Victoria Jung: Ethical Socialism
Why a Technological Society Will Need a New System for Making Decisions
Several years ago, while working on my book Ideology of a New Era, I tried to look ahead and understand where society was heading and what values were gradually beginning to replace those we had grown accustomed to.
At the time, I wrote about a transition from materialism and hedonism toward a new form of socialism and transhumanism. By this new socialism, however, I did not mean a return to the Soviet model or the rejection of private property. On the contrary, I was talking about the search for a new balance between individual and collective interests — one in which the interests of society do not require personal sacrifice, but personal success no longer exists entirely separately from what happens around us.
Today, I would like to take this idea further.
Over the past few years, technological progress has accelerated so dramatically that the question of a new ideology has, in my view, become even more relevant. But today I would give the direction I described then a more precise name.
Ethical Socialism. Why ethical? And why socialism again? When Possibilities Become Too Numerous
We are used to thinking of technological progress as moving forward.
We communicate faster, produce goods more efficiently, automate work, and process enormous amounts of data. Artificial intelligence can already perform intellectual tasks in seconds that once required hours or days of human work.
And most likely, we are still only at the beginning of this transformation.
In my book, I connected this new form of socialism with transhumanism and suggested that technology would increasingly transform both the physical and intellectual capabilities of human beings.
Today, I would add another problem to that prediction.
The more possibilities technology gives us, the more decisions we have to make about how those possibilities should be used.
Technology can answer the question:
Can we do it?
Science can tell us:
How can we do it?
Economics:
Is it profitable?
The law:
Are we allowed to do it?
But one question remains:
Should we do it?
And that question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer.
A New Scarcity
If the ideological systems of the twentieth century largely argued about how society's resources should be distributed, one of the central challenges of the twenty-first century, I believe, will be to determine the principles by which society makes decisions.
Who owns property? How should profits be distributed? How much responsibility should the state assume? What matters more — economic freedom or social equality? Entire ideological systems of the last century were built around these questions.
But technological society is gradually confronting a different category of questions.
Imagine that a company gains the ability to replace several thousand employees with artificial intelligence.
- Technologically, it is possible.
- Economically, it is profitable.
- Legally, it is permissible.
Are these criteria enough to make the decision?
Or should we also ask: What happens to the people whose jobs are replaced? What happens to the labor market if thousands of companies make the same decision at the same time?
How will such decisions reshape society ten or twenty years from now?
I deliberately do not offer an answer to whether those people should be replaced.
Automation may ultimately bring society far more benefits than harm. The disappearance of some professions may lead to the emergence of entirely new ones. Perhaps human beings will finally be freed from an enormous amount of repetitive and meaningless work.
But I am interested in something else.
Consequences must become part of the decision itself.
We Have Learned to Think About Possibilities. Now We Must
Learn to Think About Consequences.
I believe this is one of the most important transitions the people of a new era will have to make.
We have become extremely good at expanding our capabilities.
We have been far less successful at taking responsibility for the consequences of what we do with them.
As long as human capabilities were relatively limited, the scale of many human decisions remained limited as well. Technology has fundamentally changed that relationship. Today, a single decision made by a government, a corporation, the owner of a technological platform, or the creator of an algorithm can affect millions of people. And the consequences are not always immediately visible.
A decision that looks excellent from the perspective of today's economy may reveal its social consequences ten years later. We may create an extraordinarily convenient technology and only years afterward understand how profoundly it has changed education, the labor market, human relationships, or human beings themselves.
This leads to a principle that, I believe, will become increasingly important:
- The more possibilities technology gives us, the greater our responsibility becomes for the
consequences of our choices.
We cannot continue expanding our freedom to act indefinitely while assuming that our level of responsibility can remain unchanged.
Ethics as a Guide for Decision-Making
This is where ethics enters the discussion.
Ethics is often perceived as something abstract: philosophical reflections on good and evil, morality, right and wrong behavior.
I am interested in ethics from a much more practical perspective.
As a guide for decision-making.
Imagine that several options are available to us.
All of them are possible. All of them are legal. Several are rational. One is significantly more profitable than the others.
How do we choose?
At this point, an additional criterion appears:
- What consequences will my decision create for another person, for society, and for the future — and am I prepared to take responsibility for those consequences?
In this sense, ethical thinking means developing the ability to think not only in terms of actions, but also in terms of consequences.
Not only:
“Do I have the right to do this?”
But also:
“Do I have the right to do this knowing where my choice may lead?”
That represents an entirely different level of decision-making.
This is why I do not see ethics as a limitation on technological progress.
Ethics is not a brake on progress. It is a navigation system within it.
From Magical Thinking to Ethical Thinking
If we look at human history from a very broad perspective, we can see that people have always needed a framework to guide their decisions.
When the world around them was mysterious and unpredictable, people tried to explain events through magical connections, signs, and higher powers.
Religious thinking offered a more stable system of coordinates. It provided concepts of good and evil, permitted and forbidden, right and wrong. The development of science gradually strengthened another mode of thought — rational thinking.
We learned to demand evidence.
To verify facts.
To compare alternatives.
To measure effectiveness.
And this has been an extraordinary achievement of humanity.
I am certainly not suggesting that we abandon rational thinking. Quite the opposite. But today it is becoming increasingly clear that rationality alone may no longer be sufficient.
Because two decisions can be equally rational.
Moreover, the most rational and economically efficient decision may have the most damaging consequences for people.
What then?
I believe this is where another level begins to emerge — ethical thinking.
Not instead of rational thinking, but alongside it and on top of it.
We do not stop asking:
Is it logical?
We add:
Where will it lead?
We do not stop asking:
Is it efficient?
We add:
For whom?
We do not stop asking:
Is it profitable?
We add:
What price will others pay for that profit?
Perhaps the ability to ask the second question after the first has already received a positive answer will become one of the most important human skills of the future.
Why Socialism?
This raises an obvious question.
Why use the word “socialism” at all, given the enormous historical and political baggage it carries?
Because I am not talking about a return to twentieth-century socialism.
In Ideology of a New Era, I already argued that a new form of socialism should not require people to abandon their personal interests for the sake of collective ones, and certainly should not revive the idea that the individual must sacrifice themselves for the state or the collective.
The task is different: to find a new balance between the individual and society.
Today, I would take that idea one step further.
For me, the “social” dimension of Ethical Socialism means, above all, bringing society back into the decision-making equation. A decision does not involve only the person or institution making it.
There are also those who will be affected by it.
A business decision is not only about profit.
It has consequences for employees, customers, communities, markets, and society.
A government decision is not only about political outcomes.
There are people who will have to live with its consequences.
And even when an individual makes a personal choice, freedom does not mean that its consequences for others cease to exist.
Ethical Socialism therefore should not abolish individual freedom.
On the contrary, I consider individual freedom one of the most important values of the new era.
But mature freedom differs from immature freedom in one fundamental respect.
It assumes responsibility.
From “I Can” to “I Am Responsible”
One of the central ideas in Ideology of a New Era was the concept of a person's inner ideology.
Human beings need their own values, beliefs, and principles against which they can evaluate the information they receive and on which they can base their decisions. This is why any transformation of society ultimately begins with the individual.
Today, I believe the next stage of this idea is the transition from having one's own system of values to developing the ability to consider the consequences of one's choices for others.
This is also why Ethical Socialism cannot be built through laws alone.
We can write thousands of rules.
Create commissions.
Regulate artificial intelligence, genetic technologies, social media, and corporations.
But technology will almost inevitably develop faster than legislation.
By the time we formulate a rule for one situation, another will emerge that has never existed before.
This means that people need more than external restrictions.
They need an internal principle for making decisions.
And perhaps one of the most important transitions of the new era can be expressed very simply: from “I can” to “I am responsible.”
Not to Stop Progress, but to Learn How to Guide It
I do not believe in an ideology of the future that asks humanity to stop technological development.
We simply will not do it.
Human beings are too curious, too ambitious, and too determined to expand the boundaries of what is possible.
Nor do I believe we should stop.
Technology has the potential to solve an enormous number of humanity's problems. Perhaps many things we currently accept as unavoidable parts of human life will, within a few decades, appear to us in the same way we now look back at the limitations of previous centuries.
So the question is not whether we should move forward.
The question is what system of values we will take with us.
Will we arrive with extraordinary technologies but the same level of responsibility?
With unprecedented power over information, nature, and even human beings themselves — while continuing to make decisions based primarily on efficiency and individual gain? I believe this is one of the central ideological challenges of the twenty-first century.
Ethical Socialism
This is why today I would define more precisely the direction that several years ago I described as a new form of socialism. Ethical Socialism.
I do not yet propose treating it as a complete political system or a fixed set of economic rules.
Rather, I see it as a direction for the development of society and a new principle of decision-making.
Within this system, ethics becomes a guide for choice.
Consequences become an essential part of evaluating a decision.
Responsibility increases together with our capabilities.
The interests of society are considered alongside the interests of the individual, not instead of them.
Technological progress continues, but “we can do it” is no longer sufficient justification for action.
Perhaps the greatest scarcity of the future will not be information, technology, or even resources.
We are accumulating more and more of all three.
The greatest scarcity may become a criterion for choice.
The ability, when faced with dozens of technologically possible, legal, and rational options, to choose not simply the fastest, most profitable, or most efficient one, but the one whose consequences we are prepared to accept.
The twentieth century spent a great deal of time debating how resources should be distributed.
The twenty-first century may have to learn something far more complex: how to make decisions when we possess capabilities humanity has never had before.
And if this is true, ethics is no longer an abstract philosophical category.
It becomes an essential instrument for the development of a technological society.