our ethics is exactly stating our philosophy and ideals, which we cannot dare be shy of. I'm sure we know most of what we expect from the bloggers, but I'm not sure why we are hesitant to tell them.
If this is the egalitarian medium, we will lead the leaders in this regard.