Our Moral Responsibilities as Citizens

 From Pysche Ideas, I plucked On the moral responsibility to be an informed citizen. I hear people talking about the Democrats having no values, and I notice these people get their news from Fox News. We cannot be mere passive consumers of democracy, we are supposed to be its active constituent parts. This imposes a duty on us as citizens; a duty as in moral responsibility.

In the case of online misinformation, we should understand that technology giants aim at creating profit over creating public democratic goods. If disinformation can be made to be profitable, we should not expect those who profit to self-regulate and adopt a responsibility toward information by default. Placing accountability and responsibility on technology companies but also on government, regulatory bodies, traditional media and political parties by democratic means is a good first step to foster information environments that encourage good knowledge practices. This step provides a realistic distribution of both causal and effective remedial responsibility for our misinformation problem without nihilistically throwing out the entire concept of responsibility – which we should never do.

It used to be the conservatives claimed the moral high ground over the liberals, I never bought that. The Left has always had its own sense of moral responsibility - the community as well as the individual, versus the conservatives placing all moral responsibility on the individual.

 First, consider a commonly accepted requirement for someone to be responsible for something. According to what is known to philosophers as the epistemic condition of responsibility, one can only be held responsible for outcomes that one caused knowingly. For people to cause actions knowingly, they must have some level of awareness of what they are doing, what the consequences of the actions are, that there are alternatives to the action, and that the action is morally significant. If they do not fulfil these conditions, it is (at least intuitively) difficult to hold them fully and personally responsible.

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The epistemic condition of responsibility is a complicated, hotly debated concept among moral philosophers. However, if we accept such a condition, it raises an even more complicated philosophical question when applied to the proposed responsibility to be informed. How responsible are people for knowing what they know and share? Or, since awareness and knowledge are prerequisites of responsibility, how knowingly do people know and share things?

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Considering these two points together – that the designs of citizens’ information environments are not in their own hands, and that these environments make forming sound beliefs difficult – it does not seem like individual citizens are the ones responsible for the problems of our current collective information environment.

There are the problems set forth a bit academically for the problem of citizens unwarily following propaganda.

A solution:

But all this does not mean that citizens should not be encouraged to do what they can. It is prudent to stay mindful of the sources of online information, pause to consider the context, bias or the satirical nature of a story before sharing, and to check the publication date. Disinformation is especially effective when repeated often, so it’s good to try to remain critical of especially outlandish content encountered multiple times. And while there is great concern over deepfake technology, still much more ubiquitous are ‘cheapfake’ videos, which create manipulations by conventional editing techniques.

Recently, I saw a piece on MSNBC about GOP claims that schools were giving out litter boxes for children identifying as cats. Seems to me no one ever produced photos or film of these litter boxes. Seems to me people ought to have asked where was the evidence instead of buying into silly talk.

From The Bulwark's Furrygate: A Litterbox of Lies:

During that fateful focus group, Stacy from Wisconsin was the first to raise the issue. She recalled a recent job fair where “15 kids were furries. . . . They identify as a cat. Identify as a dog. . . . They had collars on. They had a leash.” Another participant, Jennifer, chimed in concurring that it was a problem in her school district as well . . . even though she eventually conceded that she had “never seen anything.”

And these are the kind of people wanting to make America great, again? Seems to me the kind who would get lost in an elevator.

sch 10/17/22