Restorative ethics for the digital world. In search for a ‘human based’ design.

This essay seeks to explore the potentials of restorative ethics in contributing in designing digital technologies in a way that puts the human being at the centre of the attention, considering how instead the digital world and its related technologies can result de-humanizing at various levels. The digital world, in fact, can produce or enhance various forms of discrimination, whose outcome may ultimately result in forms of more or less explicit violence to people and relationships. This writing will not take into account restorative ways to react to phenomena of discrimination, but rather will seeks to show that a restorative approach can offer important conceptual and ethical standpoints for legal designers and technology developers in order to design digital technology around users, their interests and their needs rather than imposing such tools "on", or "notwithstanding", them. The overall goal of these first reflection on the theme is to offer a pathway able to match a “critical openness” towards technological innovations with the issue of ethically safeguarding the protection of their human users.