Abstract
In the 1950s, duties to the self became unpopular in mainstream moral philosophy. We explain why some ethicists became skeptical of them, and we present Kant’s position on duties to oneself. Kantian moral philosophers have long maintained the existence of duties to oneself. After presenting this historical backdrop, we then provide our definition of digital minimalism; we understand this as a virtue—a robust disposition to do what is morally required. Given the conclusions of the last two chapters (viz. that autonomy matters morally and that mobile devices undermine autonomy), we argue that you have a moral duty to protect your autonomy from this threat. We define digital minimalism as the disposition to use mobile devices for a reasonable amount of time in light of your chosen ends. We conclude by showing how this duty fits in within the broader taxonomy of Kant’s ethical duties. In our view, the duty to be a digital minimalist is an imperfect duty because it is a duty to promote an obligatory end (one’s own perfection).
“So far from these duties being the lowest, they [duties to oneself] actually take first place, and are the most important of all; for even without first explaining what self-regarding duty is, we may ask, if a man degrades his own person, how can anything else be demanded of him? He who violates duties toward himself, throws away his humanity, and is no longer in a position to perform duties to others.”
—Kant (Collins 27:341)
For many people, these distractions can get out of hand, leaving us with a feeling that our decisions are not our own. The fact is, in this day and age, if you are not equipped to manage distraction, your brain will be manipulated by time-wasting diversions … The good news is that we have the unique ability to adapt to such threats. We can take steps right now to retrain and regain our brains. To be blunt, what other choice do we have? We don’t have time to wait for regulators to do something, and if you hold your breath waiting for corporations to make their products less distracting, well, you’re going to suffocate.
—Nir Eyal, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
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4.1 Introduction
Our aim in this chapter is to defend the existence of a moral duty to rebuild our relationship with technology and to be more intentional about how we use it. This is a duty that you owe to yourself. We realize that this suggestion might provoke immediate resistance. To some readers, the very idea of duties to oneself will seem quite odd—maybe even paradoxical. We typically think of moral obligations as things that we owe to each other. It may sound absurd to suggest that you owe something to yourself. After all, we can waive debts when others owe us something, so we should be able to waive whatever obligations we have to ourselves. But we tend to think that moral obligations are not something that we can release ourselves from, and this implies that there cannot be any duties to oneself.
An argument along those lines was put forward by Marcus Singer (1959), and many ethicists found it so convincing that, by the end of the twentieth century, duties to oneself had “largely disappeared from the radar of academic philosophers” (Cholbi 2015, 852). The basic idea behind Singer’s argument is that duties to oneself rest on a paradox involving three claims. First, duties involve rights. If Iris has a duty to refrain from punching Ray, then Ray has a right not to be punched by Iris. Second, if Ray has a right against Iris, then Ray can waive that right and release Iris from the obligation. For instance, Ray might agree to enter the boxing ring and thus consent to being punched by Iris. The third claim in the inconsistent triad is that no one can release themselves from an obligation. In order to resist the paradox, one of those three claims has to be rejected.
Within the last decade there has been some pushback against Singer’s influential argument. Perhaps the most popular approach for resisting the paradox is to reject the claim that duties to oneself are necessarily connected to waivable rights.Footnote 1 One way to do this would be to reject the first claim; we could deny that all duties entail rights. This may be true of some moral duties, but not all of them. Alternatively, it could be argued that the second claim is false, that some rights simply cannot be waived.Footnote 2 For instance, you might have a moral obligation to refrain from smoking because smoking harms your future self, and you cannot possibly consent to harming yourself in this way. We could imagine that your future self (who has lung cancer) wants you to quit smoking right now. And you cannot release yourself from this obligation because you do not presently inhabit the perspective of your future self (Schofield 2015). Other moral philosophers have argued for the surprising conclusion that the third claim is false, that we may be able, in some cases, to release ourselves from a moral obligation (Muñoz 2020, 2021).
But there is at least one ethical tradition in which duties to oneself never went out of fashion.Footnote 3 Far from relegating such duties to a second-class status, Immanuel Kant goes so far as to suggest that duties to oneself deserve pride of place, grounding all of our moral duties. As Kant sees it, if there were no duties to oneself, “then there would be no duties whatsoever” (MS 6:417).Footnote 4 Kant even outlined something similar to the paradox of self-release in the Metaphysics of Morals about 162 years before Marcus Singer. But unlike Singer, Kant was not troubled by the apparent contradiction.Footnote 5 According to Kant’s view, our rational agency burdens us with obligations that we must respect whether we want to or not. Kant thinks that the value of our autonomy is something that we cannot relinquish, and there is nothing in the world that would permit us to forfeit our rational agency.
As we explained in Chap. 2, we can understand these moral duties in terms of our obligation to respect humanity. We showed why Kant believes that there is something morally significant about the capacity to set and pursue one’s own ends. Kant argues that it is morally wrong to undermine someone’s capacities, to disrespect their humanity, or to treat them as a mere means. In this chapter, we show how the duty to respect humanity in your own person entails a duty to be a digital minimalist. The empirical evidence from the previous chapter gives us good reason to think that problematic smartphone use undermines autonomy. So if you have an obligation to cultivate your autonomy and protect it from things that threaten to undermine it, then you have a duty to refrain from using mobile devices in such a way. Of course, more needs to be said about the precise content of the duty. What exactly does it mean to be a digital minimalist? We begin in the next section by answering that question. In short, digital minimalism requires us to be thoughtful about how we use mobile devices and to use them in ways that do not interfere with our capacity to set and pursue our own ends. We think of digital minimalism as an end that we ought to pursue. We regard it as a virtue—a robust disposition to what is morally right.
In Sect. 4.3 we provide the Kantian credentials of the duty and we show how it fits in within his broader taxonomy of duties. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant identifies exactly two ends that we are morally obligated to pursue: our own perfection and the happiness of others. We discuss the latter (e.g., the duty of beneficence) in Chap. 5, but your duty to be a digital minimalist is rooted in the duty to perfect humanity (rational agency) in your own person. As we explain in greater detail below, this means that the obligation should be understood as an imperfect duty rather than a perfect duty. But before we get to that, we must begin with an explanation of digital minimalism.
4.2 Digital Minimalism
To begin our argument, it will be helpful to have a solid grip on the concept of digital minimalism as we understand it. It is easily misunderstood. Cal Newport, who coined the term, defines digital minimalism as follows:
A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. (Newport 2019, 28)
He says that a philosophy of technology is a personal philosophy of technology use that “provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them” (Newport 2019, xiv). Newport’s understanding of digital minimalism outlines an ambitious ideal, but our understanding of the term will differ from his statement in several key ways.
Despite being philosophers, we will avoid understanding digital minimalism as involving a philosophy. Instead, we will understand it as a practice. That is, we will be less concerned with advocating that users develop clear answers to questions about technology use. Instead, we think it sufficient that users avoid problematic use (i.e., use that conflicts with their ends). So, we will think of digital minimalism in behavioral (in contrast to intellectual) terms. Some users might find that developing a philosophy is an effective means for sticking with the practice. Indeed, this seems to be what Newport himself thinks. His book is, after all, a work of self-help and not philosophy.
What we then have in mind when we advocate for digital minimalism is a virtue, which—following Aristotle—we conceive of as a habit or stable character trait.Footnote 6 The focus on virtue (and Aristotle, for that matter) might seem odd in a book of Kantian ethics, but, as Allen Wood notes, “virtue is at least as important to Kant’s ethical theory as it is to any ‘virtue ethics’” (Wood 1999, 31). Traditionally, Kant’s ethics has been thought of in strictly deontological terms. Most students come away understanding Kant as being focused solely on duties, obligations, and rules. This paints a stark contrast with Mill, who grounds ethics in consequences, and Aristotle, who is principally concerned with character traits that lead to (and are partially constitutive of) flourishing (eudaimonia). Recent work has shown how this picture is misleading. As we explained above, Kant did care about consequences, and a number of scholars have recently highlighted the many ways that Kant’s moral theory is related to virtue ethics.Footnote 7
This development in the literature is a welcome improvement in our understanding of Kant’s ethics. Older interpretations were often overly influenced by the Groundwork. Many readers treated Kant’s first mature work on moral philosophy as if it were the sole or primary text, definitive of his ethical thought.Footnote 8 Recent work has given increased attention to Kant’s later moral writings such as the Metaphysics of Morals and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In the Religion, Kant defines virtue as “the firmly grounded disposition to fulfill one’s duty strictly” (Rel. 6:23). This understanding of virtue is helpful for our argument. The duty at stake in our book is grounded in our obligation to respect humanity as an end in itself. As Kant explains, this requires us to cultivate our capacities and to protect them from threats that would undermine our autonomy. In this way, digital minimalism should be thought of as a virtue. It is a stable disposition to fulfill our moral duty.
Understanding digital minimalism as a practice that does not involve developing a philosophy is not our only departure from Newport’s official statement. We also take a less demanding approach to digital minimalism than he does. Specifically, our arguments will not require that you “focus your online time on a small number of … optimized activities” (Newport 2019, 28 emphasis added). We are happy to take a more relaxed approach, where we will understand the underlying duty as one to focus your online time on a reasonable number (or amount) of activities (or time) in light of your ends. This, of course, might in some cases require that one follow a more demanding regimen. Perhaps some users need to treat mobile devices or their applications like many of us treat cigarettes or Oreos. Some products simply lend themselves to excessive use.Footnote 9
Putting this all together, we will understand digital minimalism as,
Using mobile devices for a number of activities or amount of time that is reasonable, in light of your ends.
Our relaxed conception of digital minimalism might raise the question of whether the view has a right to call itself “minimalism.”
In response to this last thought, it will be helpful to contrast digital minimalism with two other habits that run in two opposite directions.Footnote 10 We can call one extreme digital eliminativism:
Using mobile devices for a number of activities or amount of time significantly less than is reasonable, in light of your ends.
And the other—which we take to be the default—digital maximalism:
Using mobile devices for a number of activities or amount of time significantly more than is reasonable, in light of your ends.
The common thread between our conception of digital minimalism and Newport’s is the idea that we should take care to use mobile devices in ways that support what we value (or, perhaps, should value). This is compatible with using mobile devices to a great degree. Indeed, much of this very book was written on laptops and discussed over video chat, phone, email, and text exchanges in ways that—we think—were perfectly in alignment with our ends. We are not advocating for the elimination of mobile device use. But that is not a reason to think we are not minimalists; that is a reason to think we are not eliminativists.
Here it is important to note that, as Kantians, we have a particular gloss on what constitutes our ends. Most of our ends are entirely optional. We could commit ourselves to marathon running (or not), baking (or not), and so on. But others are not. For instance, as we have already argued, we are morally required to value autonomy. We will continue to spell out what this entails in what follows. For now, what is important is that minimalism is not eliminativism, and our brand of minimalism comes with a certain degree of latitude.
This is especially important in light of the fact that mobile devices are an important lifeline for certain vulnerable populations. For instance, despite the fact that mobile devices seem to have particularly negative effects on the young, members of some subgroups might benefit from using them. A recent New York Times article—written in response to the surgeon general’s warning that “there are ample indicators that social media can … have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents”—notes that social media might have the opposite effect for some LGBTQ+ youth (Miller 2023).Footnote 11 Indeed, Wagaman et al. (2020) found that online activity had a positive effect on how underserved, Southern LGBTQ+ youth feel about their identities. According to one co-author on that study, LGBTQ+ youth frequently describe social media networks in positive terms: “‘It’s my home,’ ‘It’s my family,’ ‘It’s kept me alive’” (Miller 2023). This must be kept in mind when we make blanket statements, such as the surgeon general’s, about the average effect of, say, screens on broader populations (e.g., all youth taken together).
There are members of other populations who likewise receive distinctive benefits from using mobile devices. Indeed, Android and iOS—the two most common operating systems on smartphones—have a suite of features that benefit users with disabilities. They feature screen readers (which, among other things, convert text to audio) and these capabilities can assist the visually impaired in a variety of ways. It has been shown experimentally that these features can be leveraged to assist people with sensory disabilities (such as blindness and hearing loss) in performing daily activities (see, e.g., Lancioni et al. 2017). This, of course, can be a major boon to people for whom completing daily activities is a challenge, as being unable to complete the activities can, among other things, affect one’s self-confidence and social status (Lancioni et al. 2017).Footnote 12
These two cases help us to highlight the flexibility of digital minimalism. It also helps us foreshadow issues that will arise in the next chapter. Although LGBTQ+ youth may benefit from social media use and certain people with disabilities benefit from using smartphones, this is not the only implication to consider. This point also underscores the need of making these products less harmful. That an LGBTQ+ adolescent needs their social media network is an additional reason to think that the developers of those sites should not leverage that need in order to, say, distract them in excess to what is useful for them. Indeed, as we will soon show, we not only have a duty to ourselves to be digital minimalists, we have duties to lessen the negative effects of mobile device use on others as well.Footnote 13
This point about the positive effects of mobile devices extends beyond these domains as well. We do not want to overstate our position. We are not suggesting that mobile devices are always bad for autonomy or that they undermine autonomy in every respect. Although the problematic use of these devices threatens our rational agency, thoughtful use of them can actually enhance our capacity to pursue ends. Smartphones have navigation tools that make it easier for us to arrive at our destinations, communication platforms that help us stay in contact with loved ones, weather alerts that keep us prepared for the day, and so on. By using these tools and incorporating them into our agency, we become more capable of pursuing certain ends. Ironically, we can even harness their addictive powers for good. For instance, a user who has an autonomous desire to exercise or study German might download an app that uses notifications prompting her to do the activity in question. The app might remind her of a successful streak—harnessing a manipulative tactic to help her pursue an autonomously chosen end.
The danger here is that it is very difficult to avoid the slippery slope. Our relationships with these devices are often decided on terms that are not our own, even when we are pursuing an autonomous end. Someone might begin using social media in order to stay in touch with old friends. This end (and the means to pursue it) was chosen autonomously; it was a product of her rational agency. Over time, however, this autonomous usage might give way to more problematic behavior as she starts to check the app compulsively to see the status of her posts. She begins to use it far more often than she would like to use it. Like Esther, she opens the app while she’s trying to read, when she’s in class, or even while she’s driving. She has fallen prey to manipulative design tactics, and now her relationship with the technology is built on the developers’ terms rather than her own.
It is important to remember that the developers’ aims are not always consistent with our own. There is an alignment problem here.Footnote 14 This applies even in cases where we reflectively endorse our reasons for using the technology in question. Language-learning apps are extremely popular, but critics routinely point out how they almost always fail at developing fluency or even proficiency in the target language.Footnote 15 Many of these apps are free, which means that they rely entirely on ad revenue. This, in turn, means that they must dedicate enormous effort to making their apps as addictive as possible. Our aim of learning the language is not perfectly aligned with the company’s aim of maximizing our screen time.
After many hours of using Duolingo to learn Italian, journalist David Freedman was unsettled to find just how little he could say or understand in Italy. Freedman then interviewed Luis von Ahn, the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, and von Ahn was incredibly forthright about these issues. Their aim is to get us hooked: “The biggest problem that people trying to learn a language by themselves face is the motivation to stay with it…That’s why we spend a lot of our energy just trying to keep people hooked” (Freedman 2018). Freedman points out how there might be ways of accelerating the learning process and that it could be useful to make the lessons more difficult. But this would be at odds with the aim of getting users to come back for more. And von Ahn admits this to Freeman as well: “We prefer to be more on the addictive side than the fast-learning side…” (Ibid.)
This is not to say that language-learning apps are not helpful in any way. That would overstate the point. Research shows that they are good at building vocabulary, for instance.Footnote 16 The point here is simply that we should be cautious about our engagement with addictive technology. Even when we are using it to pursue our autonomously chosen ends, we must be careful to avoid slipping into the kind of compulsive usage that would weaken our ability to set and pursue ends. We must cultivate a robust disposition to use technology in ways that make us more autonomous and refrain from using it in ways that undermine our autonomy. And that is precisely what it means to be a digital minimalist.
4.3 The Kantian Grounds of the Duty
Now that we have a stronger grasp of what it means to be a digital minimalist, we are in a better position to advance our argument. In this section, we will explain why we think there is a moral obligation to be a digital minimalist and what kind of duty this is. At first glance, it may appear that this has already been established or that it follows as a trivial consequence of what was said earlier. In Chap. 2 we defended Kant’s claim that autonomy is morally significant. We then showed why Kantians (and other moral theorists) believe that this requires us to refrain from doing things that undermine people’s autonomy. For Kant, this is understood in terms of a duty to respect humanity as an end in itself and never treat it as a mere means. Given the empirical evidence presented in Chap. 3, there appears to be a straightforward entailment of the moral obligation to refrain from problematic smartphone use (i.e., to be a digital minimalist).
But the matter is not quite so simple. First, the fundamental obligation to respect humanity leads to different kinds of duties. And they are not equally strict. As Kant sees it, some duties are commanded in all circumstances, and you are forbidden from disrespecting the autonomy of rational agents in certain ways. Iago’s deceitful manipulation of Othello is a good example of an action that is strictly forbidden. You have a perfect duty to refrain from such behavior. Kant thinks that it is always wrong to perform such an action. He says that perfect duties “admit of no exception in favor of inclination” (G 4:421).
In other instances, there are actions that Kant thinks you are morally required to perform, but they are not required in every circumstance. These are imperfect duties. Determining when you should perform these actions is a matter of discretion. For instance, Kant claims that we are required to promote the happiness of others—the duty of beneficence. But it is up to each individual to determine whose happiness to promote and to what extent. It would be nice of you to buy a birthday present for your close friend who has been feeling down, but you are not required to buy a birthday present for every person you know. At times you might even wonder whether you should buy a birthday present or donate the money to a charity that fights malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. You must use your moral judgment to decide how to fulfill the duty of beneficence.
This is just one of several important distinctions when it comes to understanding our moral duties concerning our relationship with technology. Thus, in order to get a clearer picture of the duty to be a digital minimalist, it would be helpful to provide more details about Kant’s ethical theory and his taxonomy of duties. Kant presents the distinction between imperfect and perfect duties in the Groundwork (1785), but he does not put forward a complete division of duties until the publication of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797.
The most fundamental distinction in the Metaphysics of Morals is between duties of right and duties of virtue. Duties of right are ones that can justifiably be enforced, whereas duties of virtue cannot. Not only are we morally obligated to refrain from murder and theft, the state can rightly deploy its coercive power to prevent these actions. We discuss duties of right in greater detail in Chap. 6, so we will set them aside for now.
Duties of virtue are then divided between duties to oneself and duties to others. We explore duties to others in Chap. 5 (with a particular emphasis on the duty of beneficence). This brings us, at last, to the topic of this chapter: duties to oneself. As previously discussed, these duties are either perfect or imperfect. Finally, they are subdivided once more into duties to ourselves as “rational beings” and duties to ourselves as “animal beings.” Duties pertaining to our rational nature require us to pursue “moral perfection” and duties to our animal nature require us to pursue “natural perfection.” The entire taxonomy can be represented by Fig. 4.1.Footnote 17
In order to explain the placement of digital minimalism in the taxonomy, we must say more about these last two distinctions.
First, there is the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. From what was said above, it should already be clear that perfect duties require you to refrain from or perform an action in all circumstances without any exceptions. Imperfect duties are not so strict. You are not called to perform such actions in every possible moment. But even with this understanding, more needs to be said about what grounds the distinction. How can we distinguish imperfect duties from perfect duties? At first, it would appear that we can tell the two apart by using the formula of universal law and finding different kinds of contradictions. In the Groundwork, Kant identifies one perfect duty to the self (refraining from suicide) and one imperfect duty (cultivating talents). He also explains one perfect duty to others (refraining from making a false promise to the banker)Footnote 18 and one imperfect duty (beneficence).
He first derives the duties by means of the formula of universal law and he then returns to them once more to show how they can be derived from the formula of humanity. For both duties, when using the formula of universal law, Kant shows why it would be impossible to will these maxims as universal laws. We can show why these actions are impermissible by demonstrating how this leads to a contradiction. If you cannot will the maxim to be a universal law, then you are acknowledging that you are making an exception of yourself when you act that way. You want everyone else to abide by one set of rules while you abide by another. This would be like the child in Chap. 2 who takes from others while insisting that no one take her toys. This behavior demonstrates an inconsistency, and Kant thinks this allows us to see why such actions are morally wrong.
But the formula leads to different kinds of contradictions. When we try to imagine a world where everyone makes false promises about repaying loans, we can immediately see why this leads to a contradiction. In such a world, there would be no banks at all. Banks depend on people repaying loans. Indeed, the very institution of promise-making depends on the other person accepting the promise and believing that you will fulfill your commitment. In a world where no one keeps their promises, there would be no promises at all. So we are trying to imagine what it would be like to make a promise in a world where there are no promises. This is a contradiction in conception. Such a world is inconceivable.Footnote 19
He contrasts this with the kind of contradiction that results when we try to universalize the maxim of non-beneficence. Can we imagine a world where no one ever helps anyone who is in need? Kant thinks we can. So it does not lead to a contradiction in conception. Instead, Kant suggests that there is a “contradiction in the will.” Although we can imagine such a world existing, we cannot coherently will to live in such a world. In the case of beneficence, Kant suggests that there are times where everyone finds themselves in need of help from others. And if this is true, then you cannot coherently will to live in a world where no one helps anyone else.Footnote 20
When it comes to understanding the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, this is a good place to start. By using the formula of universal law, we can see how perfect duties arise from contradictions in conception and imperfect ones stem from contradictions in the will. But this is not the end of the story.Footnote 21 In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant elaborates considerably on the distinction. One thing that is particularly distinctive about Kant’s treatment of duties in the doctrine of virtue is his discussion of “ends that are also duties.” Indeed, Kant frames the entire section in terms of this idea. As we noted earlier, Kant says that there are only two such ends: one’s own perfection and the happiness of others.
This opens up a new way of understanding the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. You fulfill an imperfect duty whenever your action promotes an end that you have a duty to set (such as the happiness of others). For instance, you act on an imperfect duty when you buy your friend a birthday present or when you make a donation to a charity that treats malaria. You are morally obligated to adopt the end of the happiness of others, and such actions clearly promote that aim. You violate a perfect duty, however, when you set an end that is fundamentally inconsistent with an end that you are required to adopt. So although you are not morally required to get your least favorite colleague a birthday present, it would be strictly forbidden to play a prank on him by putting a snapping mousetrap in his mailbox.
Allen Wood summarizes the distinction in the following way:
A duty d is a duty toward (gegen) S if and only if S is a finite rational being and the requirement to comply with d is grounded on the requirement to respect humanity in the person of S. A duty is wide or imperfect (or, if toward others, a duty of love) if the action promotes a duty of virtue (that is, an end it is a duty to set); an act is required by a strict, narrow or perfect duty (or a duty of respect to others) if the failure to perform it would amount to a failure to set this obligatory end at all, or a failure to respect humanity as an end in someone’s person. An act violates a perfect duty (or duty of respect) if it sets an end contrary to one of the ends it is our duty to set, or if it shows disrespect toward humanity in someone’s person (as by using the person as a mere means). (Wood 2009, 233)
When you put a mousetrap in the mailbox, the aim of your action is your colleague’s suffering. You have set an end that is inconsistent with an end that you are obligated to set (viz. the happiness of others).
Wood’s interpretation is a helpful conceptual tool for understanding the duty to be a digital minimalist. According to our view, digital minimalism is a disposition that you have an imperfect duty to cultivate because it promotes an end that you are morally required to adopt. Digital minimalism falls under the umbrella of the duty to promote your own natural perfection.
Kant singled out only a single obligatory end for duties to oneself: one’s own perfection. But he believes that we owe different things to ourselves insofar as we are both rational and animal beings. As rational beings, the duty of perfection manifests itself as the requirement to be morally perfect. This requires total purity in our motives. Kant tells us that we should act from the motive of duty; we must do what is right simply because it is right and not because it serves our own self-interest. The command here is to “be holy” (MS 6:446). We are also required to be in total compliance with every moral duty. Kant says this is the command to “be perfect” (Ibid.). Of course, Kant recognizes that it is impossible for any human being to live up to this standard. Given the nature of human frailty, we can never expect to be morally perfect (in this life)Footnote 22 or to have entirely pure motives. We can only “strive for this perfection,” so he says that this duty consists “only in continual progress” (Ibid.). It requires us to know ourselves deeply and to subject our actions and motives to the relentless scrutiny of conscience.
As animal beings, Kant understands perfection as the ability to pursue whatever ends we might set for ourselves. He says, “Natural perfection is the cultivation of any capacities whatever for furthering ends set forth by reason” (MS 6:391). Here again he defines humanity as the capacity to “set oneself an end” and he says that this is what separates us from non-human animals. He then argues that we ought to make ourselves worthy of this capacity by respecting it as the precious treasure that it is. If we let our talents rust and refuse to cultivate any of our abilities, we would express disrespect for humanity in our own person. What is the point of having the ability to set ends through reason if we render ourselves incapable of pursuing any of those ends? We would end up like Tantalus, forever doomed to desire things that are just out of reach.
In order to demonstrate respect for your capacity to set and pursue ends, Kant thinks that you must make yourself capable of pursuing “all sorts of possible ends” (MS 6:444):
Hence there is also bound up with the end of humanity in our own person the rational will, and so the duty, to make ourselves worthy of humanity by culture in general, by procuring or promoting the capacity to realize all sorts of possible ends, so far as this is to be found in the human being himself. In other words, the human being has a duty to cultivate the crude predispositions of his nature, by which the animal is first raised into the human being. It is therefore a duty in itself. (MS 6:392)
As he explains later, this requires us to cultivate the “powers of spirit” and the “powers of the soul.” He says that the latter includes “memory, imagination and the like” (MS 6:445).Footnote 23 As we argued in Chap. 2, humanity (understood as the capacity to set and pursue our own ends) is something that matters morally. Kant’s ethics requires us to express respect for this capacity in both ourselves and in others. We disrespect the humanity of others by manipulating them, deceiving them, or making them incapable of pursuing their own ends. But we disrespect our own humanity if we neglect to cultivate our own capacities or if we fail to protect them from threats that could undermine our autonomy.Footnote 24
With all of this in mind, we are in a much better position to understand how digital minimalism fits in within the broader framework of Kant’s ethics. Digital minimalism can be understood as a virtue insofar as it promotes the end of our natural perfection. By refraining from compulsive, heteronomous use of mobile devices and social media, you are protecting your ability to be the author of your own life story. As a digital minimalist, you are refusing to let developers and tech companies determine how much time you spend looking at screens because you value your memory, attention, executive function, self-esteem, and authenticity.
But this is not the only way of understanding the duty. Stefano Lo Re argues for a similar conclusion, which, in our terms, can be understood as a negative duty to refrain from what we above call digital maximalism. In his response to our first paper on this topic,Footnote 25 Lo Re argues against our conception of digital minimalism as an imperfect duty, and he defends the existence of a perfect duty against “screen overexposure” (2022, 501).Footnote 26 He also characterizes it as a duty to promote one’s own natural perfection, but he sees it as a duty of strict omission on the grounds that screen overexposure is inconsistent with the duty to make ourselves capable of pursuing a variety of ends. In spite of this apparent contradiction, we believe that his view is actually compatible with ours.
Allen Wood’s interpretation of the distinction makes it possible for us to understand how the duty in question could be seen as perfect (“refrain from maximalism”) or imperfect (“engage in minimalism”). For every obligatory end (one’s own perfection or the happiness of others) there are both perfect and imperfect duties. In our view, the duty to be a digital minimalist is understood as an obligation to cultivate a disposition that promotes an end that we are morally required to adopt. In those terms, it should be characterized as an imperfect duty. If, however, the duty is described as a duty to refrain from setting an end that is contrary to our obligatory end (as Lo Re has done by describing it as a duty to refrain from screen overexposure), then it should be understood as a perfect duty.
These are nearly two sides of the same coin; there are only minor differences in the details. The negative duty to refrain from screen overexposure (or digital maximalism) is perfect and thus can never be violated. In this sense, it might seem more demanding than what we focus on here. However, our imperfect duty is positive, and, perhaps, in asking us to do something, it asks more of us in other respects. In any event, there will be more convergence than divergence between these two accounts. Both recommend that we refrain from being on our screens too much because it is in tension with our duty to set our natural perfection as one of our ends. Lo Re is climbing the same mountain we are, even if he is on a different path to the summit.
4.4 Conclusion
Before moving on to other arguments about technology (duties to others, duties of right, etc.) it would be a good idea to take stock of everything that has been said in this chapter and summarize the argument. The first premise of the argument was established in Chap. 2. We argued for the moral significance of autonomy, and we defended Kant’s claim that humanity (the rational capacity to set and pursue your own ends) has a distinctive kind of value—dignity. We then explained Kant’s view about the moral requirements that stem from our recognition of the value of humanity. We ought to respect it as an end and never treat it as a mere means.
In Chap. 3, we discussed the empirical research that gives us reasons to believe that having an unhealthy relationship with our mobile devices is bad for our autonomy. In this chapter, we explained the concept of digital minimalism, and we showed how it fits within the broader framework of Kant’s ethics. If we value our rational agency, then we must adopt the end of our own natural perfection. One component of fulfilling that project involves a robust disposition to use technology intentionally and in ways that do not conflict with our ability to set and pursue our own ends.
In sum, the argument can be summarized as follows:
P1a Humanity (i.e., the rational capacity to set and pursue one’s own ends) has an objective, unconditional, non-fungible value––dignity.
P2a Anything that has dignity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means.
P3a If humanity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a mere means, then we ought to adopt the end of our own natural perfection.
Therefore,
C1a We ought to adopt the end of our own natural perfection (i.e., we should make ourselves capable of pursuing a variety of ends and we should protect our rational agency from things that threaten to undermine it).
P4a Mobile device use threatens to undermine our capacities of rational agency and our authenticity. The compulsive use of such devices is inconsistent with the end of natural perfection.
P5a If P4a and C1a are true, then we ought to cultivate a disposition to use mobile devices intentionally and in ways that do not undermine our capacities (i.e., we ought to be digital minimalists).
Therefore,
C2a We ought to be digital minimalists.
It might go without saying, but it should be noted that the “oughts” in the argument are moral “oughts.” They are not merely prudential. The empirical literature on mobile devices seems more than sufficient to generate prudential reasons for being more intentional about our relationships with these devices. There is already an overabundant self-help literature, teeming with books about the prudential reasons we have to “detox” from these devices and strategies for accomplishing this aim.Footnote 27 We share many of their concerns; we agree that people could promote their self-interest by unplugging from their mobile devices. But Kantian ethics offers even more compelling reasons to adopt the end of digital minimalism.Footnote 28 If autonomy matters morally, as we believe it does, then we also have moral reasons to be digital minimalists.
In Chap. 2, we briefly explained why other moral theories are also committed to the moral significance of autonomy. Consequentialists may see autonomy as partially constitutive of well-being (or as instrumentally valuable for promoting it). Virtue ethicists and perfectionist theories are likely to include autonomy as a component of human flourishing (as would many ethical egoists). Contractualists ground their moral framework in the idea that we must respect the equal moral status of autonomous agents. And so on. In general, we think that any plausible moral theory will make some room for the importance of autonomy.
Any ethical theory that assigns moral weight to autonomy is therefore capable of concluding that there are moral reasons to be a digital minimalist. Of course, the accounts will vary. For instance, the consequentialists who include autonomy in their theory of the good must weigh the promotion of this good against other effects. They will consider digital minimalism a duty if and only if this action (or set of actions) is optimific (i.e., it produces better consequences than any of the alternatives). But we have tried to characterize digital minimalism as a disposition that is variable enough to accommodate this concern. It is not “one size fits all.” The application of the duty will vary from person to person, as the aim is to maximize each person’s ability to pursue her own ends effectively. Every individual must find the appropriate balance so that they are using mobile devices in ways that promote their ends while refraining from usage that is antithetical to them (e.g., causes depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, self-esteem issues, etc.). Given that the duty is framed in this way, we believe it is likely to maximize the good (as consequentialists understand it).
Even consequentialists who do not value autonomy can find moral reasons to be a digital minimalist. Those who hold monistic theories of value—like hedonism—are likely to acknowledge that our current relationship with mobile devices does not seem to be maximizing overall or aggregate pleasure. By letting ourselves default into a relationship with technology that was not built on our own terms, many people are using them in ways that are not maximizing their well-being.
Naturally, Kantian ethics is stricter about the priority of certain values. If we were to translate Kant’s ethics into consequentialist language, we would say that the value of rational agency (humanity) is lexically prior to values like pleasure.Footnote 29 So even a user who derives pleasure from a device would have a moral reason to restructure her relationship with it if she discovers that it is undermining her rational agency.Footnote 30
Although we could have chosen other moral theories to advance our arguments about mobile devices, we believe that Kantian ethics offers the most perspicuous account of what is troubling about this relationship with technology. By foregrounding the concern with autonomy, we can bring the issue into clearer focus. As Kant sees it, humanity is the most precious commodity in our possession. It is in virtue of our humanity that we are capable of morality, the very thing that gives value and meaning to our lives.Footnote 31 To wantonly forfeit some of our agency by falling prey to technological heteronomy is to demonstrate a failure to respect this precious capacity as the treasure that it is.
Notes
- 1.
See Muñoz (2022). Muñoz says that this is the most popular response to the paradox; he cites Kading (1959), Wick (1960), Eisenberg (1968), Paton (1990), and Hills (2003). He also attributes this idea to Kant: “So here is the Kantian move. We say Singer is right about juridical duties, which really do come with rights and powers of release. There is no such thing as a juridical duty to oneself. But we insist there can still be non-juridical duties to oneself, since these do not imply rights and powers of release” (Muñoz 2022).
- 2.
See Schofield (2015).
- 3.
See Lara Denis (2001).
- 4.
Kant’s argument for this claim is complex. Timmermann (2006) says that it is “as obscure as it is philosophically ambitious” (510). Singer (1959) calls it a “blatant non-sequitur” (138). On Timmerman’s reconstruction of the argument, the core claim here is Kant’s idea of moral autonomy (which we discussed briefly in Chap. 2). Kant thinks that moral obligation must begin with a recognition of the authority of the moral law and our submission to the law is autonomous precisely because we give the moral law to ourselves. Sanctions of conscience come from within; morality springs from our own practical reason. If we complied with moral rules only because of external punishments and rewards, morality would be, according to Kant, heteronomous. So to have any duties to others (in the Kantian sense) we must begin by recognizing the authority of the moral law as binding on our will. This is a duty to oneself.
- 5.
There are several reasons for this. First, as Muñoz (2022) points out, Kant would not be troubled by Singer’s version of the paradox because he does not believe that all duties entail rights. That would be true only of juridical duties, which Kant calls “duties of right.” Juridical duties, which can justifiably be enforced by the state, involve rights that can be waived. But non-juridical duties, which Kant calls “duties of virtue,” do not involve legal rights that can be waived. We owe duties of virtue to ourselves in virtue of the fact that we are morally required to respect our own humanity. And there is no right that we can waive to release ourselves from this obligation. The second reason is more complicated. Kant distinguishes between two senses of the human being. He says there is “the human being as a natural being that has reason (homo phaenomeneon)” and that “same human being thought in terms of his personality, that is, as endowed with inner freedom (homo noumenon).” By distinguishing between two senses of the human being, one as the pure source of obligation and another who experiences morality as a constraint, Kant believes that he avoids the paradox of self-release. He writes, “So the human being (taken in these two different senses) can acknowledge a duty to himself without falling into contradiction (because the concept of a human being is not thought in one and the same sense)” (MS 6:418).
- 6.
See Nicomachean Ethics II.1-3. Aristotle (2001, 952-56).
- 7.
- 8.
This is a frequent complaint from Kant scholars who insist that we must read all of Kant’s works in order to develop a proper understanding of his ethics. Allen Wood raises this issue in many places. See, for example, the introduction to his translation of the Groundwork (Kant 2018).
- 9.
The details of what the duty looks like in practice will vary from person to person. After reading so much about this topic, both of us tried to cut back our mobile device use by a number of means (changing our phones’ screens to black and white, deleting various apps, etc.). But, in the end, we both decided to trade our smartphones in for other, less functional devices. Others may find that they function well enough with less stringent guardrails (deleting social media apps, using app timers, monitoring screen time data, etc.). But this did not work for either of us.
- 10.
Newport runs a similar comparison against “Neo-Luddites, who advocate the abandonment of most new technologies” and “Qualified Self Enthusiasts, who carefully integrate digital devices into all aspects of their life with the goal of optimizing their existence” (Newport, 2019, xiv).
- 11.
- 12.
We are sympathetic to the view of disability that is defended by Elizabeth Barnes in her book, The Minority Body. Barnes argues against what she calls the “bad difference” view of disability. That is the view that being disabled should always (or almost always) be regarded as a harm that makes the disabled person worse off than she would be without her disability (even in an ideal society, devoid of ableism). She defends the “mere difference” view, according to which being disabled is a way of being different but not necessarily worse (all things considered). Unless we are ready to ignore the testimony of people who are disabled (or dismiss their claims as adaptive preferences), we must recognize that many of them claim that they do not want their disability to be “cured.” They embrace their disabilities and take pride in them. Their disabilities allow them to experience rich goods that they would otherwise lack. This has serious implications for things like the perception of cochlear implants in the Deaf community. Importantly, Barnes is not arguing that there are no respects in which a disability could be a harm. She is also not suggesting that there are no persons for whom their disability is a bad difference. She agrees, for instance, that being deaf was indeed a harm to Beethoven. The eminently reasonable upshot of her view is that we should make sure that society does not stigmatize disability and that we should provide accommodations for disabilities. There is no doubt that mobile devices (and other technologies) could be useful in this regard. See Barnes (2016).
- 13.
What’s more, this appears to be an adaptive preference. LGBTQ+ youth who find themselves in communities that reject them have no choice but to rely on social media in order to find networks of support. So their reliance on social media is still evidence of an autonomy deficit. If they had other options (such as finding local networks of support and community), then they would not be forced to use social media as their only outlet. Thanks to Archer Amon for helping us make this connection.
- 14.
In this case, the alignment problem concerns the misalignment between what the tech companies want and what we want. This is a commonly discussed issue in the ethics of artificial intelligence, as many ethicists consider the alignment problem to be one of the most serious worries about AI. In brief, the problem goes like this. Artificial intelligence is very good at finding solutions to well-defined problems. It is fairly simple to train a machine-learning algorithm to identify which pictures have a kitten in them, to identify numbers, etc. One issue with this, however, is that the decision-making procedure is fundamentally obscure—often referred to as a “black box.” There is no way for us (or even the developers themselves) to have any idea how the algorithm is making its decisions. It will find a way to accomplish the task, but it cannot tell us how it is doing it. In some cases, we might want to use an algorithm to pursue one end, but it does so by means of a process that we would never have approved. It advances some of our aims, but not all of them. For instance, imagine a group of developers who are trying to optimize the disposal of chemical waste at a factory. Without further instructions, the algorithm might determine that dumping all of the waste into the drinking water is the most efficient way to get rid of it. Of course, that would be a disaster. In order to avoid outcomes like this, we must make sure that the AI’s aims are aligned with our own. This task can be difficult when trying to get machine-learning systems to represent and incorporate the complex array of human values.
Indeed, the alignment problem is part of the story behind the addictive nature of social media. Researchers at Open AI, Google, and UC Berkeley made this point very clearly: “In ML [machine learning], some platforms maximized clickthrough rates to approximate maximizing enjoyment, but such platforms unintentionally addicted many users and decreased their wellbeing. These cases demonstrate that unintended consequences present a challenging but important problem” (Hendrycks et al. 2021, 10).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
For brevity, we omitted many of the sub-branches. For instance, we did not list particular duties of love that we owe to others (e.g., beneficence, gratitude, sympathy). We used ellipses to indicate the missing information. We would also like to issue an important caveat. Although our account is broadly Kantian, we are certainly not committed to all of Kant’s views about particular duties. When Kant discusses duties of natural perfection, he defends duties to refrain from suicide, gluttony, drunkenness, and (perhaps most notoriously) “defiling oneself by lust” (MS 6:424). Obviously, we are not adopting his views wholesale. For our purposes, the most useful elements of his moral theory are (1) the absolute value of rational agency (humanity), (2) the humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, and (3) the taxonomy of duties.
Although this diagram can be constructed fairly easily from a careful reading of the Metaphysics of Morals, we should acknowledge a debt to Allen Wood for constructing a similar diagram. See Wood (1999, 324).
- 18.
In the Groundwork, it is fairly clear that Kant wanted to separate the duties in this way: two duties to the self and two duties to others. But this picture is complicated somewhat by the rather surprising fact that Kant identifies “lying” as a violation of a duty to oneself in the Metaphysics of Morals. See MS 6:429.
- 19.
There are different interpretations of the contradiction in question. Korsgaard (1996) explores three different possibilities. First, there is the “logical contradiction” reading, which suggests that universalized maxim must lead to a logical contradiction. She points out how this might work for certain actions that rely on social conventions (such as promises), but that it works less well for actions like killing. She then discusses “teleological” contradictions. These involve a conflict between (1) the natural end or purpose of some instinct or action and (2) the maxim of the immoral action. This interpretation fares well in the case of the suicide example (where Kant sets up a conflict between suicide and the drive of self-preservation that is contained in what he calls “self-love”). But it does less well with situations like the false promise. Korsgaard favors the “practical contradiction” view. According to this interpretation, the contradiction in question arises when the universalized maxim makes it impossible for the agent to achieve her end, particularly the end specified by her maxim.
- 20.
This seems to lead to an immediate objection. By making the test depend on what the agent wills, it appears to open it up to a dangerous form of relativism. What would Kant say to a miser who insists that he never wants or needs help from anyone else? Can such a person coherently will the maxim of universal non-beneficence? There are a few options here. We would like to suggest, as Korsgaard does, that there are certain ends that are necessarily connected to all human wills. She writes: “[W]e must find some purpose or purposes which belong essentially to the will, and in the world where maxims that fail these tests are universal law, these essential purposes will be thwarted, because the means of achieving them will be unavailable. Examples of purposes that might be thought to be essential to the will are its general effectiveness in the pursuit of its ends, and its freedom to adopt and pursue new ends” (1996, 96). Kant was reluctant to wed his ethics to anything in human nature as he worried that such an ethics could never yield categorical prescriptions. There is simply too much variance across human beings. But this suggestion looks more plausible if it is maximally thin. For instance, the very idea of a will contains the concept of setting and pursuing ends. This means that it almost analytically contains the idea of being capable of pursuing a variety of ends (which is why Kant thinks we are obligated to cultivate our capacities).
- 21.
Some commentators, like Simon Hope, take the Groundwork to be the definitive text on this issue. See Hope (2023). Hope disagrees with the view, defended by Wood and others, that imperfect duties should be understood in terms of an obligation to adopt an end. Cf. Wood (2009). Hope does not mention Wood by name, but he makes the objection quite clear: “One reason it would be inappropriate is that there is a clear sense in which principles of both perfect and imperfect duty are ends: maxims of duty feature in practical thought as time-general ends, standards that orient one’s ongoing and open-ended activity as that plays out across an indeterminate number of possibilities for interaction with an indeterminate domain of agents. In this regard any perfect duty, just as much as any imperfect duty, is a duty to adopt an end that does not come to completion in any specific pattern of action” (Hope 2023, 71). As we explain in this chapter, the view we hold is closer to Wood’s.
- 22.
Kant adds this parenthetical aside as a nod to his doctrine of the highest good.
- 23.
He then concludes by noting that we should care for our bodies as well. He says we must look after “the basic stuff (the matter) in a human being” (MS 6:445). It is a duty to invigorate the animal in ourselves, as this also plays a role in our ability to realize our ends. Thus, Kant would have seen himself as fulfilling an imperfect duty each morning as he took his daily constitutional through the streets of Königsberg.
- 24.
- 25.
See Aylsworth and Castro (2021).
- 26.
When explaining how his view differs from ours, Lo Re raises a few other issues with our account. He also points out that screen overexposure is broader than our focus on smartphones and mobile devices. This is certainly true, and we explained our reasons for this restricted focus in Chap. 3. Secondly, and more importantly, Lo Re suggests that we are “less concerned with justifying the Kantian credentials” of our account (Lo Re 2022, 501). As evidence of this, he cites our reliance on the concept of autonomy, and he points out how Kant says very little about “autonomy” in the Metaphysics of Morals. This is certainly true. The notion of moral autonomy plays a very minor role in the Metaphysics of Morals, but the concept of humanity looms quite large. Indeed, humanity (which we understand as Kant’s concept of personal autonomy) lies at the heart of every duty of virtue, including the duties of natural perfection that ground Lo Re’s duty against screen overexposure. In Chap. 2 we took greater care with the distinction between “moral autonomy” and “personal autonomy” (i.e., humanity) and we spent more time explaining our use of those terms.
- 27.
- 28.
For Kantian ethics, it is very important to avoid conflating duties to yourself with the promotion of your own self-interest. Kant insists that duties to the self do not stem from an obligation to promote one’s own happiness (which he considers an absurdity). It is true that he calls this an “indirect duty” in the Groundwork on the grounds that we would be tempted by transgressions of duty if we were to utterly neglect our own happiness (4:399). But he thinks that every individual naturally looks after their own happiness, so he thinks that it could not possibly be considered a duty. See MS 6:386.
In his lectures on ethics, he also points out how a duty to promote your own happiness would conflict with duties that you owe to others: “It all comes of the fact that people have had no pure concept on which to base a duty to oneself. The thought has been that self-regarding duty consists in promoting one’s own happiness, as Wolff also defined it; it now depends on how everyone determines his happiness, and then duty to oneself would consist of a general rule directing us to satisfy all our inclinations and promote our own happiness. This would, however, be a great hindrance thereafter to our duty to others. It is by no means the principle, though, of self-regarding duties, and the latter have nothing to do with well-being and our temporal happiness” (Collins 27:341).
- 29.
Some have even developed such accounts. See Cumminsky’s “Kantian Consequentialism” (1990).
- 30.
Although we would prefer to avoid defending all of Kant’s views about duties to oneself (including suicide), it would be useful to draw on his treatment of it in order to better understand this point. In Kant’s discussion of the suicide example, he says that man’s suicidal ideation is driven by the thought that his future life will have more pain than pleasure: “From self-love, I make it my principle to shorten my life when its longer duration threatens more troubles than agreeableness” (G 4:422). But given Kant’s commitment to the value of rational agency, discarding one’s humanity in order to avoid pain is a bad trade-off. For a Kantian discussion of suicide, see Velleman (1999).
- 31.
Kant’s view is that without rational agency (and thus without freedom), “earth would be bereft of value, a meaningless rock floating through the universe” (Aylsworth 2020). In a lecture on ethics, he says “If all creatures had a faculty of choice bound by sensuous impulses, the world would have no value; the inner value of the world, the summum bonum, is the freedom to act in accordance with a faculty of choice that is not necessitated. Freedom is therefore the inner value of the world” (VE 27:1482). For more on this point, see Aylsworth (2020). Cf. Guyer (2000, 96).
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Aylsworth, T., Castro, C. (2024). The Duty to Promote Digital Minimalism in Ourselves. In: Kantian Ethics and the Attention Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45638-1_4
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