Moral deftness : an intellectual virtue ethic for the social media age

Present day social media appears to pose unique challenges to the development and upholding of moral virtue, resulting in polarization and morally vicious behaviour becoming all too prevalent on such platforms. It is the central aim of this thesis to present a new kind of moral theory which aims at overcoming these challenges, adopting features from all corners of moral philosophy – including Kantian rationalism, Humean sentimentalism and Aristotelian virtue theory – in order to construct an account befitting the conditions of the modern day. Such an account will also make extensive use of the contemporary conception of the intellectual virtues as identified by virtue epistemologists – though crucially, it shall seek to position the intellectual virtues as a part of the moral domain. This shall give rise to the concept of “moral deftness”, which understands morally right action as a kind of skill in which agents make use of their intellectual virtues in order to pick out and act upon the ethical nuances of the situations they find themselves in. Moreover, the notion of “moral maladroitness” will also be developed as the antithesis of moral deftness, encouraging us to approach moral matters with a highly charged – and highly unskilled – sledgehammer approach, which serves to eliminate moral nuance rather than pick it out. Such maladroitness will thus come to typify the kind of morally vicious online behaviour that the thesis aims to overcome through the theory of moral deftness.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Author dc:creator

• Wade, Amelia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Darby, George
• O'Brien, Dan

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/1pv8-sd50

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:7bfce09e-8d87-4579-b786-34e596a09052:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1