For an integral ecology of digital environments
by Adriano Fabris
One of the strands that I think is more important to explore concerns the transformation, in the current technological context, of the notion of "environment". In particular, there are three points on which I believe it is important to dwell, precisely because they need to be addressed and governed from an ethical perspective.
1) First of all I want to underline the fact that today the term "environment" knows an enlargement beyond its uses in the past, which referred only to the natural environment and the cultural environment created by human beings. Today, however, we live in artificial environments which are not only built by us, but which have a certain degree of autonomy and which are largely made possible by non-human agents. The question that we will have to investigate, in particular, is that relating to the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the way in which these technologies are able to produce, develop and maintain the virtual environments with which we interact on a daily basis. It is a dimension to be urgently addressed from an ethical perspective, also due to its pervasiveness.
2) All of this - and this is the second point that I think is important to touch on - leads to the consequence that human beings today are capable of living not only in a single environment, but in many parallel and co-present environments. This has happened before, but now it occurs in new ways. Indeed, today we can experience, at the same time and in the same space, the real environment in which we physically exist and, together, the many virtual environments to which ICTs give access.
In summary, the question to be explored and discussed is that we must learn to inhabit these various environments in a just and good way, each considered in its characteristics: natural, cultural and artificial environments; environments created by the interaction between living beings, environments created by human beings or produced by machines. In many cases, faced with this multiplicity, we are forced to choose. And so we need to understand how to make the right choices.
For this purpose it is necessary to elaborate a new ethic. It is an ethic that is truly capable of responding to the challenges of the technology we are dealing with: an ethic that can face the environmental transformations that we have before our eyes in all their complexity. This is the integral ecological ethics we need today. In other words, more than an eco-logy, we need an eco-ethics.
