Ethics Newsline®

by Rushworth M. Kidder

The history of moral philosophy is littered with big, hairy arguments. Some are so antique they’re irrelevant. Others remain vitally important. Here’s one, put colloquially: “Hey, who needs ethics? We’ve got laws.”

Some lawyers (though fewer than you might think) are fond of this argument. So are some Enronesque corporations, happy to assert that “if it ain’t illegal, it must be ethical.” But the argument comes most clearly into focus when old laws don’t cover new crimes.

That’s the situation in a federal case involving Megan Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl we wrote about last December. She committed suicide in 2006 after “Josh,” a boy she’d met only on the social networking site MySpace, suddenly turned nasty and messaged her that “the world would be a better place without you.”

That tragedy would have been bad enough if Josh had been real. In fact, he was a fiction. While Megan thought she was chatting with another 13-year-old, she actually was corresponding with 47-year-old Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s estranged girlfriends living four doors down the street. Drew invented Josh as a vengeful hoax in order to (as she reportedly told a neighbor) “mess with Megan.”

But what really iced this appalling cake was a kind of legal short-sightedness. It turns out that Drew’s behavior — cyberbullying, as it’s now called — wasn’t a crime under Missouri or federal law. As a local sheriff’s department spokesman put it at the time, what she did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.” Now, finally, Drew is being brought to trial on October 7 — not in Missouri, however, but in California, where the MySpace servers are located. Reason: Federal prosecutors are having to use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, designed to prosecute Internet hackers who access computer accounts to steal data.

If Lori Drew walks free because judges can’t find any crime she committed, that conclusion will jar the national conscience, but it won’t be unprecedented:

• When 15-year-old Jonathan Lebed began using fictitious names to promote stocks on Yahoo’s finance message boards from his New Jersey bedroom in 1999, netting some $800,000 in six months, he triggered chaos in the markets until the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission finally nailed him for stock-market fraud. Lebed however was allowed to keep a huge amount of his gains because the legal issues were so unclear that prosecutors dared not press for more.
• When the “I Love You” computer virus appeared in 2000, allegedly developed and launched in the Philippines by lone computer student Onel A. de Guzman, it created $5.5 billion in global damages. At the time, however, there were no laws against such crimes in the Philippines, so all charges against Guzman were dropped.

Given that technology always will be out ahead of regulation, are we helpless? Must we assume that humans are extraordinarily brilliant as technological innovators, but that as moral actors we’re dumb as fence posts? Are we capable of amazing foresight into communication systems, but so dense about their moral implications that we let ethical calamities smash us in the face before we say, “Wow! Look at this! Who knew?”

What’s needed is a willingness to say, “We knew” — or at least, “We should have guessed.” MySpace, we now know, is a wonderfully liberating but potentially damaging technology. Is it so hard to imagine what happens if we let teens access MySpace without any instruction in the ethics of its use? That instruction should include clear warnings about the Lori Drew syndrome: how to detect fraud, what questions to ask to be sure you’re talking to someone real, and where to turn if you’re in doubt.

Can we make such warnings stick? Sure we can. As a nation, we require environmental impact statements from developers of new construction projects. Why not ask for ethical impact statements from the developers of communication technologies like MySpace? And why not require clear mitigation procedures when the product affects the sensitive mental landscapes of teens and preteens?

The tech community, like the builders before them, may grumble at the costs. But if moral history is any guide, they’ll soon settle down to help keep people like Megan alive — and mothers like Drew from ever imagining they could mess with kids and get away with it.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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