Whenever I post about religion and politics on BHL, I’m typically impressed by how quickly commenters leap to culpability judgments. Perhaps I’ve missed what to someone is an “obvious” objection, and since I didn’t address it, I must be dim-witted or deliberately dishonest. Or perhaps the very fact that I want to defend a certain position is evidence of some deep moral corruption on my part. My immediate reaction is typically, “Wow, they really have no idea what my beliefs, goals and intentions are. How could they be so confident in their judgments?” But the fact is that I leap to conclusions about the motives of others as well, including those commenters. I make such judgments quickly and easily.

And I’m often mistaken to do so. In a pre-historic world where we will only ever encounter 20-100 people, making near-automatic culpability judgments might be a reliable epistemic practice. But once we’re making culpability judgments about total strangers we will never meet, our culpability judgments almost certainly become less reliable. Such judgments are especially problematic over the internet, since we have much less social information about what is driving others emotionally and cognitively. We lack the social information conveyed by inflection and facial expressions and we frequently only interact with people a small number of times in this limited fashion. To test your own bias, consider your experience meeting someone in person that you’ve only known over the internet. Whenever this happens to me, I am almost always impressed by how much I got wrong, from their appearance, to their voice, to how often they’re sarcastic. I imagine you’ve had a similar experience.

So this leads me to a question: what if we suppressed nearly all of our culpability judgments about people we interact with over the internet, save in extremely obvious and egregious cases?  The cost would be that we’re not as able to hold people accountable in e-format in cases where it would do some good, and it may be annoying to suppress our judgments. But the benefits seem large. First, we don’t have to endure the anger or resentment involved (and if we enjoy those feelings, we almost certainly shouldn’t). Second, and more importantly, we won’t attack people who don’t deserve it.

Can anyone seriously believe that the good outweighs the bad?