Cyberspace: Ethical Issues and Catholic Perspectives
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Cyberspace: Ethical Issues and Catholic Perspectives Author: Wojciech Moranski Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107473 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2017 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College School of Theology and Ministry Academic Year 2016-2017 Cyberspace: Ethical Issues and Catholic Perspectives A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the S.T.L. Degree from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry By: Wojciech Moranski, S.J. Director: Andrea Vicini, S.J., PhD Second Reader: Prof. Richard Spinello, PhD April 2017 Morański 1 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 2 Chapter 1: The new dimensions of liberty in cyberspace ......................................................... 5 1.1. Freedom as a central value on the internet ........................................................................... 5 1.1.1. What is freedom? .......................................................................................................... 5 1.1.2. Freedom in the technology of the internet .................................................................... 9 1.1.3. Hackers ....................................................................................................................... 13 1.1.4. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Movement .................................................. 14 1.1.5. Freedom of digital content .......................................................................................... 17 1.1.6. Freedom in Cyberspace............................................................................................... 18 1.2. Some ethical issues in cyberspace ..................................................................................... 19 1.2.1. Intellectual property in cyberspace ............................................................................. 19 1.2.2. Right to free speech .................................................................................................... 23 1.3. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 2: Moral Theology of the Internet .............................................................................. 29 2.1. Did God create the internet? .............................................................................................. 29 2.2. Being co-creators: moral consequences ............................................................................. 34 2.2.1. The divine perspective ................................................................................................ 34 2.2.2. The perspective of the human ..................................................................................... 37 2.2.3. The perspective of cyberspace as a gift of God .......................................................... 38 2.3. Theological reflections on human action in cyberspace .................................................... 40 2.3.1. Cyberspace as a structure of grace .............................................................................. 41 2.3.2. Cyberspace as a structure of sin .................................................................................. 46 2.3.3. Jesus Christ as the Savior of Cyberspace .................................................................... 52 2.4. Virtues in video games....................................................................................................... 58 2.4.1. Transhumanism in video games.................................................................................. 60 2.4.2. Moral implications of transhumanism in video games ............................................... 68 2.4.3. Video games and virtuous behavior ............................................................................ 74 2.4.4. Faith, Hope, and Charity in video games .................................................................... 78 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 83 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 84 Morański 2 Introduction In 1941 the Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges published a collection of his stories containing, among other things, the one short story titled “The Library of Babel.” This short text describes in detail a fictional, mysterious, unlimited, and eternal library that contains all possible books. Borges carefully narrates the architecture of the library underlining its simple and repetitive structure of similar galleries of shelves. “The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian.”1 Even the books have very unified form, covers and typefaces. Nevertheless, such a seemingly unlimited source of knowledge is useless. Since the library consists of all possible books, the vast majority of them are meaningless strings of letters. Humanity, as described by Borges, continuously investigates the library and develops theories about the structure and qualities of this peculiar set of books. One of these theories claims that the library is total, which means that it consists of all books in all languages. “All – the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog (…).”2 This theory of the totality of the library, on the one hand, made people briefly very joyful and happy to have access to the priceless treasure. On the other hand, the inability to find any useful book drove people into prolonged depression. The awareness that each book can narrate the truth or a lie and that there is no way to find which is correct, additionally fostered this hopelessness. Many divisions arose between people who were 1 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 112. 2 Ibid., 115. Morański 3 trying to find the true meaning of the library, and this led some people even to fight, kill or commit suicide. Nevertheless, there are many who tirelessly believe there is some Order in the library. Jorge Borges could not imagine the internet when he was writing this story. Nevertheless, his intuitions, in my opinion, fit very well to the reality of cyberspace that we experience today. As in the Library of Babel, the internet gives all of us access to seemingly unlimited sources of knowledge organized in a very standard way. Nevertheless, the access to All is at the same time a blessing and a curse. The search for meaning in cyberspace does not seem easier than in this mysterious library. The internet frequently becomes a source of divisions and of immoral behavior. Therefore, cyberspace, as the Library of Babel, requires a careful investigation and a search for true meaning. Following the intuition of Borges, I too believe that there can be found an Order in our contemporary digital library. In this thesis, I try to make a small contribution to this search for an Order in cyberspace. In the first chapter I study some new dimensions of freedom, which arose together with the development of the internet. I present the technology and the culture of hackers as two sources of a new understanding of liberty in cyberspace. I also highlight two moral issues, which are present in cyberspace, and that, in my opinion, were caused by this redefinition of freedom. In the second chapter, I try to apply Christian moral theology to address, interpret, and suggest some possible solutions for some ethical issues in cyberspace. In order to build a theological foundation to address further considerations, I study the relation between God’s plan of creation and the rise of the internet. In the second section of this chapter, studying the issue of hate speech online and the phenomenon of Wikipedia, I present cyberspace simultaneously as a structure of sin and a structure of grace. The theology of the Trinity, and of Jesus as the Word of Morański 4 God, help me to give some Christian interpretation of this discrepancy. In the last section of this chapter, I study the phenomenon of video games, particularly online multiplayer games. I identify a deep relation between the video game culture and transhumanism, and I address its implications for morality. However, I also find some ethical virtues particularly present in the community of gamers. Finally, I identify some occurrences of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, in the virtual world of video games. This helps me to give some Christian moral interpretation of the virtual world of video games. Morański 5 Chapter 1: The new dimensions of liberty in cyberspace 1.1. Freedom as a central value on the internet Freedom and liberty are central values for humanity in many aspects of its life: personal, socio-political, ethical and even religious. The topic of freedom,