Talking to Yourself

In 2012, a 14-year-old Pakistani girl received one of the most frightening messages imaginable: a terrorist group was plotting to kill her. Her name was Malala Yousafzai, and two years later, after recovering from a gunshot wound to the face, she would become the youngest Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. But in that initial moment, when she had just heard about the threat against her life, she found herself focusing inward trying to make sense of her situation. When we're stressed, turning inward is a common response—but it often backfires. Instead of making us feel better, it leads us to experience chatter. Chatter is the cycle of negative thoughts and feelings that turn our capacity for introspection into a vulnerability rather than a strength—we worry, ruminate, and catastrophize rather than come up with clear solutions for how to improve our circumstances. And chatter is even more common now, given the turbulence of a once-in-a-century pandemic, a racial reckoning, and extreme political polarization.

Ethics and Morality

Academic texts have to conform to certain standards, and one of these is to define the concepts they use. Texts dealing with ethics or morality therefore have to define what these concepts mean. In the case of English text about computer ethics, the definitions are usually done by contrasting the teleological and the deontological tradition. Another possibility is to talk about absolutist versus relativist ethical theories. Frequently, the terms ethics and morality are treated as equal. Arguably, texts on computer ethics are not meant to be expertises in ethics and many readers of these texts tend to be practically oriented. It is often argued that an introduction into the depth of ethical theory will do more to confuse these readers than help them. However, such arguments can be used to blend out problematic aspects of ethics and pretend that there are clear solutions to these problems when these are in fact contentious. This book chooses another route and will spend some time giving an introduction to normative terms that may be unfamiliar to many native English speakers. Furthermore, it will emphasise that the complexity of the problems warrants a more fine-grained use of the terms, and that it is useful to distinguish between ethics and morality.