The Duplicity of Online Behavior

People commonly believe that any form of deception, no matter how innocuous it is and no matter whether the deceiving person intended it otherwise, is always morally wrong. In this paper, I will argue that deceiving in real-time is morally distinguishable from deceiving on-line because online actions aren’t as fine-grained as actions occurring in real-time. Our failure to detect the fine-grained characteristics of another avatar leads us to believe that that avatar intended to do a moral harm. Openly deceiving someone on Facebook or Twitter is not a way to build wholesome virtual friendships but to destroy them. This paper will show how the traditional understanding of the doing / allowing distinction fails to apply in cyberspace.