Negatively

If we can choose only between ethical relativism and ethical monism, then any effort to undertake a digital media ethics that might “work” cross-culturally is doomed to two equally unattractive choices: either we follow the relativist and tolerate any and all practices (saving us, admittedly, the difficult work of having to think about any of this at all …), or we adopt an absolutism that would result in a kind of ethical colonialism – i.e., the imposition of a single set of practices upon all peoples, because any difference from the right set of values and practices must be wrong.

Positively: ethical pluralism allows us to see – in some important cases, at least – how people in diverse cultures may share important norms and values; but, at the same time, we are able to interpret and apply these norms and values in sometimes very different sorts of practices – ones that reflect diverse cultural contexts and traditions. Ethical pluralism thus allows us to have a global digital media ethics – one that provides a shared set of guidelines for how we may behave ethically in relationship with one another. But these shared norms and values are interpreted through the lenses of different traditions and applied in different cultural contexts. These different interpretations or applications thereby allow us to preserve the practices and characteristics that make each culture distinctive and unique. In this way, ethical pluralism is a crucial element of the “ethical toolkit” we need if we are to develop a global ethics that respects and preserves diverse cultural traditions and identities.

Ethical pluralism enjoys two additional strengths. First, it is a way of approaching ethical matters that is found not only within Western traditions but also throughout diverse religious and philosophical traditions such as Islam, Confucian thought, and others. Ethical pluralism thus appears to be a widely shared and recognized way of approaching ethical differences – not simply a provincially Western way. In particular, Shannon Vallor’s extensive synthesis of global traditions of virtue ethics, as then reformulated specifically to help us come to grips with the multiple ethical challenges of contemporary technologies, explicitly includes this pluralistic approach in turn