Anscombe’s indictment of modern moral philosophy is full-blooded. She began with three strong claims:

Duty and virtue are no longer the common coin of daily conversation. Both terms strike many of us as old-fashioned and heavy handed. Yet we incessantly talk about what ought and ought not to be done, and about the sorts of persons we admire or despise. As soon as we talk in these ways we discuss topics traditionally dealt with under the headings of duty and of virtue. If we no longer use these terms, it may be because we associate them with heavily moralistic approaches to life, with obsolete codes and ideals, with ‘Victorian’ values and attitudes, rather than because the concerns our predecessors discussed in these terms have vanished from our lives.

Some discussions of the ethics of communication focus on claims about speech acts, others on claims about speech content. However, a focus on content alone is not enough for an account of the ethics of communication, or of the ethics of digital communication. Unless originators act to convey content to recipients, whether individuals or wider audiences, there will be no communication, a fortiori no communication of content.

Communication includes a wide and distinctive range of activities that link originators to recipients. Like other complex activities, it must meet both technical standards and ethical and epistemic norms. Unsurprisingly discussion of many of the norms and standards that bear on communication is an age-old theme. And unsurprisingly these norms and standards may need review and reconsideration if we are to reach a convincing view of the ethics of communication that uses new technologies.

Whichever communication technologies are used, successful communication must be accessible to recipients, intelligible to them and (in relevant ways) assessable by them. However, communication that meets these technical requirements may fail to meet important ethical and epistemic requirements. Such failures can become harder to detect when established ways of communicating are disrupted by technological innovations: and the digital revolution is not the first example of such disruption. In this chapter I shall look at some difficulties produced by past innovations in communication technologies. These disruptions, and the steps taken to deal with them, may offer clues for addressing the disruptions produced by digital communication technologies.

Appeals to human rights make an important but limited contribution to the ethics of communication. On reflection this is hardly surprising: communication is complex; the ethics of communication is unavoidably complex, and the ethics of digital communication unavoidably even more complex. Since human rights approaches to ethics appeal to very few abstractly formulated principles, it is important to ask how those principles may and must be qualified to take account of a wider range of important norms and standards.

The right to privacy is the other human right that bears on communication, although not only on communication. Its formulations in the Universal Declaration and in the European Convention are very similar and quite dated. Although privacy is often discussed in conjunction with other informational requirements, such as transparency, confidentiality or freedom of information, none of these are counted as human rights. And once again, concentrating on one specific right may offer a limited contribution to the complex ethical and epistemic standards that are relevant to communication, and especially to digital communication. Digital technologies raise numerous challenges for privacy, and addressing them is likely to require attention to a wide range of ethical and epistemic norms and standards.

Digital innovations are not the only changes that have reshaped the ethics of communication. A generation or more before the digital revolution, ethical discussion was disrupted by challenges of quite a different sort. Until the twentieth century, discussions of norms and standards in Western cultures were embedded in ethical and cultural traditions that saw duties as fundamental. Ethical discussion addressed the agent’s question ‘What ought I (or we) do?’, and aimed to identify and to justify required and prohibited types of action. Discussions of the ethics of communication followed this pattern. They covered a wide variety of duties and prohibitions that bear on communication, ranging from requirements to speak honestly, to keep promises and to respect evidence, to prohibitions of deceit and defamation, disinformation and discourtesy, and many others.

Despite past difficulties with new communication technologies, many greeted digital technologies with high hopes. Enthusiasts thought that the unparalleled connectivity that they provide would support both wider and better communication between individuals, and lead to better scientific communication and better politics. In particular, many hoped that digital technologies would strengthen and extend democracy by allowing better-informed citizens to participate more fully in public deliberation. Others thought that wider connectivity would make transparency more effective and make a reality of freedom of information.

For centuries discussions of justice and ethics were closely linked in European thought and culture, but they have now diverged in marked, interesting and unsettling ways. European traditions had seen them as contributing distinct but parallel answers to the classic question ‘what ought we to do?’1 Duties of justice were widely seen as requirements both on individuals and on institutions that could, and in many cases should, be backed by legal sanctions, and could in some cases also define counterpart rights. Ethical duties were widely seen as requirements on individuals and certain institutions that did not need to be, and indeed on many views should not be, backed by legal sanctions and did not define counterpart rights. Yet by the start of the twenty-first century claims that justice and ethics were complementary and linked domains of duty – although still deeply embedded in European languages and culture – were often questioned, ignored or even explicitly rejected.