Elizabeth O'Neill

In today's techno-social environment, it is easy to make, store, and share digital recordings, such as photographs, audio fragments, and video streams, at an unprecedented scale. While there are often obvious immediate benefits to making and sharing digital recordings, serious hazards associated with these practices have thus far gone underappreciated. We contend that today's digital recording practices threaten to radically alter how we perceive and evaluate ourselves and others, producing an ongoing, socially and morally disruptive shift toward unbounded moralized judgment. The shift toward unbounded moralized judgment in turn poses several hazards, including widespread, difficult-to-restore reputation damage, negatively altered self-perceptions, and the stifling of morally right behavior. Our central claim is that in the current techno-social environment, every individual has a pro tanto reason to avoid being recorded and to avoid recording others. On the occasions where the reasons for recording outweigh those against, more must be done to counteract the hazards introduced by recording. We conclude the article by outlining possible avenues for technical, regulatory, and societal approaches to mitigating the hazards of unbounded moralized judgment.

The extent to which normative cognition varies across cultures has implications for a number of important philosophical questions. This chapter examines several striking commonalities and differences in normative cognition across cultures. We focus on cross-cultural commonality and difference in norm typologies (especially the moral-conventional distinction); the externalization of norms; which aspects of life are normativized; and some of the concepts and principles associated with the normative domain. We argue that the distinction between moral and conventional norms is probably not universal and that several concepts and principles that have been suggested as candidate universals may in fact be culturally local. We nevertheless isolate two possible universals: the phenomenon of externalizing norms and the normativization of a preferred class of subject matters.

In this reply to van de Poel’s (Philosophy & Technology, 35(3), 82, 2022) commentary on O’Neill (Philosophy & Technology, 35(79), 2022), I discuss two worries about the general contextual integrity approach to evaluating technological change. First, I address van de Poel’s concern that the general contextual integrity approach will not supply the right guidance in cases where morally problematic technological change poses no threat to contextual integrity. Second, I elaborate on how the approach supplies mechanisms for balancing caution with the need for change.