Opening Conference

Make Virtue-Ethics Viral: Media Ethics in Infosphere  

At the VIII Media Ethics Conference, Professor Basilio Monteiro will open the face-to-face sessions with a paper entitled "Making Virtue Ethics Go Viral: Media Ethics in the Information Sphere". The conference will take place on July 11, at 10 a.m., at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra.

The 8 billion netizens in digital infosphere, hinged to dynamic media devices are producers, distributors, managers, influencers and consumers of the commodified content, thus beyond the control of any one regulatory agency. Virtue-ethics is the answer to this pandemic of artificial intelligence.  

Virtue-ethics refers to the collection of normative ethical philosophies that place an emphasis on being (ethical) rather than doing (ethics). In virtue ethics, morality stems from the identity or character of the individual. Morality comes as a result of intrinsic virtues. Intrinsic virtues are the common link that unites the disparate normative philosophies into the field known as virtue ethics.  

In the infosphere, the media are extensions of the human (McLuhan) and thus it is a matter of being and not doing. Media are not tools, but linguistic logic in a digitized society. 

I argue that nurturing virtue-ethics, not utilitarian or deontological ethics, is the way to deal with the ubiquitous mediatized society, which is integral to living in the infosphere.