Perhaps one of the most profound changes technology has wrought on society is the ability to form and maintain human relationships online. Dating sites are only one example. People connect and reconnect with friends, family, professional contacts, and romantic interests through social networking sites like Facebook, through gaming sites like WoW, and through virtual worlds like Second Life.
It's also brought broken relationships with people citing online infidelity as cause for divorce like the now infamous British woman who accused her husband of a Second Life affair.
With these new types of relationships, we have new challenges to traditional relationship ethics. If a woman goes out for drinks in real life with a former romantic partner without telling her current romantic partner about it, we probably each have an immediate opinion about the ethics of the situation even without knowing all of the details. What if that same woman friends the former partner on a social network instead? What if it's a network on which she actually has hundreds of contacts? Is she obligated to full disclosure?
These new ways of conducting relationships bring not only new arenas in which to decide right and wrong but also new challenges to deciding degrees of right and wrong. At which point does Facebook chatting behind your partner's back become the equivalent of meeting a person face-to-face behind your partner's back?
There are many possible answers to this question and others.
- Is it wrong to pretend to be someone else on a social networking site? If so, how wrong?
- Is it wrong to make your qualities sound a little better than strictly true on an online dating site? If so, how wrong?
- Is it wrong to have multiple flirtatious chat relationships going on at once in which there is mental intimacy but not physical intimacy and in which none of the various partners are aware of the others? If so, how wrong?
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