This book has been in progress for a number of years and much has happened along the way. Hence, we apologize in advance to those who have helped us, but whom we have forgotten to thank. Three research assistants have helped us over the course of writing the manuscript: Job Timmermans provided some excellent work on cyberbullying, and on online social worlds, in the early days of the project; Sofia Kaliarnta also gave us some excellent work on online trends and cases for Chapter 1 and David van Putten provided us with many helpful corrections and suggestions throughout. The book has also benefited from careful readings given by Justin Oakley and Robert Young. We are grateful for their many suggestions that helped develop our thoughts, and the many revisions that helped us avoid some embarrassing mistakes.

We are indebted to the Department of of Values, Technology and Innovation: Delft University of Technology, for their support of the project. In addition to supporting the work of our research assistants, Dean was also provided with a six‐month fellowship to work on the project. We would also like to thank our editor at Wiley‐Blackwell, Michael Boylan, for his strong support and encouragement in the early days, and his significant help over the past year. We are also very grateful to Alec McAulay for his excellent, collaborative and extensive copy‐editing work and to Sindhuja Kumar whose proof‐reading and production editing also improved the book significantly.

For their love and support Dean would like to thank his wife, Kylie Cocking, and their children, Harry, Chloe, Georgia, and Lola. Kylie and Dean have also spent much of their time over the past decade or so discussing this project. As a result, Kylie has initiated and helped develop many lines of thought in this book. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are especially indebted to her contributions. Jeroen would also like to thank his family for their support: his wife Eugenie and his son Allard and daughter Emilie. To Emilie we are also grateful for providing us with some striking cases and examples. Jeroen would also like to thank his colleagues in Delft who have heard a lot about a project on evil and the Internet for a number of years, and not given up hope that it would appear.

Emblematic Still Life with Flagon, Glass, Jug and Bridle, Johannes Torrentius, 1614

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hangs the seventeenth‐century still life painting you can see on your left. It is by a painter named Torrentius, a contemporary of Vermeer, who, according to some who had been in a position to compare their work, was the better and technically more skilled painter of the two. Torrentius’s ability to paint still life realistically was allegedly so impressive that some thought he had come to an agreement with the devil. The choice of topics of his paintings was also extraordinary: He was accused of and convicted for painting downright pornographic images.

What we know about Torrentius we mainly know through the proceedings of the many court cases that were brought against him because of his pornography. In Holland he had a group of enthusiastic followers and friends sometimes referred to as “Torrentians.” They had outspoken ideas about good and evil, and one of their central lines of thought was that they were beyond good and evil. Torrentius himself is reported to have behaved and justified his actions as if he was the sole measure of good and evil.

The still life in Amsterdam is the only remaining painting by Torrentius. The painting is in the genre of the temperance movement, a symbolic reminder of the virtues of temperance and restraint. It depicts a horse bridle, two vases, a glass and a music score and the following text in Dutch: “wat buyten maets bestaet in onmaets quaat vergaet,” which translates as “what fails to keep measure, will perish by extreme evil.” Torrentius lived his life in stark contrast to this pictorial evocation of temperance. He was well known in his hometown Haarlem for his luxurious life style, parties and expensive extravagancies. To this end, the painting should probably be interpreted as an ironic statement.

Among the many who were friends or followers of Torrentius was Jeronimus Cornelisz, a disgruntled drugstore owner in Haarlem. Cornelisz had nothing to lose in Holland and embarked upon the Batavia, a ship of the Vereenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie (the Dutch East India Company), to set sail to Batavia, the capital of the Dutch territories in the Indonesian Archipelago. The ship carried a valuable cargo of jewelry, silver and gold coins. Some of the men on board had been planning a mutiny from the moment the ship left port in Amsterdam, intending to disappear with the cargo and start a new life somewhere in the Asian Pacific Region. Jeronimus Cornelisz was one of them.

They would have carried out their plans if the Batavia had not been thrown on to a reef in a storm near the western coast of Australia at the Houtman Abrolhos Islands. The sailors, officers and other people on board were able to reach a group of small coral islands. Here they stayed for a few months, while others in a small rowing boat went to get help. Cornelisz became the leader of the small stranded community of 150 people, many of whom were women and children desperately needing assistance. Instead, however, Cornelisz and his men imposed a reign of terror and went on a killing spree. In a couple of months more than 120 people were murdered, including women and children. According to eye witnesses who survived and were later rescued, the killings often seemed to be done just for the fun of it.

The shocking story of the Batavia has been evocatively described in several novels and books, and presents an explosive mixture of contextual features that are conducive to the flourishing of evil. First, there was an underlying self‐serving motive of stealing and running with the riches that the ship carried. Second, there was the Torrentian philosophy of being above the law, beyond good and evil, and being entitled to set moral standards irrespective of what history had handed down and what existing social and legal institutions imposed. Third, there was the physical isolation of a coral reef island in one of the most remote corners of the world, untouched by man, but also unregulated, unobserved and so seemingly immune from censure.

In many cases, evil online has flourished in similar ways. Attitudes and conduct are set in new worlds where the nature and application of legal and moral values and constraints are far less clear and certain. There are new environments where the voice of moral authorities and the constraints of existing social institutions are often too weak to be heard, and where isolation from the reactions of others is ubiquitous. As a result, and unsurprisingly, those already guided by antisocial and immoral attitudes have been able to run amok online. The flourishing of evil online, however, is far from confined to the “likely suspects.” It is not just the bad, mad or criminal that we have to worry about. On the contrary, much evil online is being driven, and engaged in, by otherwise relatively normal, ordinary people. People who have not already largely abandoned prosocial standards and moral values, and who otherwise have managed to conduct themselves in relatively prosocial ways. Trying to better understand this territory of evildoing, both online and in our traditional worlds, is the main focus of our book.

Thinking of evildoers as not radically dissimilar in psychology to most of us is nothing new; it has a long history and has been expressed in different and conflicting ways. So, for example, some philosophers, such as the Confucian, Xunzi, have claimed that we are all naturally evil,¹ whereas the Western philosopher, Immanuel Kant, thought that while we have the potential to exercise self‐governance by morality, our self‐conceit and our tendency to pursue self‐interest at the expense of others is all too common.² Typically, tragedy also paints a somber picture of the world and what we can know about it, a place where evildoing becomes unavoidable, or at least a common pitfall of our normal lives.³ And, more recently, as we discuss in our final chapters, an industry in social science has emerged, investigating the evildoing of ordinary, even otherwise seemingly well‐adjusted, people.

The most influential contemporary description of evildoing resulting from minds that are not already consumed by antisocial and immoral attitudes, has been Hannah Arendt’s account of the “banality of evil.” On this account, or a common reading of it, otherwise relatively normal people, not already driven, say, by malice or hatred for others, become evildoers because they are fundamentally unthinking and uncritical about their own conduct. In the face of seemingly loud and clear evidence to the contrary, banal evildoers manage to persist in being guided by very ordinary, widely shared attitudes and pursuits. Attitudes and pursuits that have morally neutral descriptions, such as “doing one’s job well.” They possess, Arendt said, “an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of someone else.”⁴

Much of the rise of evil online may be seen as providing spectacularly new and widespread ways in which evil is banal and can flourish. However, there is typically much more to say about, and deeper considerations to explain, being “unthinking” about the moral status of one’s conduct and how this can enable evildoing. What is true, we argue, is that evildoing is typically not motivated by the recognition that what one is doing is evil. Evildoers rarely aim at evil. The sadist or the malicious are paradigms of evildoers who we imagine to commit evil intentionally or purposefully. However, much evildoing is not captured by these or other images of antisocial extremes. In fact, evildoing is commonly not even done in recognition of the nature of what one is doing as evil. But such failures of moral understanding are typically not simply banal. Indeed, sometimes they are not really banal at all. Instead, we argue, such evildoing is often better described, and explained, in terms of being undertaken in a moral fog.⁵

We describe various forms of moral fog ahead, and how it appears both online and in our traditional worlds. Online worlds have created and amplified problems of moral fog, and with this our capacities for moral corruption and evildoing, in a variety of ways. Moreover, the nature of values basic to the prosocial, moral life, such as autonomy, intimacy, trust and privacy are transformed online. In particular, the online social revolution has led to the near‐total demolition of our abilities to inhabit both of the (generally) quite separate, very different, and often contrasting worlds of public and private life, upon which important features of our basic values depend. As a result, our online‐transformed worlds raise some fundamental concerns about the fate of the prosocial, moral life. We begin developing our story about these worries more directly in Chapter 3.

In Chapter 2 we describe the online environment and how many features of the technology and its milieu shape self‐expression, communication, and the ways in which people pursue interests and activities. Our discussion here also provides some foundation for our focus in Chapter 3 on the fate of our traditional plural worlds and some of its basic values. In Chapters 4 and 5 we develop our accounts of the moral fog of evil, of moral character and of the prosocial life.

Our investigations into the varied phenomena of evil online, and how they have been enabled by features of our online environments, have unavoidably caused us to look more broadly and deeply at the nature of evildoing and the moral life. We begin our account with some of the cases and major trends of evil online that have led us down these tracks.