Freedom and responsibility in digital reality: an attempt of Orthodox analysis

Anatoly G. Kosichenko

2025

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DOI 10.51216/2687-072x_2025_2_14-29
Data confidence 70 medium
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Abstract

The subject of the article is the process of digitalization, taken from the side of their worldview and ideological foundations and concretized to the relationship between freedom and responsibility. The purpose of the research is to analyze these foundations from the Orthodox positions in the aspect of the ideological content of digitalization, considered through the prism of the relationship between freedom and responsibility in the digital reality. The relevance of such an analysis is dictated by the growing influence of digitalization on all aspects of personal and social life of a person with the obvious ambiguity of its current tasks and ultimate goals. The following methods serve as the methodological basis for the study: comparative, which compares the relationship between freedom and responsibility in Orthodoxy with their content in the digital reality; phenomenological, revealing the essence of freedom and responsibility in these areas; axiological, focusing on the value aspects of freedom and responsibility. It is shown that digitalization and artificial intelligence can have a positive impact on the development of humanity, but only if they remain what they essentially are - just another stage of technological development - and do not claim the status of a new and comprehensive paradigm of global progress. However, digitalization is already claiming the status of a dominant trend of our time. It is concluded that the worldview and ideological basis of digitalization is trans-humanism and a radical substitution of the spiritual essence of man; at the same time, digitalization negatively affects the spiritual content of human life, reducing the potential for interpersonal communication, primitivizing culture, replacing the creative essence of man with formal behavioral stereotypes. Since the trend towards the expansion of digital reality is universal and cannot be ignored, it should be endowed with at least minimal moral content as much as possible and not allowed to turn into a global challenge for humanity.