the morality of the Information Age

本来看前面各种对自由竞争的推崇（厌穷厌蠢厌懒厌能力效率低下）以为作者挺社达呢，看到最后一章发现他把标签贴给了马列毛跟斯大林希特勒哈哈，甚至批判了道德相对主义。也没想到落脚是对道德对信任对信誉的肯定和想象，有点儿像 Balaji 呼吁的 “道德创新”。
Karl Marx believed in the struggle for survival just as much as Charles Darwin, but he believed it was a war between social classes, themselves formed by economic forces. Adolf Hitler believed in the struggle for survival, and saw his own political career almost exclusively in those terms. But he believed that the struggle was one between different races. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler can all be called social Darwinists, in that they saw the struggle for survival, “Mein Kampf” as Hitler called it, as the central political issue. The Marxists saw social classes as though they were separate species; the Nazis saw races in the same light.
The alternative to destructive “interference” competition is collaborative competition, and collaborative competition is the central idea of Adam Smith, and also of Malthus and of William James. 
The archetype of collaborative competition is the merchant. It is in the interest of the merchant that the customer should be satisfied with the transaction, because only a satisfied customer comes back for more trade. It is also in the interest of the merchant that the customer should be prosperous, because a prosperous customer has the money to go on buying.
Conquest implies the destruction of the other party; commerce implies the satisfaction of the other party.
A successful social morality must therefore have certain characteristics. It must be strong—a weak morality will be vulnerable and ineffective. It must contribute to the struggle for survival, but in ways that are collaborative rather than murderous.
It must be dynamic, to match the dynamic changes of modern technology, and indeed of all modern social systems. It must be economically efficient. The mixture of egalitarian and authoritarian ideas in the Leninist system simply did not work.
It has a broader purpose of making the society a good one to live in, and of binding people together. Also, moralities have to adapt and survive; a brittle morality may be acceptable in our generation only to be rejected in the next. A traditional social morality may be too inflexible to adapt to successive changes in social structure. 
A purely relativist system is not amorality at all; it gives no clear signals on how to behave.
A strong community, even a virtual community, depends upon the morality being widely accepted. The most successful periods in the history of societies tend to be those in which the collective morality is fully shared. Such a morality not only performs specific functions such as reducing crime, and helping to support family and social structures, but gives citizens a sense of purpose and direction.
In such a moral society, the individual citizen is able to work toward personal objectives inside a framework of social support.
Yet the adherent to each of these systems of belief regards these observations as a small price to pay for a shared and coherent sense of world order, in which the individual has a settled place. 
A shared morality in a tolerant society was the ideal of John Locke and of early philosophers of liberty. They did not at all believe that a society, of any kind, can be maintained without rules, but they thought that the rules ought to be subject to the best of reason, and that people should be coerced to accept only the essential rules. They did recognize that coercion was inevitable in social morality, particularly in the protection of life or of property, because they considered that no society can survive if there is no security. They applied an almost absolute tolerance to variations in personal choices that did not affect the welfare of others.
From this combined doctrine of social morality inessential matters and tolerance in personal decisions, one actually gets a core moral standard that has to be imposed on all citizens and a voluntary ethic that citizens accept as individuals or as members of subgroups in society.
The adherence to these optional parts of social morality does not need to be universal, but the core morality does have to be shared, and people who will not accept the core morality damage society as well as themselves.
Anarchy is not the ideal society, because without the enforcement of law there is no human security.
The original phrase of John Locke has it precisely. Everyone has a right to “life, liberty and estate.” In 1776 Thomas Jefferson added another of John Locke’s phrases, “the pursuit of happiness.” That makes a very fine phrase, and a very fine aspiration, but “life, liberty and estate” is more down to earth than “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Society depends absolutely on the right to life and the right to property. In practice history shows that these rights can be protected only when there is liberty. If the state is all-powerful, then the state becomes the great enemy of life, as in wars of aggression, and of individual property, by taking an inordinate share of the national wealth for its own often undesirable and always wasteful purposes.
The phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is taken from John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1691): “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful pursuit of true and solid happiness, so the care of ourselves that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.”
A good social morality has certain characteristics. It should contribute to the survival of society and of individuals, in a dynamic rather than static way. It should include tolerance and avoid self-righteousness. It should be religious, rather than merely agnostic. It should not pretend to decide questions of scientific fact. It should be neither anarchic nor authoritarian. It should be widely shared and deeply held. Such a social morality is particularly important to the family and to the raising of children as independent and responsible adults. It provides the focus of a good society.
When change occurs in technology or the other factors that set the boundaries where violence is exercised, the character of society inevitably changes with them. Everything that is attached to the way humans interact, including morality and the common sense of the way we seethe world, will change as well. After a period of slack morality, which is indicative of the end of an era, we will see the awakening of a sterner morality, with more exacting demands to meet the more exacting requirements of a world of competitive sovereignty.
As James Bennett has argued, the morality of the Information Age will also be a morality of trust.
A reputation for honesty will be an important asset in the cybereconomy.