Ethics And Blogging

A deep frustration with the typical curriculum was one of the initial inspirations for my PhD research. I’ve been thinking about how that relates to blogging today.

Part of my frustration with those ethics courses was an almost exclusive focus on the big life and death ethical issues – war, euthanasia, abortion, sexuality. and so on.

What is often missing though is some ethical consideration of the more everyday moral issues of personal and social interaction – honesty, loyalty, commitment, hard work, trust and so on. The deep moral deliberation students are trained to do in these classes isn’t a good template for the moral thinking we do every hour of the day.

This extends to the way church leaders are trained. I’m no fan of Stanley Hauerwas, but I think he is totally right to say that the one thing ministers are not told often enough in their training is to “…tell the truth.”

Part of my fascination with blogging comes from a personal belief (or delusion) that it is a good practice for anyone interested in being morally responsible. I like to believe we’re approaching a moment when pastors, anyone in a position of moral leadership really, will have to explain why they don’t blog. What are they hiding?

To get there though we need to consider how the practice of blogging, and other forms of online communication, square with our spiritual practices.

Consider the issue of citing references, or linkage. One of the conventions of blogging is that if a fellow blogger draws your attention to a piece, say in a magazine or newspaper (or another blog or YouTube), you reference both the destination piece and the blogger who found it for you.

This mirrors the standard academic practices of referencing secondary material. A failure to do so this in academic writing is called plagiarism, or to put it another way, a form of lying.

This is more than just a failure of individual character. It undermines the trust required to make academia work. Citing your sources models your approach to research. It highlights the important role your breadth of reading has in the quality of your work.

It could be that a failure to link well breaks the blogosphere. We are playing with a virtual system here that uses links to build relationships. It’s the blogosphere’s equivalent of word of mouth.

These kinds of ethical considerations also apply to comments. Responding to comments helps one deal with other points of view, with the times that people misunderstand what you are saying, and even with your own errors in thought and judgement.