Evil Online

DEAN COCKING is a moral philosopher and independent researcher who works on friendship, moral theory, and various subjects within professional and applied ethics. He is the author of Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (with Justin Oakley, 2001) and has published articles in Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, and Revue Internationale De Philosophie. JEROEN VAN DEN HOVEN is Professor of Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology. He is founding editor-in-chief of Ethics and Information Technology and a member of the European Group on Ethics in the European Commission. He has been widely published on ethics and information technology, including Information Technology and Moral Philosophy (2009) and Designing in Ethics (2018).

• Acknowledgments ixPreface xi1 The Many Faces of Evil Online 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Some Trends and Cases 72 Our Online Environment 332.1 Introduction 332.2 Epistemic Success, Connectivity, and Coordination 392.2.1 Epistemic Success 392.2.2 Connectivity 402.2.3 Coordination 412.3 Other Features of Online Worlds that Shape Our Lives 432.3.1 Selectivity 432.3.2 Homophily and Stigmergy 462.3.3 Jurisdiction 472.3.4 Anonymity 482.3.5 Virtuality 492.3.6 Voluntariness 492.3.7 Positionality 502.3.8 Interpretive Flexibility 512.3.9 Interactivity 522.3.10 Publicity 532.3.11 Domesticity 552.3.12 Isolation 562.3.13 Addictiveness 573 The Transformation of Social Life 593.1 Introduction 593.2 Our Public and Private Lives: Plural Worlds and Values 613.3 Public/Private Lives Online 693.4 Life on Your Own Terms 713.5 Online/Offline World Contrasts: Overstated and Alarmist 773.6 Alarmism about Sexual Predators and Children 794 The Moral Fog of Our Worlds 834.1 Introduction 834.2 The Moral Fog of Evil 864.3 The Shared Life and Our Vulnerability to Evil 974.3.1 Learning and Development Vulnerabilities 1044.3.2 The Need for Intimacy 1074.3.3 Keeping Up with Others 1084.3.4 Working and Professional Life 1104.3.5 Plural Identities 1134.3.6 Incremental and Collective Evils 1144.3.7 Widely Shared Vice and Weakness 1165 The Fate of the Moral Life 1195.1 Introduction 1205.2 Moral Character: A Case of Mistaken Identity? 1205.3 Good Character, Self]interest, Others and Surrounds 1245.4 Evil and Responsibility 1315.5 Nothing New Under the Sun 1405.6 The Liberal 1425.7 Conclusion: Just Me and the Internet 145Bibliography 150Index 157

"I see Evil Online as in the same tradition as Hannah Arendt’s crucially important book The Banality of Evil, which attempted to explain and characterize the behaviour of apparently ‘ordinary’ people – rather than probable psychopaths like Himmler – in the Holocaust. As Cocking and van den Hoven note, whether their idea of a moral fog is a development of the banality thesis or something entirely new doesn’t matter much, since even if it is a development they are taking it further and using the idea of a moral fog to elucidate the way that the online environment we are in can make us insensitive to moral facts we’re otherwise perfectly capable of recognizing. Certainly the particular mechanisms of totalitarianism identified by Arendt aren’t straightforwardly going to explain evil online, but the general issues at stake do have similarities. How is it that Eichmann and the non-psychopathic perpetrators of evil online come to ignore their duty, or arrive at such a distorted view of what duty requires?The book is also in some ways analogous to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, first published in 1651, in which Hobbes tries to explain how the natural state of human beings is amoral – a war of all against all – and how morality can be seen as a human creation enabling us to escape that state and build a civilization. The online world is something like a state of nature, but the difference between the Hobbesian situation and our own is that we already have a morality. The puzzle is how to disperse the fog, and it is a puzzle we need urgently to think about before it is too late and the fog begins to thicken and drift even further than it is already doing from the online into the real world."--Roger Crisp, Practical Ethics