Peter Singer: Ethical Issues in an Online World

Overview

"The unexamined life is not worth living" said Socrates, a conviction that would ultimately lead to his death in 399BC. His crime? Corrupting the minds of the young and impiety. But the message had already been delivered: what happens to you when you start to examine your very assumptions and unexpressed presuppositions? Are you living an ethical life? Do your actions correspond to your ethics?

Renowned philosopher Peter Singer realises these are difficult questions to ask, but asking them nonetheless, he says, is an important part of being a sentient human being. First coming to prominence for having nudged the animal rights movement into action with his book Animal Liberation (1975), Singer is an eponymous figure in the world of bioethics and morality, tackling the subjects that define who we are and the way we live (e.g. poverty, immigration, abortion, euthanasia, animal rights and so on). To this end, his current focus on the internet and the ethical dillemmas and issues it unzips is apt.

How are we to think about information, access, censorship, sexuality and community in an online world? As Singer has written, "today, if you have an internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries..." With this kind of connectivity and fingertip power, Twitter, blogging or even a basic google search can quickly become a political tool. Plato described Socrates as a gadfly, constantly buzzing and stinging the side of the Athenian State in the service of truth. Singer too carries his own kind of gadfly sting, and it will be interesting to see this applied to the way we live in an online world.