Ethics: The Impact of Technology on the Youth and Their Moral Values

Ethics: The Impact of Technology on the Youth and Their Moral Values

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

Technological advancements have posed ethical questions from the issue of cloning to privacy and communication because as much as they make life easier and are indications of what humanity can achieve, they also beg the question “are we losing our humanity”? This issue has poised technology and religion against each other so that it is as though the more one edges towards the areas that depend on the tangible; what can be touched and felt and explained through empiricism, the more one deviates away from that which depends on belief and faith alone. Philosophers like Michel Foucault who are at the forefront of thinking and those at the helm of our present-day telecommunications and social networking like Mark Zukerberg and Bill Gates are all atheists. This buttresses the binary opposition we speak of.

Although it is a given that our generation known as the Millenials have gained so much through technological advancements; albeit there have been more innovations within the past five years than there are within the past two thousand years, serious humanitarian issues are being grappled with as a result of human dependency on these inventions. It is easier now to communicate with people who are miles away all at the same time without needing to take time and think about forming useful physical human relations with others. Young people on a bus no longer communicate with each other as the older generation used to. Against this background, we are setting out to delve into the ethical effects of technology on the youth, their moral values and their education.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

The problems generated by technology on the moral values and education of the youth of today abound. A typical millennial is more interested in the opinions of his peers than ever before. Social media platforms have initiated a habit of pretence in the circle of life of the youth. It exposes them to the flashness of life so that those who are unable to gain these luxuries at the moment do anything to get them or fake having them thereby making them live on a pretentious foundation. These social media platforms celebrate people with questionable sources of wealth than those with high moral values. What counts are followers and how many people follow one. Consequently, these uninformed and misinformed young people do everything to stand out including lowering their moral values, dressing extremely indecently. The technological developments that aimed at bringing the world closer and together to connect better have thereby alienated the world especially the youth and the shallow competition we mentioned earlier consequently increase the rate of sexuality among them as sex sells more than anything from the music videos to their prized TV reality shows where the morally depraved are celebrated. With sex being peddled through technology, pregnancies and STDs are on the rise. Of course, they run to technology to provide them with answers and the online pages on google whose major interest is to draw traffic to their websites suffuse them with the wrong information and education.

This research aims at discussing at length, these ethical questions raised by the technological effect on the youth’s moral values and education.

1.3 Research Questions

The research question which has called forth this present work is the inquiry into the ethical effect of technology on the youth generally. They include:

Do technological advancements affect the youth’s moral values negatively?

To what extent are these humanitarian issues?

At what point does innovation encroach mortality?

1.4 Objectives of the Study

The objectives of this research work go beyond posing the above ethical question to tackling them in a very remarkable, yet, academic way with all the acceptable and methodologies of the domiciled discipline.

In the area of topographical studies and language disciplines, it will, directly and indirectly, proffer informed solutions as to the problem of how much technology affects language and vice versa. The implication is that legislation upon guiding technology through a better language consideration will have a better backbone. This is a very polarizing issue that has over the centuries catalyzed into crusades and tyrannical inquisitions. So this work aims also at mapping out not only how technology affects the youth ethically but also to design workable guidelines in determining the boundaries between innovation and morality and how the use of these inventions can amount to abuse.

1.5 Significance of the Study

Albeit this work was done under the department of philosophy, its significance encompasses the humanities generally, the physical sciences, pharmaceuticals, medical sciences and even the biological sciences. This work is important to those that specialize in parenting guidance and counselling. It will inform them in drafting guidelines for how to slowly and safely integrate their children and their youth into a technologically ruled world so that they do not lose the morals bequeathed them during their formative years.

1.6 Research Hypothesis

Every research sets out from an assumption that would either be proven to be correct or not. In the case of this one, the present writer is taking as a given at this point that technological inventions in all their trajectories are affecting the youth’s moral values and education negatively.

1.7 Scope of the Study

The scope of this research work would be determined by two things namely the various categories of technology like social media and the internet generally, pharmaceuticals which includes all the hard drugs that the youth are prone to abuse, movies and what they present and how technology has eased the procurement of those materials so that their monitoring by the older generation is close to impossible.

1.8 Limitations of the Study

A research problem such as was tackled in this one would require one to sift through a stack of material on previous arguments and counter-argument on this polarizing issue. And with the limited time and space, one has in research of this kind, one has to work beyond one’s limits to achieve thorough work within the given time frame.

1.9 Definition of Terms

Ethics

This is the philosophy of morality and behavioural conduct. Especially when it is related to a particular profession. In the last sense, it is the body of rules and regulations that dictate the conduct of practitioners of a particular profession.

Technology

This is a term that in one sweep describes the organized body of knowledge that is used for practical purposes especially in the sense of the ones developed by a particular culture for use.