Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"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 EthicsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Preface xi
1 The Many Faces of Evil Online 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Some Trends and Cases 7
2 Our Online Environment 33
2.1 Introduction 33
2.2 Epistemic Success, Connectivity, and Coordination 39
2.2.1 Epistemic Success 39
2.2.2 Connectivity 40
2.2.3 Coordination 41
2.3 Other Features of Online Worlds that Shape Our Lives 43
2.3.1 Selectivity 43
2.3.2 Homophily and Stigmergy 46
2.3.3 Jurisdiction 47
2.3.4 Anonymity 48
2.3.5 Virtuality 49
2.3.6 Voluntariness 49
2.3.7 Positionality 50
2.3.8 Interpretive Flexibility 51
2.3.9 Interactivity 52
2.3.10 Publicity 53
2.3.11 Domesticity 55
2.3.12 Isolation 56
2.3.13 Addictiveness 57
3 The Transformation of Social Life 59
3.1 Introduction 59
3.2 Our Public and Private Lives: Plural Worlds and Values 61
3.3 Public/Private Lives Online 69
3.4 Life on Your Own Terms 71
3.5 Online/Offline World Contrasts: Overstated and Alarmist 77
3.6 Alarmism about Sexual Predators and Children 79
4 The Moral Fog of Our Worlds 83
4.1 Introduction 83
4.2 The Moral Fog of Evil 86
4.3 The Shared Life and Our Vulnerability to Evil 97
4.3.1 Learning and Development Vulnerabilities 104
4.3.2 The Need for Intimacy 107
4.3.3 Keeping Up with Others 108
4.3.4 Working and Professional Life 110
4.3.5 Plural Identities 113
4.3.6 Incremental and Collective Evils 114
4.3.7 Widely Shared Vice and Weakness 116
5 The Fate of the Moral Life 119
5.1 Introduction 120
5.2 Moral Character: A Case of Mistaken Identity? 120
5.3 Good Character, Self]interest, Others and Surrounds 124
5.4 Evil and Responsibility 131
5.5 Nothing New Under the Sun 140
5.6 The Liberal 142
5.7 Conclusion: Just Me and the Internet 145
Bibliography 150
Index 157
