Digital Ethics: The Emergence of the Problems

The article sets a goal to show the problem area of digital ethics is today and to identify those problems whose solution will allow digital ethics to be considered as an independent branch of philosophical ethics. To this end, an analysis is conducted of the moral issues and solutions arising from the ever-increasing digitization of human activity. The structure of the problem area is determined by the degree of theoretical elaboration of the subject of digital ethics itself and is described in terms of applied and philosophical ethics. In the ap­plied aspect, two areas are also distinguished: non-specific – general ethical problems (con­fidentiality, security, lying, etc.); specific – new problems arising from digitalization (AI, auto­mated decision-making). The philosophical part includes questions arising from reflection on the phenomenon of digitalization itself and the definition of fundamental concepts. Defi­nitions are also divided into two types: essential – about what a digital subject or digital ac­tion is; substantial – about what the digital world / reality is, etc. It is shown that within the framework of applied ethics, digital ethics does not form its own subject, which raises doubts about its future development and does not provide a solution to the problem of dehu­manization, which manifests itself in the practice of applying digital technologies in two ways: through the alienation of decision-making from humans, the objectification of humans (direct dehumanization), and the dehumanization of humans by humans themselves through the use of digital technologies as amoral (reverse dehumanization). However, now, there is not only no theoretical foundation, but even no clear formulation of the problem of its con­ceptualization. It is concluded that for the development of digital ethics as a full-fledged the­matic area within the philosophy of ethics, for the internally coherent development of its is­sues, conceptualization is required both of digital existence (in its essential and substantial aspects) and of the relationship between digital and non-digital existence.