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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