Network Society's Moral Anomie And May The Statute

The development of network information technology has a great influence upon modern society. It not only deconstructs the former structure of human society, which makes a new modelof society structure--network society--appear, but also collides with the core of traditionalcivilization and makes a new model of civilization--network civilization--exhibit slowly.Meanwhile, a new conflict between the new and old morality is contained in the field of morality, which is the important content of civilization. This conflict comes from the large number of phenomena of moral anomie in the network society, which are mainly showed from three aspects: i.e. the behaviors lack of norms, such as these in the fields of network privacy right, network intellectual property right and network advertisements, etc.; the norms of behaviors conflicting with each other in the fields of communication freedom, discourse rights, and resource sharing, etc., these conflicts come from different economic, technological and ideological backgrounds between different countries and districts; behaviors of extreme anomie-network crimes, such as network "hackers"(mainly refers to the "crackers"), network cheatings and network thefts, etc.. All of these phenomena are deeply rooted both in society and in recognition. Among them, the most important are the lack and contradictions in people's value standards, norm systems and meaning systems. In order to go out of the moral dilemma, people come to construct many kinds of ethical norms of network to regulate and control moral anomies. However, as we know that, any norm is a kind of restriction on the human freedom, therefore, setting up a norm requires for reasons and proofs, especially to ethical norms of network, in that the essential spirits of network are "freedom" and "sharing". So it is needed considering carefully for people to decide what kinds of norms won't hurt these spirits. With the help of the traditional ethical principles and wisdom, we can easily find, by analyzing practically and realistically the status of moral relations in the network society, that to the fully new network and network society, the ethical norms of network are actually a kind of beings of probability, which are not imposed by any outside authorities or only determined by their wills. From the viewpoint of human beings' long-term benefits, many present and impending ethical norms of network, compared with other ethical norms of human being, are just some kinds of probable norms. The reasons that network ethical norms are some kinds of probable norms lie in that traditional ethical ideas and principles cannot make every stakeholder get the consistent "happiness", "fairness" and "justice" in such aspects as privacy right, intellectual property, speech freedom and information property, and so on. In addition, the networksociety is now an appearing society, and we can hardly give a specific judgment to the "merits" or "demerits" of all kinds of network behaviors. These situations reveal further the probability of ethical norms of network. But any probability conceals the inexorability, so the more we recognize deeply the probability of ethical norms of network, the nearer we can approach the inexorable ways to construct reasonable and excellent ethical norms of network. These ways are: establishing an ultimate standard-improving the benefits of the whole society and every person; constructing a negotiation principle; analyzing the stakeholders, etc. Only by these ways, can we come out of the etliical dilemma of network society, and go further to form the "ought-to-be" principles, i.e. principle of autonomy, principle of compatibility, and principle of development, in the process of constructing the ethical norms of network society: And in the end, these principles embody our value orientations and meaning pursuits in the process of constructing ethical norms of network.