Information technologies and the tragedy of the good will

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com . Copyright SpringerInformation plays a major role in any moral action. ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) have revolutionized the life of information, from its production and management to its consumption, thus deeply affecting our moral lives. Amid the many issues they have raised, a very serious one, discussed in this paper, is labelled the tragedy of the Good Will. This is represented by the increasing pressure that ICT and their deluge of information are putting on any agent who would like to act morally, when informed about actual or potential evils, but who also lacks the resources to do much about them. In the paper, it is argued that the tragedy may be at least mitigated, if not solved, by seeking to re-establish some equilibrium, through ICT themselves, between what agents know about the world and what they can do to improve it. Information Ethics, Tragedy of the Good Will.--Peer reviewe

Agency and Structure in Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust

The article explores how in Modernity and the Holocaust to his liquid turn\ud writings Zygmunt Bauman’s work assumes that people live in a deterministic\ud world. Bauman fails to distinguish agency as an analytical category in its own\ud right and as such fails to capture self-determination, agential control and moral\ud responsibility. All of Bauman’s work is based upon the assumption that the\ud individual loses their autonomy and the ability to judge the moral content of their\ud actions because of adiaphortic processes external to themselves as individuals\ud giving rise to agentic state in which the individual is unable to exercise their\ud agency. In contrast to the argument in Modernity and the Holocaust this article\ud suggests that the Nazis developed a distinct communitarian ethical code rooted\ud in self-control that encouraged individuals to overcome their personal feeling\ud states, enabling them to engage in acts of cruelty to people defined as outside\ud of the community. In his post-2000 work where the emphasis is on the process\ud of liquefaction there is the same undervaluing of human agency in the face of\ud external forces reflected in Bauman’s concepts of ambivalence, fate and swarm