Week 15

Among the ethical theories, the one about the Subjective Relativism reasons with me. It also describes the impossibility of creating the sole set of ethical rules. And even people who clearly do amoral things, sometimes are convinced they don’t.

There are many online shopping platforms in Ukraine, and all of them are pretty safe to use. However, one of them is considered a hole of scammers, and people try to avoid buying stuff there. But it has a huge range of products, and sometimes that is the only choice to buy or sell specific products. I tried to sell my guitar there, and brushing away scammers with their phishing links became a common thing for me. However, once, I decided to understand what is going on in the heads of these people, because they all are people at the end of the day. And I started a dialogue with one of them.

What I didn’t know is that most of the scammers are not loners, but people working for someone and getting presents of profit from their work. And there is where the ambiguity emerges, and the theory of subjective relativism starts to work. I know that I would never do these scams, but the fact that you are just doing the routine work for a one boss-scammer may be more appropriate for some people. The man I spoke to was a student, just a young man, and he saw nothing bad in just sending people some links. Then goes the dilemma: “Are you guilty of being hands of evil?”. On one hand, you don’t do that from your own intentions of doing cruel things. On the other, you do them, even though you are just one link in the chain. Another dilemma is “The rules about being safe during online shopping are written everywhere, so the scammed person has only themselves to blame”. Everyone’s moral beliefs come from their unique background and upbringing, thus, cannot be certain for all people.

To sum up, the theory of subjective relativism describes the difficulties of creating ethical rules for behavior on the Internet. However, I am sure the rules still have to be rigid and written to all people to make the Internet a safer place.