[Too long. Not long enough. Too loosely joined. Thoughts-in-progress.]

The class session at MIT went better this time than last time, I thought. In part that’s because I’m finding my sea legs. In part it’s because I presented a more structured and coherent set of ideas than last time. I think I got clearer to myself about what I mean. So, here’s a stab at further shaping what I said, minus the masturbation joke and the True Tale of Keanu contributed by one of the attendees.

The mystery of morality for philosophers has been why individuals do what’s right even when it seems not to be in their own self-interest. What makes an action moral? What makes an “ought” statement morally compelling?

Look at how philosophers decide what makes something moral. E.g., utillitarianism says that X is moral if it increases the sum of pleasure. But as soon as John Stuart Mill proposed that, he had to distinguish lower and higher pleasures to counter the objection that gluttony brings a lot of pleasure. Or, suppose there’s some case where killing an innocent child would result in much more overall pleasure than pain . We’d better come up with a variation of utilitarianism that’d save the kid. But why? Because we already know that a rule that says eating all day, taking breaks only to kill innocent children, is wrong. We test our moral theories by seeing if they sort our moral “intuitions” correctly.

Of course there are terrible problems with basing a moral philosophy on intuitions, since Nazis and terrorists have very strong intuitions. But let’s ask a slightly different question: What makes humans capable of being moral, of understanding events morally?

This only looks like a challenging issue because western philosophy generally (even broader strokes a-comin’!) has made two assumptions: It begins with individuals as the atoms and it begins with consciousness as our basic form of awareness. Phenomenology contradicts the second idea, however, and uses it to contradict the first. It says that consciousness is always conscious of something — it’s always filled with the world — and, most important, it is not a detached form of knowing or perceiving. We’re not just aware of our world, we care about it. We care about it because we know we’re finite, vulnerable, mortal. Within the world we care about are some special “things”: other people. We understand from the beginning — because our understanding is mediated through language, the most profound social invention — that we share this world with other people who are likewise caringly absorbed in the world.

How is our shared caring expressed? Through sympathy. But I don’t mean that I feel the same emotions as you, as if we had internal tuning forks. I mean that you and I are capable of caring about the world in the same way. In sympathy we can show each other the world as it appears to us and let the see how we care about it.

Because our existence in the world is a shared caring, selflessness both marks much of morality and forms the initial moral puzzle of why we sometimes act against our own interests: we sacrifice our interests for the sake of others on occasion not because it’s Moral with a capital M but because it recognizes the two basic truths: there are other people and we care about them. Sharing and caring. See, Mr. Rogers was right.

Very basic stuff, yet it runs contrary to the traditional picture of individual consciousnesses living in inner representations of the world, unable even to prove that the world and other people exist outside of our thoughts.

Now, why go through all the above folderol? Because the architecture of the Internet happens to match the phenomenological view of morality rather eerily. Here goes. And I’ll try to be brief.

In a nutshell: The Internet is about truth and the Web is about morality.

The Internet was created to move bits around without knowing anything about what the bits encode: porn bits look exactly like biblical bits. So, at its heart the Internet values a non-partisan, unfiltered exchange of information. It is decentralized. It is permission-free. But these are exactly the characteristics required for the pursuit of truth in a diverse world.

The Web, built on top of the Internet, brought us pages, browsers and links. Of these, links are the most important because without them you only have a set of disconnected pages, not a Web. The Web thus begins with connections, not individuals. This mirrors the human context in which morality is possible: we find ourselves first in a world we share. Connections come first. If you start with the individuals instead of our connection, you can never build up to a moral world. (That’s the true Is that yields no Ought.)

Further, on the Web and in life we share this world not primarily as a physical, brute geology but in sympathy: a shared caring. “Here’s the world I see, based on what I care about. Let’s talk. Let’s joke. Even let’s flame.”

Further further, the links that connect us on the Web are small acts of selflessness, deferring to what we share — the topic of discussion, perhaps — rather than to the primacy of our own place in the world. If every site were as “sticky” as business sites would like to be, there would be no working Web.

The conclusion isn’t and couldn’t be that the Web is moral in the sense that everyone only does Good Things on it. Hah! Instead, I think the conclusion is that the Web’s architecture reflects our own moral natures. We can go as wrong on it as we can in the real world. But unlike the indifferent real world, the Web is based on an admission of shared caring, and thus has a tendency towards moral goodness just as our own moral natures do.

Clive Thompson, currently a Knight science-journalism fellow at MIT, has blogged the session. Asphodel, an MIT student, blogged the previous session under a title you gotta love: “I am profound! Hear me … whimper.”

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