Draft – January 2005 Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue*1

Building from the conclusions of the previous section -- that consistent patterns of action can be both expressions (or evidence) of longstanding character traits, or virtues, and also causally responsible for the development of virtues -- we may usefully ask about practical arrangements in the world that might either support or undermine such opportunities for training and expression of virtue. While the archetypal Aristotelian mentor-student relationship is one such possibility, it offers little more than a place-holder for the contemporary environment, where the potential sources of learning as well as habitual training are both increasingly diverse and decreasingly systematic. The central thesis of this paper is that socio-technical systems of commons-based peer production offer one such context for positive character formation.

Claiming that characteristics of organizational environments may have the power to shape human disposition is not unprecedented. An important thread in scholarly discussions of political philosophy is concerned precisely with this issue as it studies complex relationships among politics and political institutions, on the one hand, and ethics, morality, and virtue on the other. The idea here is to evaluate political practices and institutions, at least partially, on the basis of their contribution to the moral quality of the actions, practices, and people that they foster.³⁸

Sandel’s work provides the most useful parallels for the purposes, of this paper when, he refers to critical policy debates that took place during the early, formative periods of the founding of United States. In arguing in favor of one policy over another, it was not uncommon for key political figures to cite as a critical factor the potential impacts on human character. An example Sandel cites is George Mason, who vehemently opposed a bill (the Port Bill) to develop large commercial cities, claiming that such development would undermine what he considered as moral virtue in residents of the affected cities (e.g. “frugality, probity and strictness of morals”).³⁹ That such arguments could be made by central figures of that time demonstrates that, at least then, there was common acceptance that citizen virtue was a relevant consideration, that, according to Sandel, “The public life of a republic must serve a formative role, aimed at cultivating citizens of a certain kind.”⁴⁰ The Constitution of 1787 was considered to be a vehicle for the overarching goal of saving “… American republicanism from the deadly effects of [the] private pursuits of happiness,” and “from the acquisitive preoccupations that so absorbed Americans and distracted them from the public good.”⁴¹ The framers maintained that the government had “a stake in cultivating citizens of a certain kind.”⁴² Besides the Constitution, there were to be other public mechanisms for “improving” moral and civic character, from institutions of, “ … to education, to religion, and more broadly, to the social and economic arrangements that would define the character of the new nation.”⁴³ It goes without saying that one need not adopt the particular beliefs about which life is virtuous that Sandel ascribes to the founding generation to elicit a conception of the relationship between lived experience and the virtues of those who live it.

The philosopher, Lester Hunt, who, in his book Character and Culture, also addresses the question of ways social institutions may influence the development of virtues, writes

…there are some virtues that it is comparatively easy to acquire and instill in the context of American institutions. At any rate, parents who are trying to get their children to respect the property of others or keep their promises probably do no so often have the feeling that they have the whole world working against them. Our institutions do seem to be arranged so that they facilitate the acquisition of some good traits of character. … We may find, for instance, that some of the limits to the powers that moral instructors possess are not due to the immutable facts of human nature but to institutions that we have the power to change. Perhaps people are no more generous or just than they are, no less envious and vengeful than they are, because of the institutions that influence their behavior, and not because the guardians of virtue—whoever they may be—have failed to be sufficiently vigilant or skillful.⁴⁴

Such institutions could be loosely construed cultural rituals like gift-giving, or explicit regulatory vehicles, like tax-deductions for charitable gift-giving, Hunt acknowledges, further, that although a world offering many opportunities to engage in generous actions might encourage the virtue of generosity in people, the connections between any given institution and formation of any given virtue are complicated:
“A theory of the origin of a trait of character does not state that from a specific concrete situation, in all its complexity and with all the features of it that individuals might perceive and to which they might respond, one specific result must emerge. Rather, it picks out certain features of many actual situations—as, for instance, that the people in them are taught a certain type of rule—and shows that these features support the formation of certain traits of character. This means that they can be expected, if certain specifiable conditions are present, to produce certain results: they can make people, in some respects, better or worse.”⁴⁵
These observations mean that any claims we make about commons-based peer production and virtue must be tempered by the enumerable contingencies that mediate the two, including highly variable background conditions under which participation is undertaken.
7. A Political Argument

In Chapter Fifteen of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre remarks: “Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life, as Aristotle and Engels noted, we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.”⁴⁶ MacIntyre means something quite general about the ways people’s lives reflect both their own distinctive narratives mingled together with those of other individuals, as well as the constraints of overarching stories and experiences of families, tribes, traditions, community, and historical circumstances. These all come together to shape the possibilities and choices open to individuals. In particular, these agents, including family, education, training, convention, and social, political, and cultural institutions, have the capacity to induce, systematically, those behaviors deemed moral and human character deemed virtuous.

Yet, it is possible to render a more concrete interpretation of MacIntyre’s remark by focusing on that stage, an artifact designed by others, upon which we must enter. For the philosophical and social study of technology, the metaphor points to a world constrained not only by the narratives and expectations of the self as well as social agents and institutions but by a material reality shaped in part, and in increasing measure, by technologies.

The idea that technical design imposes systematic constraints on action in morally and politically relevant ways has emerged robustly, in various guises, within many of the non-technical fields that study social, humanistic, and legal dimensions of technology. From Lewis Mumford’s authoritarian and democratic technics to Marshall McLuhan’s medium as a shaper of content to Langdon Winner’s artifacts with politics to Bruno Latour’s inscription of morality in machines, the common thread tying these and other efforts together is the idea that technical systems and devices, as a consequence of their features, architecture or functionality, have the capacity to limit and facilitate, in systematic ways, what individuals and collectivities can do.⁴⁷ Rejecting the view of technology as neutral, producing outcomes only as a result of the uses and applications chosen by people, the thesis that technology embodies values holds that values may be “built into” technical design characteristics of technologies, which, in interaction with social, political, economic, and cultural characteristics of the contexts in which they are embedded, produces outcomes skewed in one way or another.

Philosophers, legal scholars, and social scientists who have embraced these ideas and drawn attention to technologies that enhance or suppress social, political, and moral values, frequently see their work as continuous with social, political, and moral commentary. As Brian Pfaffenberger notes,

All around us today are artifacts that were generated in the technological dramas of their time: railways, canals, aviation artifacts, radios, and more. And yet their meaning, together with their location in what was formerly a deeply felt grammar of political action, is utterly lost; in their place is what appears to be nothing more than a material record of "technological progress." What was once the conscious product of human cultural and political action, passionate and meaningful, is now a silent material reality within which we lead our daily lives, mutely acting out patterns of behavior that once had obvious connections to the root paradigms of our culture. The refrigerator hums, but we do not know why.⁴⁸ To become fully aware of the political circumstances of their lives, new generations of students, at every level of education, must be trained (as Hughes suggests) to "fathom the depth of the technological society, to identify currents running more deeply than those conventionally associated with politics and economics.”⁴⁹ Because STS offers a way to recontextualize technological artifacts, it is therefore the political philosophy of our time, and it deserves to stand at the center of any curriculum that teaches political awareness and civic responsibility.

In other words, technical systems and devices are as much a part of political and moral life as any practices, laws, regulations, institutions or norms that embody moral and political principles in more conventionally recognized ways. Urgent appeals regarding, say, the pervasive video and data surveillance and biometric measurement technologies that threaten privacy, automated command and control systems that undermine human autonomy and accountability, network infrastructures that redistribute or fix hierarchies of power and authority, are frequently proffered in the same spirit as appeals concerning executive, legislative, judicial, or other regulatory actions that are the more typical objects of traditional political analysis and commentary.

This article has a similar political aim. It departs slightly from other political analyses of technical systems and devices in that it focuses not on constraints imposed by technology on actions and social policies, but on facilitative characteristics – here, the enhancement of human moral development through the development of virtue. Furthermore, it draws attention not to the ways technical systems and devices threaten values, but to ways they may offer a positive potential to people and societies to nourish values to which they are committed. If our thesis warns of anything, it is, instead, a threat of omission, namely, the squandering of opportunity – the promise that inheres in a particular type of socio-technical system that constitutes not only a powerful new tool of intellectual production but the fertile ground for human character development.

Despite the positive aspects of commons-based peer production, there is cause for concern over its future flourishing. Sources of resistance, probably all stemming from uneasiness of established, centralized authority over the difficulty of controlling peer-to-peer interaction, fall roughly in three patterns: attempts to obstruct technical operation, content restriction, and neglect.

Because commons-based peer production, in some areas, is seen to rival traditional market-driven hierarchical production of knowledge, information, and cultural goods, it has triggered alarm. Prominent leaders in Microsoft Corporation have famously dubbed open-source a “cancer” of the software world⁵⁰ and large corporate producers and distributors of music and movies have relentlessly sought ways to put an end to file sharing in peer-to-peer networks.⁵¹ Because of the difficulty controlling from a single point, various avenues have been pursued to introduce chokepoints as well as checkpoints of various kinds. ADSL, asymmetric high speed internet access that provides greater downstream capacity than upstream, models the structure of traditional media with its strict distinction between consumers at the edges receiving information and centralized media organizations broadcasting to consumers, is an indirect mechanism that works against the more egalitarian flows of peer-to-peer interaction. Further, one aspect of the effort to stem peer-to-peer file-sharing, involves litigation against producers of file-sharing software, resulting possibly in a chilling of that area of technical development.⁵² Finally, we note a general move to de-anonymize network activity, both through technical as well as legal means, which, if successful, might set limits on the degree of engagement some individuals might choose.

Since commons-based peer production not only contributes to the intellectual commons but draws from it, it benefits from an environment in which this commons is constantly enriched. Aggressive efforts by global commercial producers and distributors of content to slow the movement of all forms of content into the commons in turn sets boundaries on potential for commons-based peer production. While battles over control of content and condemnation of peer-to-peer software represent active opposition, they may be enough to set in a pattern of neglect, through failure to pursue robust development of underlying technologies, circulation of relevant know-how, and stimulation of social networks, in general. While these three patterns of resistance might not extinguish the powerful attractions of commons-based peer-production, they nevertheless deserve critical scrutiny if they form barriers to pursuit of activities of varied social benefit.
8. Conclusion

We have argued that commons-based peer-production is an attractive alternative to market-based, hierarchy-managed forms of production because of its capacity to foster important moral and political virtues, and moreover, that this capacity has motivational force. As important as this feature is, however, it probably does not provide sufficient reason to vigorously promote commons-based peer production. We might, similarly, admire the values and virtues embodied in, for example, traditional practice of barn-raisings, in which the able-bodied members of a community gathered to raise the barn of a neighbor, while conceding that in the face of contemporary, more efficient means of constructing barns, traditional practices must give way. Although acknowledging, in the case of barns, the irrecoverable social loss, we nevertheless accept the need for older practices to yield to a better – in this case, more efficient -- ones. That is why our argument, here, is necessarily part of a larger one. As free and open source software, the open directory project, SETI@Home, and many other projects demonstrate, commons- based peer production is not only a sustainable mode of information production, but a highly efficient one, even more efficient for certain products than traditional alternatives.⁵³ It is in light of the whole picture that we recommend vigorous support for this exceptional socio-technical phenomenon that serves not only as the source of knowledge and information but as a platform for virtuous practices and the development of virtue in its participants.