Coral Reefs One of the First Lessons

Coral Reefs

One of the first lessons that nearly every one of us learns is that it is important to share. We are told to share our snacks with our fellow kindergarteners and to share our toys with visiting cousins. We are told to share the dinner table conversation and our good wishes. And these admonitions are generally cross-cultural: Different cultures and different religious traditions all ask that their members act generously in the world or that they cannot consider themselves to be good people.

But what is it that we are ethically obligated to share? Certainly anything that we can live without that does not harm another living creature. We must share food unless we or those under our care are starving. We must donate blood in times of crisis unless to do so would harm us. We must offer water to those who are laboring in the sun, and warmth to those who would otherwise starve.

The people who make the least money are much more likely to give to charity, and this is entirely relevant here. Those who know firsthand what it is like to do without are those who are the first to step up and give to others.

We are not enjoined by laws to give so deeply and certainly not to strangers or those to whom we owe nothing in a formal sense. But if we would like to consider ourselves to be ethical beings, we must pay what we can into the communal pot so that any who are hungry may eat. Even if it is only a smile to someone who is sad, we must each pay what we can afford to pay.

Question Two

The phenomenon of Wikileaks is as important for the ethical questions that it raises as for the information that it has released. As Marshall McLuhan said in a different context: The medium is the message. For partisans of Wikileaks, the fact that information can be so carelessly and anonymously collected necessitates a shift in how we each look at the responsibilities that we have in relationship to what we know. The ability that so many people now have to expose so much about others makes it very hard for most of us to understand how serious that information is.

There is so much information about each one of us that this diminishes the seeming importance of each fact. This is not, of course, true. This is also, however, not the core of the ethical issue here. Privacy remains important even when there are tens of thousands of facts recorded about each one of us in computers across the world. However, simply because privacy remains important in the digital age, it is less important than preventing harm from being done to wider society.

Individual rights will always be important. And individuals must always be protected. But it is of even greater importance is the courage to taking responsibility for assessing in any given situation whether individual privacy trumps larger social good or the reverse. Ethical decisions are indeed situational. In this case it seems to me that the information should be released. There is moral hazard in doing so, but this is almost always the case. Releasing the information means preventing further harm by doing something morally problematic. Doing harm to prevent greater harm is certainly an ethically defensible position. However, it does leave one with dirty hands.

Question Three: Fair Use

Art is one of the slipperiest areas for the law to address, which is not surprising given that one of the major functions of art (at least arguably) is to provide slippery spaces in culture. Art provides exceptions and excuses that other realms do not. Artists can mock and elevate their subjects and get away with extreme attitudes because this is their work. Artists get to break the rules because the work of art in our society is to break rules.

This brings us to the ethical problems at the heart of the practice of music sampling. Musicians frequently "sample" each others' work. It is certainly established practice and has been so for centuries at least. But should they be able to do so? The answer to this shifts over time because the ethics of the practice are not distinct from the technology. Digital technology makes it astonishingly easy to sample someone else's music and to do so in a way that makes the sampling/borrowing/larceny seamless.

An essential element of the doctrine of fair use is that part of what makes the use fair is that it is not seamless, that it is always visible. A newspaper review that quotes a line from a movie (the archetypal example of proper fair use) is fair precisely because where the scriptwriter's work begins and ends and where the journalist's work begins and ends are absolutely clear. There is an absolutely clear acknowledgement all around as to who gets credit for what. This is precisely what is not the case with sampling. Sampling muddies the waters of who gets credit for something.

This is the crux of the ethical issue: Who gets credit? This overrides other relevant issues such as whether or not the sampling is some form of homage. The issue is not whether the sampling artist likes the first artist or not, whether s/he wants to exalt or humiliate the first artist. It is the act of borrowing that lies at the ethical core of the issue. The reason that the fair use doctrine was developed was to protect the economic rights that the maker of something of value had in her or his creation. Fair use applies to the preservation of economic value. The world of music is too complicated to be assayed simply in material terms. Sampling, as long as the relationship is explicit, is as complex as the world it is a part of. It is a way of both creating and acknowledging value.

Question Four

Facebook has indeed become the face of Big Brother. This is not what Orwell probably imagined when he wrote about a world in which we are always observed, and the differences between what he imagined and what has come to pass are illuminative because the differences between Big Brother and Facebook can tell us how to parse the differences in ethical behavior by different entities. It would be simpler (at least it would seem to be simpler) if we each could come up with a unified set of ethical rules for ourselves and apply them wherever we go.