#morailty

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

- Graham Greene

Logan: If I go outside and all our mugs are on the front lawn im leaving.

What does it mean to be good in today's society? How do we answer the tough questions in life? Today I was in a situation where I didn't have the right answer. 

I work at a popular retail store. As i was working a customer came up to me and asked me. I found $5 what should I do with it? Now this lady was all set to give the money to me and because she didn't take it herself, I assume she assumed I would give it to a manager or something and they would do the "right thing" with it. And honestly I would have taken the money and kept it for myself. But I didn't, I just gave her the choice. I told her you could  give it to a manager. And she did just that. Then I thought.. what would have been the right thing to do. Should I have kept it. Should she have kept it. I don't think the store should have kept it. And there was no way to find the owner and give it to them. I guess the right thing would have been to give it charity or something.

You may say it was just 5 dollars , who gives? But i say.. yeah it was $5 this time but this is not the first time this has happened to me. When i was much younger I had found $100 at a restaurants bathroom. I gave it to my parents who you are suppose to look up to. I wanted to give it to the restaurant. But they told me No its yours now. And that always left a bad taste in my mouth. I went along with the decision but i did not like it.

The question of ethics in our new media landscape is certainly a compelling issue. Many game-changing ideas have come to my attention since investigating the readings for this week.

For many people our age, the question of ethics in new media has been reduced to a tired socio-cultural issue which isn’t even a blimp in our busy lives. Or at the other end of the spectrum, it has become an issue which creates great controversy when raised in the media, conservatives, school and parents. But unlike the aforementioned, Hamelink (2006) argues that new media is not accountable for the ‘tears in the fabric of contemporary society’, rather it is ‘contextually altering the same morally ambiguous human condition which has been plaguing us for thousands of years. ‘

   So should we just accept the morally ambiguous ethical activity on the internet as unchangeable, or should we introduce different regulations for the internet? I would think that the less censorship the better and if this is simply a representation of our physical interactions than so be it. This doesn’t mean a free for all cess pit of harmful conduct, as out standard level of ethics should apply. This view is shared by another blogger, Tess Martin (http://tmartinnewmedia.tumblr.com/post/19882746378/social-media-ethics-politics-beliefs-week-4).

What I’d love to shout at those conservative thinkers is that the net does not imply a confrontation with new moral problems. What is new is that the chance of getting caught on the grounds of immoral behaviour has diminished considerably (Hamelink 2006).

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