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Monday, January 06, 2020

Moral fog


Moral fog actually is a term that comes from the military world. It refers to the phenomenon that in complex situations, which are so typical for war, moral lines and distinctions become vague and obscure, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish right from wrong. This is worsened by the fact that in war situations military decisions come to have priority: What is good from a purely military point of view is good as such. This has been worded by Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s: “We all make mistakes. We know we make mistakes. I don’t know any military commander, who is honest, who would say he has not made a mistake. There’s a wonderful phrase: ‘the fog of war.’ What ‘the fog of war’ means is: war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.” (from: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War ) McNamara talks here of “mistakes” but actually this is an understatement if not hiding the facts, for often moral fog situations bring also outright crimes with them as well. But here I don’t want to talk about evil in war but about evil online.
The world of the Internet hasn’t broadened our world a lot only positively but also negatively. As for the latter: There is much evil online, and then I don’t only mean what is done by criminals who try to steal our passwords and inlog data in order to steal our money, for instance, but much evil is done by people who are seemingly good souls; souls like you and me so to speak. Take for instance the phenomenon of happy slapping: knock down someone, record it with your mobile camera and upload it to Facebook. For fun. For fun? What kind of fun is it if you physically and probably also mentally hurt someone else and show it to everybody? It’s evil! Or someone has sent you a nude picture in trust because you are Internet friends. But you both get into a virtual fight and you share the picture publicly online in order to blame him or her. It’s evil. Etc. Cases abound. Would you do such things outside the Internet in “real life”? The answer for most of us is “no”. Why then is your Internet conduct so different from what you do offline? In order to explain this Dean Cocking and Jeroen van de Hoven have broadened the use of the idea of moral fog and have applied it to the Internet as well. For there is much in the online world that makes our moral lines and distinctions vague, as they state in their book Evil online.
On the Internet, just like in war, so Cocking and van den Hoven, “our abilities to make and act upon reasonable judgements about our conduct, and about where we are headed, are fogged up in some atypical and hugely amplified ways.” (p. 87) To mention a few factors that make our online world foggy:
- “Filter bubbles”: searching machines select information based on what it “thinks” that you find interesting in view of your past searching behaviour. This makes that you mainly get information you already agree with. So your view is restricted to your “normative environment”. Critical information is screened out.
- The human tendency to associate with similar others and copy their behaviour.
- Anonymity. But also that online you can easily present yourself better than you are and leave out what you want to hide for others. And many believe you.
- Social isolation. You are alone behind your computer and nobody really controls you. You can have the weirdest ideas in your mind and put them online.
These are only some of the characteristics of being online that are treated in Evil online. They make that our social lives change and are different in online situations from what they are in the face-to-face world. Relations that were once clear and distinct become vague and obscure like in a fog: What is public, what is private? Who can we trust? What can we show of ourselves to others online, for example when we think of intimacy (if not to speak of nude pictures and sex?). And to mention yet something else: in the age of the Internet it has become more difficult for parents to check what their children do. The rise of the online world has education made more complicated than before. This is not only so because children are often more knowledgeable about the online world than their parents are, but also because it is easier for them to hide their Internet behaviour from their parents than their “real life” behaviour.
Factors like these make that the online world is foggy and nebulous in comparison to the “real world”, so Cocking and van de Hoven make clear, with the result that, to quote a book review by Robert Crisp, “[t]he internet environment causes us to be blind to morally salient features of what we’re doing, screening off our moral understanding. The technology distances us from the people we are harming, and the moral authorities that provide us with guidance are no longer our parents, our teachers, ordinary role models, but our internet ‘friends’ ”. And then the fog can becomes so thick that we lose sight of the moral lines we always followed and still follow in the “real world”. “[W]hat was obviously bad, now seems fine” , so Cocking and van de Hoven (p.97). When you have come that far, there are not many thresholds anymore for you to commit evil online.

Sources
- Cocking, Dean and Jeroen van de Hoven, Evil online. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018.
- Crisp, Robert, “Evil Online and the Moral Fog”, on http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2018/10/evil-online-and-the-moral-fog/

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