Rousseau and the myth of Glaucus: A reflection on information ethics

Abstract

The scope of this text is to analyze ethics and responsibility in the dissemination of informational data in light of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought, based on a hermeneutics of the passage about the Platonic allegory of the statue of Glaucus as it appears in the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. In examining this passage, which harks back to the myth of the sea-god Glaucus referenced in Plato's dialogues The Republic and The Laws, in addition to texts extracted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an Information Ethics concept is delineated. This concept reaffirms the inseparability—suggested by the Heraclitean maxim ethos anthropou daimon—between the ethical form and political action, highlighting the existence of a bridge that connects, on one side, the notion of daimon as action identified with a eudaimonic purpose, as conceived by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, and, on the other, the notion of ethos as identified with the deontological character, as conceived by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a perspective in which the wonder accompanying the nuances of the metamorphosing magic wrought by the sorceress Circe within the mythical narrative represents the philosophical step of thaumadzein (wonder) toward an ethics of recognition. This ethics is grounded in the acknowledgment that the human individual, even within the most corrupt society, remains essentially good and free to activate the magical power of transformation that makes them akin to the divine. The practical and contemporary relevance of this reflection is shown in the face of the phenomenon of disinformation made possible by the unethical dissemination of informational data, where the concept of the information society, as a harmony between the form of the ethos of philosophical contemplation and the action of the political daimon, remains a challenge to the intelligence focused on the problem of ethical responsibility today.