Moral justification for online shaming

Abstract

It is ever more common nowadays, since the onset of digitalized socializing, for people to censure those who fall short of established moral standards by publicly shaming them. The traditional aim of shaming wrongdoers has been to awaken in the victim a feeling of embarrassment, exposure, or guilt and remorse in the hope that these feelings would inspire a change in their behavior. Yet overall, the ease and ubiquity of online bullying and humiliation has significantly altered the overall impact of public shaming as a force for good. What used to be a reliable means of enforcing positive change has now evolved into an unprecedented genre in its own right. Thus ‘online shaming’ opens the forum of behavioral evaluation to a completely anonymous terrain of interchange, eliminating cultural and geographical barriers, whereby anyone is free to shame promptly and ubiquitously. The result is that the degree of shaming is often disproportionate to the targeted offense, raising serious moral risks that require accountability. Should there be technical mechanisms by which to simply do away with online shaming altogether? I propose candidates for a possible register of objective desiderata to guide our thinking about whether online shaming might ever be morally justified.