To most people, the moral is what they think they can get away with. Consequently, technology plays an important role in morality by enabling people to get away with more, or by forcing them to get away with less.
This view of morality may seem cynical, but it has clear advantages over other definitions. These definitions may be grouped into two types: causal and functional. A causal definition defines something by its antecedents, while a functional definition defines something by its consequences.
Causal definitions of morality hold that behaviour is moral if it is consistent with some standard already established. So Christian morality considers behaviour moral if it is consistent with Christian standards. In general, the idea of any causal definition of morality is that the Good can be defined, and then used as a yardstick against which to measure the ethicality of specific behaviour.
The problem with this approach is that no one agrees about the definition of the Good. Even the Christians cannot agree among themselves about what Christ’s teachings justify. Some Christians, for example, approve of first cousins marrying, while others disapprove.
Most functional definitions of morality define moral behaviour as what promotes the Good. For example, the moral has been defined as what promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Since nobody knows what happiness is, though, that definition has never really flown. Again the problem is that people cannot agree about what the Good is.
The definition I have proposed avoids this problem by being non-prescriptive. The chief effect of other definitions seems to be to promote wrangling about what the Good is, while this definition actually makes falsifiable predictions about behaviour.
For example, in the early 1960s, sexual intercourse between unmarried teenagers was considered tremendously wrong. It often resulted in pregnancy, and pregnant girls were forced to leave school, have their babies somewhere out of town, and then put them up for adoption. Their boyfriends would also be moved out of town so that the couple could not re-unite.
Then came a piece of technology called the birth control pill. Once it became available to teenagers more of them started having sex. Soon enough legislators were worrying (as have members of provincial parliament in Ontario on at least two occasions) about whether measures to control sexually transmitted disease would discourage sexual experimentation by teenagers. Sexual experimentation by teenagers has been transformed by technology, then, into a wholesome developmental experience.
What’s more, eventually teenagers started to get pregnant in large numbers, anyway, and they were not forced to leave town or give up their babies. Having once approved of sex, we decided to treat its consequences as something to be coped with rather than to be punished.
These days people argue the rights and wrongs of violation of copyright. These days many people, if not most, are for it. In the old days, though, people did not advocate the illegal copying and dissemination of recorded music, since disseminating it in a playable form was damnably difficult. This option was chiefly available to people who owned expensive equipment. Denied the opportunity to disseminate music illegally, people were not interested in advocating its desirability.
These days, though, people seem dumfounded when it is suggested that being able to disseminate music illegally does not justify disseminating music illegally. However, the ability to shoot someone with a handgun does not imply the ethicality of actually shooting someone with it. The difference is that most people have no reason to fear that their music will be copied, since they are incompetent to produce any, while there is some probability that someone with a handgun could avail him or herself of the opportunity to pop a few caps in their direction.
Technology may function in another way in changing ideas about morality. The internet, for example, demonstrated that pornography does not have the terrible consequences that many people believed it had. Consequently, people are now able to make legitimate careers in the exciting field of facilitation of masturbation.
Furthermore, the internet has made it easier to apprehend people who disseminate pornography that is the product of sexual abuse or exploitation. Of course, technology can make some breaches of morality more difficult. However, technology is rarely used to turn what is now considered moral behaviour into immoral behaviour. It plays only a defensive role in preventing people from expanding the definition of morality. As I have noted, once sexual intercourse between teenagers was approved, we were not going to return to the days when pregnant teenagers and the boys who got them pregnant were punished.
When we examine the effects of technology on morality we see that it expands moral behaviour when there are few victims of the expansion. Recording companies are few, people who listen to music are many, so it is moral, in the popular mind, to act against the interests of the minority.
However, technology has also allowed people to steal other peoples’ identities more easily. Since the number of potential victims of this development comprises the entire population, this behaviour remains strictly immoral.
So our falsifiable prediction is that the likelihood that a behaviour will be considered moral is proportional to the number of people it benefits and inversely proportional to the number of people it harms. The behaviours which benefit and disadvantage about equal numbers of people (men and women, say) are the ones that are going to be the most hotly debated.
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