Juan Enriquez - Right Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics

Juan Enriquez

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2020 Juan Enriquez

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Enriquez, Juan, 1959- author.

Title: Right/wrong : how technology transforms our ethics / Juan Enriquez.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020002963 | ISBN 9780262044424 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: TechnologyMoral and ethical aspects.

Classification: LCC BJ59 .E57 2020 | DDC 170dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002963

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To Mary, Diana, and Nico, and the next generations...

who will get to shape the ethics of New Worlds

d_r0

Sex. Its changing. Fast. So too are some of our core notions of what is Right and Wrong, about sex, and about so many other topics. What your grandparents thought about contraception, IVF, surrogates, and gene editing is very different from what you now take for granted. Things that they would have considered unacceptable and unethical are now commonplace. Technology often changes our beliefs and, in moving fundamental ethical goal posts, leaves many feeling discombobulated; others end up angry and scared, on the wrong side of history.

Whether you are conservative or liberal, there is so much sound and fury surrounding constant change. Perhaps that is one reason youve felt a touch uneasy lately? You are surrounded by so many people telling you, with absolute certainty, that you are doing x, y, or z wrong. And, at the same time, you too may feel: That is not how I was brought up, what I was taught. Why are so many doing really evil stuff?

It sometimes feels as though demons are loose everywhere, like never before. One ends up asking: Why is it so hard, for so many, to just understand and do what is RIGHT? In this Age of FEAR but also of GREAT Certainty, people take sides and barricade themselves behind positions they feel comfortable with. They declare they are tried-and-true (insert your favorite label): gay-rights activists, red-blooded conservatives, #MeToo, God-fearing X, Y, Zs, anti-vaxxers, #MAGA and so on. Many of us tend to judge an acquaintance as soon as we find out if they are R or D, for or against (insert favorite cause here).

Maybe even you feel that, unlike the rest of the surrounding, unwashed mob, you know Right from Wrong. And you loudly proclaim your absolute certainty, at school, in a stadium, on Twitter, Facebook, in bars, coffeehouses, and ballot boxes.

The far right and the far left have no monopoly on concern over the future. A lot of us are scared. For better, and worse, the speed of invention and adoption of new technologies is such that we have little time to consider, less time to adapt. Pick a random young adult book or movie: most are post-apocalyptic. The delicious terrors and perils of Harry Potter morphed into far darker takes: The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, The Matrix, Divergent, and Game of Thrones. How about videogames? Pong, Tetris, and Super Mario morphed into massive online multiplayer games where armies of millions do battle and die.

How did we get here? Why arent the old customs, norms, beliefs enough anymore? One thesis is: people are just so much more radical, evil, racist, deluded, and angry these days. I do not believe this. I think most people are kind, caring, and, sometimes desperately, want to do the right thing; they may hold opinions different from you or me, but outside a small coterie, on the extreme left and right, we are more connected, more aware of what should be done, of how we should treat others, than ever before. As we communicate more, we care ever more about what happens in Africa, in a ghetto, in a suburb, to those like us, and sometimes to those very different from us.

In a sense, as occurs with those constantly exposed to vast amounts of evil and bloodthink doctors and soldierswe end up thinking the whole world acts like this. We are so exposed and sensitized that we forget how much got so much better, and we forget, as things get better, ethics change across time. Most of us now hold ourselves, and others, to higher standards, and somehow we expect our ancestors to have lived up to our newly enlightened benchmarks.

We had better be careful because there is a powerful, longterm trend upending ethical debates: the rules change. What we consider to be Right, ethical, and normal is changing at an unprecedented speed. Many of the pillars of certainty, of faith, of what we have held to be self-evident and eternal truths have shiftedand they continue to shift rapidly. In most cases, this is a good thing.

What we consider Right and Wrong today is different from the Right and Wrong of the past. The Old Testament is not the New Testament. We dont burn heretics. Most dont hold slaves. Most dont torture and behead in public squares for the masses entertainment. What was once broadly acceptable no longer is so.

We are used to thinking of ethics as a pristine, white marble statue:

An unmoving, eternal, static, legal totem to RIGHT.

But what if what is ethical fundamentally changes over time?

Right versus Wrong is a deadly serious subject, but we also have to recognize and laugh at our folly. We have made, and continue to make, many mistakes that will seem obvious and tragic in retrospect. In the highest and richest of medieval courts, marrying twelve-year-olds was natural, and chivalrous. In some spots, when there was a serious lack of calories available, cannibalism was considered a normal and natural practice well into the twentieth century. (And it reappears periodically, under extreme, circumstances, i.e., Chilean rugby team post-Andes airplane crash in 1972.) Sexual mores vary widely across societies and across time. Burning heathens at the stake is now done with Tweets instead of faggots of wood. (Oh and BTW, the use, definition, and acceptability of single words can change over time as well, look up faggots in the dictionary if you do not know the original meaning and then look up gay, bumfiddle, cock-bell, and fuksheet).

Across civilizations and history... boy, have we screwed up time and time again.

Yet we are still wedded to old notions of how to wrestle with ethical questions, starting with the most fundamental of erroneous beliefs: ethics dont not really change, therefore I know Right from Wrong! So we dont get wildly excited when someone helpfully suggests lets spend the afternoon on an ethics review. And we do get really intolerant when someone disagrees with us.

Because we think we KNOW RIGHT from WRONG, we think of ethics as BORING. Think about it... You arrive at a new school, a new job, and soon thereafter, with a big KA-THUNK, an ethics-HR manual lands on your desk. Usually this long document, filled with platitudes, authored by Captain Obvious, containing some of the most boring, corporate-speak ever written by a human. Truth is, if you ever show up somewhere and do not already know the stuff they teach you through these catechisms, then you probably should not be attending that school, taking that job, interacting with these nice, decent folks.