Virtue or Utility? Being an Ethical Online Citizen

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A month or so ago I wrote a post called ‘Why #notaspottynerd isn’t okay‘, which was basically a case study on something I’ve discussed previously in “You Can’t Build Inclusion on Exclusionary Language“. Both of these look at a particular issue – the tendency in ‘social justice’ circles to use insults and terms that are often just as harmful as the things they’re aiming to combat. In this post, I intend to show how this particular issue is just one symptom of a much larger ethical issue common to cyberspace – the primacy of Utilitarian thought. From there, I shall move to suggest an alternate ethical framework – that of virtue ethics.