I am very glad to signal and share this editor’s letter, authored by Prof. Federica Russo for the journal Digital Society, titled “A Relational Ethical Framework for the Digital Society”.

In this letter, as the title suggests, Prof. Russo calls for and outlines the contours of a relational and constructive framework for the ethics of the digital society, which is complementary with (and somewhat alternative to) an axiological and normative ethics: “the axiological and normative frameworks we—the older generation—grew up with,” she notes, “are obsolete and cannot be the default basis for ethical decision making.”

In advancing a relational and constructive ethics for the digital society, Prof. Russo identifies and elaborates on mine and Prof. Hendrik Ploeger’s problem-solving approach to data ethics, as we discussed in this open access article on Big Data and Society.

Russo writes:

“Their starting point, instead, is that the fabric of society is complex, and this complexity, mirrored in ethical problems, requires problem-opening rather than requiring problem-solving. That is, these problems require the possibility and ability of exploring options for ethical decision-making, taking into account the multiplicity of ethical stances and the fact that technical solutions are inherently open-ended.”

“To approach ethics in terms of ‘problem-opening’, we need to go back to the process of ethical decision-making. That is why recovering a constructionist approach to ethics is important. But we also need to supplement a constructionist approach with an ecological approach which is inherently relational in character: to fully open ethics problems, we need to explore the relations between human and artificial agents, between agents and the environment (social and natural).”

This passage, which intertwines constructionism (or, more radically, emergentism) with relationality as an inherent ecological affair (which owns much, as Russo notes, to Latour’s work), encapsulates very well not only what we write in our article on ethics as a problem-opening process, but also – more radically – what I discuss, together with Prof Derrick de Kerckhove, in our book Quantum Ecology.

Based on this latter, my only caveat to Russo’s letter is the following: as soon as one blends constructivism with ecological relationality, it is fundamental – and, to an extent, inevitable – to acknowledge and maintain a position from within. In fact, a radical reading of Latour’s work whereby human and other-than-human actants are codependent – and, I would say, a proper reading, since his work has been too often simplified in its association with the network and the logic of the rhizome – entails an always perspectival (i.e. partial and incomplete; situated and contingent) and, indeed, open-ended take on reality as a complex system. Complexity, then, is so in two respects: it is both something that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts and something that one cannot know entirely at once.

To the extent to which relations are constitutive of relata – or, better, to the extent reality emerges as an observer-observed entanglement – one is always already part of and in the ecological network – intended as an always-in-the-making practice – of which one can never get a full picture, nor abstract/essentialize its becoming from its constitutive context (which amounts to our critique of axiological and normative ethics). It is (the acknowledgment of) this inevitable within-ness that entails open-endedness and it is this within-ness that demands, in turn, a cautious and responsible approach to ethics as a problem-opening practice that is never “definite”, but always multiple. In other words, ethics is an inherent transdisciplinary endeavor which cuts across onto-epistemological boundaries, resists any privilege point of reference, and configures an ongoing multidimensional disposition.