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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Public Philosophy Series
- Sprache: Englisch
"I am delighted to offer my highest praise to Dean Cocking and Jeroen van den Hoven's brilliant new book, Evil Online. The confrontation between good and evil occupies a central place in the challenges facing our human nature, and this creative investigation into the spread of evil by means of all-powerful new technologies raises fundamental questions about our morality and values. Cocking and Van den Hoven's account of the moral fog of evil forces us to face both the demons within each of us as well as the demons all around us. In the end, we are all enriched by their perceptive analyses." --Phil Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University Principal Investigator, Stanford Prison Experiment "The internet offers new and deeply concerning opportunities for immorality, much of it shocking and extreme. This volume explains with great insight and clarity the corrupting nature of the internet and the moral confusion it has produced. It will play a vital role in the growing debate about how to balance the benefits of the internet against the risks it poses to all of us. Evil Online is an excellent book." --Roger Crisp, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford We now live in an era defined by the ubiquity of the internet. From our everyday engagement with social media to trolls on forums and the emergence of the dark web, the internet is a space characterized by unreality, isolation, anonymity, objectification, and rampant self-obsession--the perfect breeding ground for new, unprecedented manifestations of evil. Evil Online is the first comprehensive analysis of evil and moral character in relation to our increasingly online lives. Chapters consider traditional ideas around the phenomenon of evil in moral philosophy and explore how the dawn of the internet has presented unprecedented challenges to older theoretical approaches. Cocking and Van den Hoven propose that a growing sense of moral confusion--moral fog--pushes otherwise ordinary, normal people toward evildoing, and that values basic to moral life such as autonomy, intimacy, trust, and privacy are put at risk by online platforms and new technologies. This new theory of evildoing offers fresh insight into the moral character of the individual, and opens the way for a burgeoning new area of social thought. A comprehensive analysis of an emerging and disturbing social phenomenon, Evil Online examines the morally troubling aspects of the internet in our society. Written not only for academics in the fields of philosophy, psychology, information science, and social science, Evil Online is accessible and compelling reading for anyone interested in understanding the emergence of evil in our digitally-dominated world.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Acknowledgments
Preface
1 The Many Faces of Evil Online
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Some Trends and Cases
2 Our Online Environment
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Epistemic Success, Connectivity, and Coordination
2.3 Other Features of Online Worlds that Shape Our Lives
3 The Transformation of Social Life
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Our Public and Private Lives: Plural Worlds and Values
3.3 Public/Private Lives Online
3.4 Life on Your Own Terms
3.5 Online/Offline World Contrasts: Overstated and Alarmist
3.6 Alarmism about Sexual Predators and Children
4 The Moral Fog of Our Worlds
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The Moral Fog of Evil
4.3 The Shared Life and Our Vulnerability to Evil
5 The Fate of the Moral Life
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Moral Character: A Case of Mistaken Identity?
5.3 Good Character, Self‐interest, Others and Surrounds
5.4 Evil and Responsibility
5.5 Nothing New Under the Sun
5.6 The Liberal
5.7 Conclusion: Just Me and the Internet
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Evil Online
Dean CockingJeroen van den Hoven
This edition first published 2018© 2018 Dean Cocking and Jeroen van den Hoven
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Cocking, Dean, 1958– author.Title: Evil online / by Dean Cocking, Jeroen van den Hoven.Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2018. | Series: Blackwell public philosophy |Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2017060972 (print) | LCCN 2018006550 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119471202 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119471189 (epub) | ISBN 9781405154369 (cloth) | ISBN 9781405154376 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Good and evil–Electronic information resources. | Internet–Moral and ethical aspects.Classification: LCC BJ1401 (ebook) | LCC BJ1401 .C57 2018 (print) | DDC 170–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060972
Cover Image: © DimaChe/GettyimagesCover Design: Wiley
In memory of my mother “Bonnie”Dean Cocking
Ter nagedachtenis aan mijn vaderJeroen van den Hoven
Acknowledgments
This book has been in progress for a number of years and much has happened along the way. Hence, we apologize in advance to those who have helped us, but whom we have forgotten to thank. Three research assistants have helped us over the course of writing the manuscript: Job Timmermans provided some excellent work on cyberbullying, and on online social worlds, in the early days of the project; Sofia Kaliarnta also gave us some excellent work on online trends and cases for Chapter 1 and David van Putten provided us with many helpful corrections and suggestions throughout. The book has also benefited from careful readings given by Justin Oakley and Robert Young. We are grateful for their many suggestions that helped develop our thoughts, and the many revisions that helped us avoid some embarrassing mistakes.
We are indebted to the Department of of Values, Technology and Innovation: Delft University of Technology, for their support of the project. In addition to supporting the work of our research assistants, Dean was also provided with a six‐month fellowship to work on the project. We would also like to thank our editor at Wiley‐Blackwell, Michael Boylan, for his strong support and encouragement in the early days, and his significant help over the past year. We are also very grateful to Alec McAulay for his excellent, collaborative and extensive copy‐editing work and to Sindhuja Kumar whose proof‐reading and production editing also improved the book significantly.
For their love and support Dean would like to thank his wife, Kylie Cocking, and their children, Harry, Chloe, Georgia, and Lola. Kylie and Dean have also spent much of their time over the past decade or so discussing this project. As a result, Kylie has initiated and helped develop many lines of thought in this book. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are especially indebted to her contributions. Jeroen would also like to thank his family for their support: his wife Eugenie and his son Allard and daughter Emilie. To Emilie we are also grateful for providing us with some striking cases and examples. Jeroen would also like to thank his colleagues in Delft who have heard a lot about a project on evil and the Internet for a number of years, and not given up hope that it would appear.
Emblematic Still Life with Flagon, Glass, Jug and Bridle, Johannes Torrentius, 1614
Preface
In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hangs the seventeenth‐century still life painting you can see on your left. It is by a painter named Torrentius, a contemporary of Vermeer, who, according to some who had been in a position to compare their work, was the better and technically more skilled painter of the two. Torrentius’s ability to paint still life realistically was allegedly so impressive that some thought he had come to an agreement with the devil. The choice of topics of his paintings was also extraordinary: He was accused of and convicted for painting downright pornographic images.
What we know about Torrentius we mainly know through the proceedings of the many court cases that were brought against him because of his pornography. In Holland he had a group of enthusiastic followers and friends sometimes referred to as “Torrentians.” They had outspoken ideas about good and evil, and one of their central lines of thought was that they were beyond good and evil. Torrentius himself is reported to have behaved and justified his actions as if he was the sole measure of good and evil.
The still life in Amsterdam is the only remaining painting by Torrentius. The painting is in the genre of the temperance movement, a symbolic reminder of the virtues of temperance and restraint. It depicts a horse bridle, two vases, a glass and a music score and the following text in Dutch: “wat buyten maets bestaet in onmaets quaat vergaet,” which translates as “what fails to keep measure, will perish by extreme evil.” Torrentius lived his life in stark contrast to this pictorial evocation of temperance. He was well known in his hometown Haarlem for his luxurious life style, parties and expensive extravagancies. To this end, the painting should probably be interpreted as an ironic statement.
Among the many who were friends or followers of Torrentius was Jeronimus Cornelisz, a disgruntled drugstore owner in Haarlem. Cornelisz had nothing to lose in Holland and embarked upon the Batavia, a ship of the Vereenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company), to set sail to Batavia, the capital of the Dutch territories in the Indonesian Archipelago. The ship carried a valuable cargo of jewelry, silver and gold coins. Some of the men on board had been planning a mutiny from the moment the ship left port in Amsterdam, intending to disappear with the cargo and start a new life somewhere in the Asian Pacific Region. Jeronimus Cornelisz was one of them.
They would have carried out their plans if the Batavia had not been thrown on to a reef in a storm near the western coast of Australia at the Houtman Abrolhos Islands. The sailors, officers and other people on board were able to reach a group of small coral islands. Here they stayed for a few months, while others in a small rowing boat went to get help. Cornelisz became the leader of the small stranded community of 150 people, many of whom were women and children desperately needing assistance. Instead, however, Cornelisz and his men imposed a reign of terror and went on a killing spree. In a couple of months more than 120 people were murdered, including women and children. According to eye witnesses who survived and were later rescued, the killings often seemed to be done just for the fun of it.
The shocking story of the Batavia has been evocatively described in several novels and books, and presents an explosive mixture of contextual features that are conducive to the flourishing of evil. First, there was an underlying self‐serving motive of stealing and running with the riches that the ship carried. Second, there was the Torrentian philosophy of being above the law, beyond good and evil, and being entitled to set moral standards irrespective of what history had handed down and what existing social and legal institutions imposed. Third, there was the physical isolation of a coral reef island in one of the most remote corners of the world, untouched by man, but also unregulated, unobserved and so seemingly immune from censure.
In many cases, evil online has flourished in similar ways. Attitudes and conduct are set in new worlds where the nature and application of legal and moral values and constraints are far less clear and certain. There are new environments where the voice of moral authorities and the constraints of existing social institutions are often too weak to be heard, and where isolation from the reactions of others is ubiquitous. As a result, and unsurprisingly, those already guided by antisocial and immoral attitudes have been able to run amok online. The flourishing of evil online, however, is far from confined to the “likely suspects.” It is not just the bad, mad or criminal that we have to worry about. On the contrary, much evil online is being driven, and engaged in, by otherwise relatively normal, ordinary people. People who have not already largely abandoned prosocial standards and moral values, and who otherwise have managed to conduct themselves in relatively prosocial ways. Trying to better understand this territory of evildoing, both online and in our traditional worlds, is the main focus of our book.
Thinking of evildoers as not radically dissimilar in psychology to most of us is nothing new; it has a long history and has been expressed in different and conflicting ways. So, for example, some philosophers, such as the Confucian, Xunzi, have claimed that we are all naturally evil,1 whereas the Western philosopher, Immanuel Kant, thought that while we have the potential to exercise self‐governance by morality, our self‐conceit and our tendency to pursue self‐interest at the expense of others is all too common.2 Typically, tragedy also paints a somber picture of the world and what we can know about it, a place where evildoing becomes unavoidable, or at least a common pitfall of our normal lives.3 And, more recently, as we discuss in our final chapters, an industry in social science has emerged, investigating the evildoing of ordinary, even otherwise seemingly well‐adjusted, people.
The most influential contemporary description of evildoing resulting from minds that are not already consumed by antisocial and immoral attitudes, has been Hannah Arendt’s account of the “banality of evil.” On this account, or a common reading of it, otherwise relatively normal people, not already driven, say, by malice or hatred for others, become evildoers because they are fundamentally unthinking and uncritical about their own conduct. In the face of seemingly loud and clear evidence to the contrary, banal evildoers manage to persist in being guided by very ordinary, widely shared attitudes and pursuits. Attitudes and pursuits that have morally neutral descriptions, such as “doing one’s job well.” They possess, Arendt said, “an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of someone else.”4
Much of the rise of evil online may be seen as providing spectacularly new and widespread ways in which evil is banal and can flourish. However, there is typically much more to say about, and deeper considerations to explain, being “unthinking” about the moral status of one’s conduct and how this can enable evildoing. What is true, we argue, is that evildoing is typically not motivated by the recognition that what one is doing is evil. Evildoers rarely aim at evil. The sadist or the malicious are paradigms of evildoers who we imagine to commit evil intentionally or purposefully. However, much evildoing is not captured by these or other images of antisocial extremes. In fact, evildoing is commonly not even done in recognition of the nature of what one is doing as evil. But such failures of moral understanding are typically not simply banal. Indeed, sometimes they are not really banal at all. Instead, we argue, such evildoing is often better described, and explained, in terms of being undertaken in a moral fog.5
We describe various forms of moral fog ahead, and how it appears both online and in our traditional worlds. Online worlds have created and amplified problems of moral fog, and with this our capacities for moral corruption and evildoing, in a variety of ways. Moreover, the nature of values basic to the prosocial, moral life, such as autonomy, intimacy, trust and privacy are transformed online. In particular, the online social revolution has led to the near‐total demolition of our abilities to inhabit both of the (generally) quite separate, very different, and often contrasting worlds of public and private life, upon which important features of our basic values depend. As a result, our online‐transformed worlds raise some fundamental concerns about the fate of the prosocial, moral life. We begin developing our story about these worries more directly in Chapter 3.
In Chapter 2 we describe the online environment and how many features of the technology and its milieu shape self‐expression, communication, and the ways in which people pursue interests and activities. Our discussion here also provides some foundation for our focus in Chapter 3 on the fate of our traditional plural worlds and some of its basic values. In Chapters 4 and 5 we develop our accounts of the moral fog of evil, of moral character and of the prosocial life.
Our investigations into the varied phenomena of evil online, and how they have been enabled by features of our online environments, have unavoidably caused us to look more broadly and deeply at the nature of evildoing and the moral life. We begin our account with some of the cases and major trends of evil online that have led us down these tracks.
Notes
1
For a thoughtful and accessible account of Xunzi’s philosophy, see David Elstein’s entry, Xunzi,
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
,
www.iep.utm.edu/xunzi
(accessed 18 November 2017).
2
Kant regarded an evil will simply and broadly in terms of failing to have a good will. See, Immanuel Kant, Religion within the boundaries of mere reason, in
Religion and Rational Theology
(translators and editors Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant does describe different kinds of evil wills as more and less evil. The worst kind of will is where one is
governed
by self-interest, and so generally indifferent to conflict with the moral law. As we say above, for Kant our propensity to put ourselves ahead of others (our self-conceit) is all too common, and in this sense he described our evildoing as radical. See also, for example, Claudia Card, Kant’s theory of radical evil, in Claudia Card,
The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 73–95; Erik M. Hanson’s entry, Immanuel Kant: Radical evil, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://www.iep.utm.edu/rad-evil
(accessed 18 November 2017); and Paul Formosa, Kant on the radical evil of human nature,
The Philosophical Forum
, 38, no. 3, 2007, pp. 221–246.
3
For an account of evil in terms of tragedy see, John Kekes,
Facing Evil
, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990.
4
Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
, London: Penguin, 1964, p. 49.
5
For a short and clear discussion of what Arendt meant by “unthinking,” see, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt’s challenge to Adolf Eichmann,
The Guardian
, August 29 2011, available at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/hannah-arendt-adolf-eichmann-banality-of-evil
(accessed 18 November 2017). See also a collection of interviews with Arendt:
Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
, New York, Melville House Publishing, 2013. One of Butler’s points (or that comes out of her discussion) is that for Arendt, it is not that evil had become banal in the dictionary sense of ordinary, obvious and unsurprising, but that unthinkingness about the moral status of one’s conduct had, under totalitarian regimes, become banal. The account of the moral fog of evil that we go on to develop aims to shed light on what enables this unthinkingness (well beyond the case of totalitarianism). In some cases, we suggest features that may well be banal in the dictionary sense of mundane and unsurprising, such as in cases featuring our learning vulnerabilities, and dependence upon experts, leaders, and mentors. Seen like this, therefore, we may be read as highlighting various ways in which evil really is banal. However, as we argue in
Chapter 4
, even if our attitudes and/or motives can be described as banal in such cases, our doing evil things from mundane and widely shared motives need not make these cases examples of the banality of evil, at least, not in the sense to which the description of the banality of evil is always applied – namely, to depict
monumental
moral unthinkingness. Many cases are mixed and more nuanced. Thus, one can have fairly banal attitudes and motives, and commit evil, but the problem not be that one is altogether morally unthinking in the sense of
lacking
(or near enough) the capacity to be able to think from the standpoint of someone else. Instead, this capacity has been blindsided or misdirected, for instance, by one’s learning vulnerabilities.
1The Many Faces of Evil Online
Human wickedness is sometimes the product of a sort of conscious leeringly evil intent… But more usually it is the product of a semi‐deliberate inattention, in a swooning relationship to time.
Iris Murdoch1
1.1 Introduction
In May 2008, hackers bombarded the website of the Epilepsy Foundation of America with hundreds of pictures and links. The site provides advice, news on scientific research and contacts for people who suffer from epilepsy. People who suffer from epileptic seizures have to manage their condition carefully and need regular checkups and medical advice. Epilepsy patients often take precautionary measures to deal with situations where they may be incapacitated and unable to act. Some patients suffer from what is called “photosensitive epilepsy,” which means that flickering and flashing images may trigger epileptic seizures. The hackers who attacked the Landover site exploited a security flaw and inserted links to pages with rapidly flashing images. These images were perceived inadvertently by epilepsy patients who were looking for medical information on the website and triggered severe migraines and near‐seizure reactions in some site visitors. “They were out to create seizures,” said Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing for the foundation.2 The hackers did not seem to be interested in money or in control over the victim’s computer; they just wanted to create this impact on vulnerable people. “I count this in the same category of teenagers who think it's funny to put a cat in a bag and throw it over a clothesline – they don't realize how cruel it is,” said Paul Ferguson, a security researcher at antivirus‐software maker Trend Micro Inc.3
This is just one of the many examples of evil online that we present in this book. The evils we discuss are not situated on a faraway deserted island, but in another place much closer to home, yet unfamiliar at the same time: our new world of the Internet and social media. Attitudes and conduct may no longer be set in a world of uncharted waters and land, but now they are set in the uncharted territories of our new virtual worlds in cyberspace. This is where our children grow up and teenagers hang out pretty much all day. It is where socialization, moral education, and psychological development takes place. It is the space where young adults live and meet their partners, work, and relax. It is a world that surprises us every day with new inventions and services. And it is a world that is not well‐ordered, and that is weakly regulated, monitored, and policed.
This protean cyberdomain is growing and developing at breakneck speed, and it is far from clear who is responsible for what. Facebook and Google earn astronomical amounts of money from the online social and information revolution, but when it comes to taking responsibility for contributing to the social infrastructure of future societies, they are not very active. The responsibility for fake news, the live streaming of suicides, and cascading violence are cases in point. The application of legal principles and moral values in this new territory is deeply problematic. New digital environments constitute a different world, where the voice of traditional moral authorities and the constraints of old social institutions are largely screened from view. Laws often cannot be enforced because of confusion about the nature and status of the phenomena, lack of clarity about jurisdiction, the ineffectiveness of enforcement, and the anonymity of the perpetrators.
It has become clear over the last decade that online contexts have created wonderful opportunities for a vast range of crimes, from cybercrime to child abuse, from cyber‐jihad to identity fraud. We are, however, not primarily interested in the online versions of the obvious and straightforward forms of wrongdoing, such as fraud, crime, deception, scams, war, aggression, hate, and violence, with which we are all too familiar from the offline history of humanity. These are, by now, all well‐known, extensively studied, and are usually referred to by means of prefixing “cyber,” “digital,” or “online” to the traditional catalogue of crimes and misdemeanors: cyber fraud, digital crimes, identity theft, online deceit and so on. As such, they are not so much novel, surprising, and puzzling as merely recent chapters in a long‐lasting arms race between criminals and crime‐fighters, between high‐tech frauds and cyberforensics.4 Neither are we primarily interested in the gross depravities that are sometimes seen in serious mental illness, and are now so easily supported and accommodated online. Paraphilias have blossomed online and there is no entry in the DSM classification under that heading without a large online repository of videos, images, and communities associated with it.5
Our primary interest is to assess how our new online habitats work against the “better angels” of our nature, and against aspects of our traditional environments and our relationships with others that enable our moral and prosocial capacities. We identify and investigate features of our online worlds that erode empathy and moral character, and that stifle moral and prosocial development.6 In so doing, we try to understand how young people, among others, are especially vulnerable to becoming victims of the online environments in which they increasingly spend their time. We do not want to take a Luddite or alarmist stance (more on this in Chapters 3 and 5 ahead), or add to the moral panic that sometimes surrounds discussions about social media and the Internet. On the other hand, evil online is an increasingly disturbing phenomenon across a wide range of fronts, and, as is invariably the case with revolutionary technology – and perhaps never more so than with the Internet revolution – our recognition of worries about where we are headed, much less our understanding of these worries, is lagging badly behind. More investigation into the rise of various forms of evil online, and the ways in which our online worlds differ “morally speaking” from our traditional worlds, is well overdue.
We evolved as moral and social beings in our traditional worlds of good old‐fashioned causality, contiguity of time and space, unity of action, physical proximity, and face‐to‐face interaction. In fact, it is in light of these conditions that the evolution of human beings as moral and prosocial creatures (of the kind that we are) makes sense. We have already struggled in the first part of the twentieth century with globalization and the stretching of our moral frameworks and sensibilities beyond the boundaries of our families, clans, cities, regions, and nation states. Now we are well into the twenty‐first century, we need to come to grips with our colonization of a digital space that operates under very different conditions, and obeys very different laws.
One thing that is clear is that the Internet and social media disinhibit people and easily escalate conflicts and problems. Once in existence, problems of any nature can cascade like a row of dominoes, and spread like a contagious disease in a large population of interconnected individuals. Chat and comment spaces are regularly filled with abusive language and denigrating remarks. The revolution in speed and access to wonderful ideas has just as effectively been a revolution in the spread of bad ideas. As indicated in our preface, the flourishing of evil online is not confined to the “usual suspects” – those already inclined from deranged, immoral, or criminal intentions. On the contrary, much evil flourishes online (as it long has offline) from the minds of more ordinary and normal people. In developing our account of this territory of evil online, we identify and bring together various characteristics of the online social environment, and of our capacities for evil, and illustrate how the latter may be appeased or summoned depending upon the former.
What we observe and experience at the surface of our online worlds is significantly determined by how the underlying contact network is structured, and by which software and algorithms are at work. All of these ingredients together guide people’s conduct online, and make them inclined to do things they could not have (easily) done offline.
A good deal of recent empirical research has shown the ways in which the design of the technology, the mechanisms, circumstances, imperceptible sensory cues, and the design of choice situations are hugely important for the way people behave online. So, for instance, in his book, The Dark Net, Jamie Bartlett provides excellent, well‐researched descriptions of the spread of some worrying phenomena online, such as assassination markets, suicide and self‐harm forums, racism and white supremacy networks, and anorexia and bulimia web sites. He is, however, reluctant to provide a normative analysis of the phenomena encountered online: “it is a series of portraits about how these issues play out at the fringes. I leave it entirely to you to decide what to think it means.”7
Some other scholars in the field have been a little more inclined to provide some moral evaluation.8 We aim to add to, and move beyond, these very useful though largely descriptive accounts of worrisome cyberphenomena. Not so much by means of more detailed description, but by means of morally relevant explanations, evaluations, and a general framework for ethical understanding of the moral life, and of the conditions under which it is enabled and sustained, or otherwise. As mentioned in our preface, while Hannah Arendt’s description of evil as banal has been massively influential, and much evil online may be seen as providing new ways in which evil can flourish and exhibit its banality, we argue that evildoing is often better understood as undertaken in a moral fog. Varieties of this moral fog can be encountered on a deserted island, or a remote and unruly corner of the world, or in an anonymous section of cyberspace with evocative names such as the “Deep Web,” “Dark Net,” or “Silk Road.” It may also be encountered on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, in a WhatsApp group, or on a chat forum of a high school website. The odds of washing up on the shores of a deserted island are not very high, but all of us are regularly stranded on one of these online places.
There are many kinds of moral fog that apply across cases involving those of otherwise relatively prosocial minds. Thousands of visitors are surrounded by it when visiting the hundreds of websites and forums specializing in self‐harm, suicide, anorexia, pedophilia, body dysmorphia, hard drugs, white supremacy, racism, misogyny, anti‐Semitism, and terrorism. We identify and discuss various kinds of moral fog throughout this book, from both our online and traditional worlds, and illustrate how thinking of evildoing in this way provides broader and deeper explanations of the territory of so‐called “banal evil,” and takes our understanding of evildoing a long way beyond banality.
1.2 Some Trends and Cases
In the case of the epilepsy hack with which we started this chapter, quite a few questions force themselves upon us. Who were the people who took the trouble to make these posts with the intention of inducing epileptic seizures? They spent many hours applying their computer skills to do so. Why? It wasn’t about money or material gain of some sort. Did they really understand the significance of the harm they set out to cause? Or, was it, as the security expert suggested, done just for “fun” without realizing how bad their action was? (Like teens might do in torturing a cat?) The fact that they could not be present to witness the suffering they caused apparently did not make it less “fun.” Indeed, it’s more likely (perhaps) that not really being there to see the damage inflicted on their victims enabled their lack of moral understanding. Such cases drive us to search for further explanations beyond that given by the seemingly banal description: “it was fun.”
Malicious practical jokers on the Internet are called trolls; there are many of them around, although they are not usually as bad as this one. Some perpetrators think they are doing the morally right thing, or at least a morally acceptable thing. Often however, application of their moral understanding is somehow suspended in the circumstances, and so they see little need for justification or excuse. The emotional damage and other negative effects that accrue to their victims are often not directly intended, and often not even foreseen.
Much the same is generally true of “catfishing.” Catfishing is a form of online identity fraud and deception. The “catfish” is the person who deceives others online. He or she benefits (typically psychologically) by getting attention of some sort, such as romantic attention, or admiration or empathy, from being in a sustained relationship with the victim or the “catfished.” Catfish can often sustain a relationship with their victim for a long time without being found out. They typically create an elaborate system of lies and deception, such as about their age, gender, education, health, accomplishments, or socioeconomic status, and may go to extremes to uphold their deceptive schemes and enhancing their fake biographies. A now‐famous MTV series, Catfish, has unraveled many interesting cases, in emulation of the documentary film, Catfish, that gave the phenomenon its name.9
