Morality and law in a digital society

Abstract

The traditional values of truth, justice, shame, conscience, responsibility, duty, forgiveness, and love in the process of civilization give way to functional and formal relations. A new impetus in this direction is given by digitized technologies that open up the possibility of making ethical and legal decisions not by people, but by machines. It is about formalizing morality and law, creating algorithms for making assessments and decisions that could be programmed and executed by artificial intelligence. Fears are caused by the fact that a person in the face of digital rights ceases to be a person, a subject, becomes an element of the law. But, given that the “human factor” often turns into corruption, we have to admit that the formal approach is more objective than emotional assessments based on sympathy. Therefore, in the Critique of Practical Reason, I. Kant contrasted the ethics of feeling with morality based on duty, which the thinker defined as the law of freedom. Obviously, the existing ethical and legal norms require a change or addition of new rules governing the behavior of people in situations that has not been encountered before. This problem arises in the context of the transition from an estate society to a civil one. As man became more and more tightly enmeshed in economic and social orders, he was already thinking according to the formula of nothing personal. The article discusses the problem of substantiation of rational and emotional prerequisites of ethics and law. Models of ethical and judicial decision-making are proposed, including an analysis of the specific application of formal norms and laws, taking into account moral values.