Initial Considerations for Islamic Digital Ethics
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Initial Considerations for Islamic Digital Ethics Mohammad Yaqub Chaudhary 1 Received: 2 January 2020 / Accepted: 23 July 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Recent literature on Islam and the digital covers a wide range of topics and themes; however, what is yet to be developed from an Islamic perspective is a broader philosophical framework that accounts for the nature, exigencies and affordances of contemporary digital technologies. In advance of such a framework, this article is an attempt to open the way to philosophical engagement with issues of digital ethics from an Islamic perspective. After a brief review of recent literature on Islam and the digital and a significantly earlier work by Ziauddin Sardar, in which he proposed an information strategy for the Muslim world, this paper provides some background to Islamic ethics and the wide field of ethical theories in the Islamic tradition. This paper then proceeds by identifying and outlining examples of contemporary themes in Islam and the digital which conceal underlying philosophical and theological issues. Finally, this paper considers the significant scale and scope of the transformations involved in the ongoing transposition to the ‘onlife’ and highlights several areas where Islamic perspectives may be seen to converge or diverge with other strands of scholarship on digital ethics. Keywords Intercultural digital ethics . Philosophy of information . Islam . Cyberspace .
Religion . Onlife . Information ethics
1 Introduction In ‘The Ethics of Information’, Luciano Floridi writes that information ethics (IE), as construed within Floridi’s broader philosophy of information, is compatible with a Buddhist, Confucian, Shinto or Judeo-Christian view of the world (Floridi 2015b, 328). The underlying question this paper is concerned with is to what extent the same may be true for an Islamic view of the world.
* Mohammad Yaqub Chaudhary [email protected]
1
Cambridge Muslim College, Cambridge, UK
M. Y. Chaudhary
The literature on the philosophy of information (PI), information ethics (IE) and related fields now comprises a wide range of scholarly perspectives on digital ethics from various cultural and religious traditions. For example, Soraj Hongladarom has written extensively on a wide range of topics in information ethics from Buddhist, Thai and far eastern perspectives, such as privacy (Hongladarom 2016) and the online self (Hongladarom 2018), and Charles Ess has written and edited several volumes on digital media ethics and ‘Information Technology Ethics’ (Hongladarom and Ess 2006) that contain contributions and views based on Confucian, Buddhist, Middle East and African traditions. While there has been some interest in issues related to digital information communication technologies, the internet and social media from the Muslim community at large in general forums of Muslim discourse, to the best of our knowledge, there has been considerably less scholarly investigation of the issues from Muslim perspectives at deeper philosophica
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