Values in the Digital World

Ethics and Practices that Underpin Wellbeing

John Bellavance

• Publisher: South North Group
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780645255416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

This book proposes a Digital Moral Framework (DMF) that parents and teachers can use to foster moral values and abilities, and address moral challenges faced by young people while using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The second outcome is the Cyber Values Systems model (CVS) that can be used to understand the role of values (moral and immoral) in the use of ICTs.

Challenges Faced by Young People

ICTs have been greeted with enthusiasm in education and in society because these provide incredible means for moral action, productivity, innovation and creativity.However, unethical and inappropriate practices are challenging society and educational institutions to understand the moral values and abilities that can mediate the use of ICTs by young people, and help them respond to the challenges they face.

It is my experience, although some students behave inappropriately at times such as malicious attempts to damage the reputation of peers, inappropriate responses and profiles on social media, they also demonstrate moral agency such as standing up to cyberbullies and supporting their peers in need in the digital world. Because young people can be both moral and immoral, as a teacher I concluded that opportunities for learning are rich. The reality is that the use of ICTs is rich with promise and risks, both of which carry moral consequences and personal responsibility. Young people are often navigating the digital world without the values and skills they need to be good digital citizens.

However, we have an opportunity to be proactive and prepare young people before and after they set sail in the digital world. A proactive approach requires fostering moral agency (one's capacity to act morally).

CHAPTER ONE

What Makes us Moral Human Beings?

The quest to understand what makes a human being moral is as old as philosophy itself. Currently, moral development, and social and emotional learning with respect to young people is basically conceptualised in two ways. First, children acquire values through both role modelling and socialisation from parents, family members, teachers, peers, and individuals and groups that the child is attached to. Second, because the child is an active interpreter of information, they grow morally through self-reflection by making efforts to become aware of their own values and behaviours, and by trying to change the values and behaviours that they consider inappropriate. Experiences in the digital world can provide young people opportunities to reflect on their values and behaviours.

What are Values?

We need to be able to distinguish between personal, moral and immoral values. Personal values involves our like and dislikes with respect to music, clothing, the arts and so on. Moral values, such as justice have public implications because they affect others. In this sense, a lack of justice or fair treatment of others has implications beyond me personally, hence society sets the importance of moral values in its norms and legal systems. Conversely, immoral values also impact others in a negative way and are considered contrary to the public good.

Moral Reasoning, Moral Emotion and Moral Behaviour

What makes us moral incorporates aspects of the cognitive (reasoning), affective (emotions) and behavioural domains (the moral domains) of psychological functioning and development. To understand morality we must account for how these moral domains connect and interact with each other to form the moral person.

To investigate the role of values and the moral domains in the use of ICTs, I reviewed the literature on moral and developmental psychology, computer ethics, new media and the Australian and Victorian curriculum frameworks. The Australian Curriculum and the Victorian Curriculum were also included because these reflect guidelines that schools in Australia need to consider when planning teaching and learning with respect to emotional and social abilities. I suspect that similar guidelines exist throughout the world.

To determine which values underpin each moral domain, I drew on how moral psychology associates particular values to moral reasoning, moral emotion and moral behaviour. Even though the moral domains are reviewed separately in this book to facilitate understanding, and teaching and learning, the moral domains are inseparably linked. For example, moral emotions are strongly shaped by prior deliberative moral reasoning, while moral emotions influence behaviour. Additionally, the values that the literature indicates are associated with a particular moral domain could arguably underpin other domains. For example, being a person of integrity involves reasoning (having expectations of oneself) and behaving accordingly, hence, the link between reasoning and behaviour. The links between the moral domains are important because they point to a need to take a holistic approach that incorporates all three moral domains when seeking to foster morality.

Let us now take a brief look at how moral development has been understood. The values that are important for each domain are discussed first, followed by abilities associated with moral reasoning, emotion and behaviour.

Moral Psychology and Values

Proposing moral values is not generally considered the role of psychology. However, values are impossible to eliminate from moral psychology because any analysis of moral development must go beyond a descriptive account of what is. It cannot avoid evaluative questions to understand what contributes to positive morality in order to encourage it.

Evolutionary science and research in human behaviour have yielded a consensus that justice, empathy and altruism are part of the biological makeup of our species (Colby & Damon, 2015). Empathy, compassion and conscientiousness (relating to a person’s conscience and remorse) are values, but also moral emotions. Altruism and justice are associated with moral behaviours towards others and social responsibility. A personal sense of responsibility and self-control are also considered important for self-management with regard to moral behaviour, while honesty, integrity and authenticity are associated with moral reasoning.

Computer Ethics and Values

Acquiring and understanding the moral values that underpin moral reasoning and behaviour are crucial for computer ethics. Moral reasoning also relies on learning to apply moral values to make moral judgements with regard to ICTs and justifying moral judgements and decisions.

A review of computer ethics suggests that certain values are particularly important with respect to the use of ICTs by young people – authenticity, integrity, honesty, trust, privacy, accountability and responsibility, stand out. Authenticity is being who we truly are regardless of the contexts in which we find ourselves, including while using of ICTs. Being authentic involves us having integrity, being honest and accountable. Having moral integrity also involves having high moral expectation, feeling a sense of personal responsibility and accountability and living up to one’s moral values. ICTs are now commonly used by adolescents to construct online public profiles. The construction of these profiles raises issues of the authenticity and honesty because this involves a desire on their part to be validated by their peers and profiles can be more easily manipulated using ICTs.

Another important value and moral concern is privacy and how young people portray themselves. Research has found that the need for popularity was a predictor of whether adolescents posted sexual images of themselves online. Conversely, they were less likely to post sexual images if they had a lower need for popularity (Baumgartner, Sumter, Peter, & Valkenburg, 2015).

Accountability and responsibility are also important because of the virtual nature (“I am not physically there”) of the actions taken while using ICTs. ICTs often provide anonymity for the actions of individuals, leaving them to feel less accountable for their actions. Research suggests that anonymity fosters attitudes towards cyberbullying in young people, which also predict subsequent cyberbullying behaviours (Barlett, 2017).

Now let us explore how the moral domains operate with respect to these values.

Moral Reasoning

Initial psychological investigations into moral development were dominated by the role of moral reasoning as the basis for moral development and behaviour. More recently, scholars have questioned whether moral reasoning necessarily results in an actual moral behaviour. It is argued that moral motives are driven in large part by emotions that arise quickly and automatically, and then influenced by moral reasoning, which can correct and override emotions. Reasoning is still important, because the manifestation of moral emotions in adolescents is an indicator that moral values have been internalised (Krettenauer & Malti, 2013). In the course of development, conscious reflection fosters moral understanding, which influences emotional responses. Skilled moral emotions depend on moral reasoning.

Reasoning Abilities

Moral reasoning abilities involve using moral values to evaluate and produce moral arguments, and make decisions. Moral reasoning is important for the early development of moral action tendencies. For example, disengagement from moral reasoning plays a role in the continuation of cyberbullying (Perren & Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, 2012; Wang, Yang, Yang, Wang, & Le, 2017).

Australian and Victorian Curriculums and the Moral Domains

The Australian Curriculum suggests that self-awareness and self-reflection are important reasoning skills. Identifying and describing factors that influence a student’s emotional responses are important for self-awareness. With respect to moral behaviour, self-management involves behavioural skills such as, self-discipline and the ability to delay gratification. Moral behaviour also requires social awareness of others. This includes altruism (assisting others), a sense of justice, in the form of analysing discrimination (racism and sexism), showing respect for others’ perspectives, emotional states and needs, and responsibility towards others. Fostering behavioural skills involves students identifying strategies to manage themselves in a range of situations.

Self-awareness and understanding others are also considered important by the Victorian Curriculum. Moral reasoning abilities involve evaluating and finding resolutions to ethical problems and understanding the ethical principles that are common across people and cultures. Students need to investigate fairness, equality, respect and tolerance. To foster these skills, it is recommended that students explore a range of ethical problems and examine the extent to which different positions share common ethical principles. Students are also required to explore how they manage their reasoning, emotions and experiences.

Moral Emotion

Moral psychology shows that experiencing appropriate emotions and managing them well is essential for morality. Moral emotions are self-evaluative (conscience and remorse) and other-oriented emotions (empathy). They also support motivation for actions, self-regulation and developing relations with others.

Empathy

Empathy is linked to the ability to coordinate perspectives of self and others in children, while deficiencies in empathy are predictors of adolescents’ antisocial behaviours. Adolescents engaging in cyberbullying tend to score lower in empathy measures (Lazuras, Barkoukis, Ourda, & Tsorbatzoudis, 2013). The more empathetic people are, the more they are willing to follow moral values. Individuals with more developed emotional intelligence are better able to discern the morally relevant factors of a situation (Cameron & Payne, 2013; Goleman, 2004; Schalkwijk, Stams, Stegge, Dekker, & Peen, 2016).

Empathy facilitates social interactions, nurture relationships, acts as a protective factor that promotes young people’s psychosocial adjustment and helps individuals to overcome risk factors such as aggression and immoral behaviours. A study of teenagers’ online experiences indicates that they encounter situations that cause them to feel anger (Greenfield, 2008), suggesting the need for empathy. The level of empathy felt by the individual is associated with more lenient moral judgments of others and tempers anger with compassion in situations where activities cause frustration and anger (Cameron & Payne, 2013; Giner-Sorolla, 2012; Goleman, 2004).

Abilities associated with empathy include understanding and feeling what another person is experiencing and feeling, being more forgiving, recognising that moral transgressions have negative consequences on others, acting out of concern for the wellbeing of others and seeking to alleviate the suffering of others.

The Conscience

Conscientiousness is defined by some moral psychologists as a person’s integrated moral values which act as internal moral sanctions that guide decision making and behaviour (the voice of the conscience) (Berkowitz & Grych, 1998; Juthberg & Sundin, 2010; Schalkwijk et al., 2016). The conscience influences behaviour in two ways. First, it leads to self-evaluations as a result of emotional discomfort (remorse) following a behaviour that is in opposition to one’s own moral values. Second, it influences moral reasoning when evaluating behavioural intentions. In this respect, it fosters moral responsibility and acts as a deterrent for immoral behaviour.

Abilities associated with conscience involves reasoning about one’s actions and the emotional experience of feeling committed to and accountable for one’s own moral values, which are closely related to integrity. The conscience is also linked to behaviours that seek to fix what one has done wrong, such as apologising for misbehaviours.

Moral Behaviour

There are two dimensions to moral behaviour: self-management and social responsibility towards others. Abilities associated with self-management include self-awareness, being honest with oneself and self-control. Behavioural psychology has demonstrated that self-control plays a significant role in self-management in academic, occupational and social success (Ent, Baumeister, & Tice, 2015; Schalkwijk et al., 2016). Conversely, low self-control is a significant risk factor for a broad range of personal and interpersonal problems. Values and abilities associated with social responsibility include altruism, justice and respect. Let us now investigate how to foster morality.

Moral Psychology and Fostering the Moral Domains

Moral reasoning is fostered in part, by the acquisition of moral values. Moral reasoning provides a means for values to become part of the individual’s moral identity. Teaching children how to identify the moral aspects of a situation is important because reasoning about right and wrong is necessary to take the perspective of another. Providing opportunities for youth dialogue is one suggested means of acquiring this moral reasoning skill, as groups and collaborative thinking play an essential role in moral change. Practical wisdom is acquired through children’s active participation in relationships with adults, peers, cultural practices and social institutions. A study of cyberbullying among teenagers concluded that moral training targeting maladaptive normative beliefs can form the basis for educational programs and preventive strategies (Lazuras et al., 2013). Fostering the link between moral reasoning (duties) and the consequences of behaviours also needs to occur.

Empathy can be taught effectively through school-based programs, first because moral emotions partly rely on the acquisition of moral values and second, because narratives that appeal to emotions foster moral learning. Empathy also builds on self-awareness, as the individual learns to distinguish between the perspectives of the self and others. The conscience is fostered when people come to recognise that moral transgressions have a negative impact on others and learn from their mistakes.

Parental involvement and connection with the adolescent foster moral reasoning and behaviour. Modelling moral values in the life of the child is another important means of fostering morality, as are peer groups, which can serve to positively reinforce and influence behaviour.

CHAPTER TWO

Do we Drive Technology or Does Technology Drive us?

Young people need to understand how their values and behaviours affect their activities and others in the digital world, but also how the digital world affects their values and behaviours. This understanding will help shape their good practices as participants in online communities. As we navigate the digital world, it is a two-sided story of the reciprocal effect of humans on the digital world and the digital world on humans. The Cyber Values Systems (CVS) model presented in this chapter is used to understand such effects, but also provides guidance with respect to values in the digital world.

As we investigate the immoral values that mediate the use of ICTs, this highlights the importance of the need for particular moral values and behaviours. Having said this, we should not to adopt a reactive or deficit approach by mostly focusing on the detrimental effects of ICTs on morality. This view can result in a restricting the benefits ICTs can offer. A second problem of focusing on the detrimental features of ICTs can result in downplaying the significance of the moral agency that young people have while using ICTs. For this reason, the CVS model i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: A Teacher’s Journey
• Chapter One: What Makes us Moral Human Beings?
• Chapter Two: Do we Drive Technology or Does Technology Drive us?
• Chapter Three: Moral Issues in the Digital World and Moral Reasoning
• Chapter Four: Moral Issues in the Digital World and Moral Emotions
• Chapter Five: Moral Issues in the Digital World and Moral Behaviours
• Chapter Six : Integrity – Values and Moral Reasoning in the Digital World
• Chapter Seven: Heart – Values and Moral Emotions in the Digital World
• Chapter Eight: Character – Values and Moral Behaviours in the Digital World
• Conclusion
• References