Once upon a time, before the enlightenment, ethics consisted of doing what those in authority told you to do. The ethical argument was, "This is what is right because the pope says so". Rational argument existed with Aquinas and others, but the majority of people received moral theology from the confessional. At the enlightenment with the increasing subjectivity of truth, increased literacy among the populace, and the rise of books, people needed to be convinced by the structure as well as the content or authority of the argument. Ethicists now needed to make arguments like, "This is what is right and now I'm going to show you why". With this shift, a shift from the content of ethics to the structure of the ethical argument also occurred. This content of ethics is still important to many post-enlightenment ethical stances, but content alone is no longer a satisfactory ethical argument.
In the current move to a hypertext based textual environment structure is destabilized. With hypertext, we no longer move through an argument in logical order from beginning to end. Instead readers constructs their own paths, "surfing" through the material. The structure of an argument becomes less important when you can jump out of it at any time to a different, even conflicting, view. Hypertext does not support a monolithic argument, but it does support and facilitate a chaos of conflicting values. In this move from structure to the chaos of conflicting values the foundation of ethics again shifts. The implicit foundational ethic of hypertext is very much like the complexity of relational feminist theology. The shift in foundation is from structure to relationship.
We stand on the cusp of the "information revolution" which is, I would argue, a revolution similar in magnitude to the enlightenment for the western technological world. Beginning with Vannevar Bush's memex machine but instantiating itself perhaps most dramatically with the rise of the internet and especially the World Wide Web, this revolution gives us access to enormous quantities of information and more importantly, it gives us, with hypertext, profoundly new ways to access this information. Demographically, the clear majority of people in this revolution are men. The tools of the information revolution are expensive computers, exciting technology and the enormous internet, which are, in the sense that they seem to fit well into the category of adult male toy, anathema to feminist theology. This tension creates a complex context for a paper on hypertext and feminist theological ethics.
Nonetheless in this essay is set one major task; to explore the analogy between relational feminist ethics and the implicit foundational ethics of the information revolution. By necessity this task is largely descriptive, that is, the main thesis is that there simply is an analogy between relational feminist ethics and the implicit foundational ethics of the information revolution.
Before engaging in the task proper it is important to set some boundaries for our inquiry. Firstly, in this paper we are concerned primarily with foundational or fundamental ethics as opposed to applied ethics. The effects of the internet on women, families, in universities, to national security or to free speech are not of main concern, but rather the ways in which the internet facilitates new or different ways of doing ethics. It must be recognized that this split, between applied and foundational ethics, is to some degree a false one. This is true especially for feminist theological ethics, which often works from applied issues towards foundational statements. Without abandoning this emphasis on the inductive nature of doing feminist theological ethics we seek to focus on the foundational side of the doing of ethics. This paper will examine the ways in which the internet, on a foundational ethical level, facilitates the doing of specifically feminist ethics.
Secondly, as regards feminist ethics, Margaret A. Farley lists three caveats about the relationship between feminist theology and bioethics that also apply to our analogy. These are; "First, we should not expect to find feminist theology articulating .... fundamental values or moral principles which are in every way unique to a feminist theological perspective. .... Second, there is no one definitive form of feminist theology which can be looked to as representing all of its possible implications .... Third, .... the kind of systematic development necessary to bring basic values to bear on (the issue at hand) .... remains in important respects still to be undertaken." Of these three caveats: the commonness, diversity and newness of feminist ethics, diversity merits some further comment. Feminist ethics is a diverse endeavor represented by a diversity of feminist ethical theories. In this essay we will be concerned with a particular type of feminist theological ethics that is focused on the relationships between people, and the forging of ethics out of the chaos of conflicting values that occurs when many voices are brought together and given equal weight in dialogue. We will call this type of feminist ethics "relational feminist ethics". It is important to note that what will be presented here will not entail a complete ethical system but rather a web of interwoven directions towards a new ethical paradigm. With these boundaries in place we are prepared to move onto a description of relational feminist ethics.
Note: This essay is shareware. Shareware is defined in this instance as, "I have put this essay up for you to look at but I retain it wholly as if it had not been published." This little lame lick at legality is instantiated in case this essay gets really published, as I expect it to.