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This is an interesting view point but I believe that there are a few important elephants missing from this party.
Firstly, i take contention with your claim of an online ‘morality’ – we have morality in one sense, it doesn’t change depending on the situation. What YOU might CHOOSE to DO, may change depending on where you are and what medium you are using, but the actual moral content of your actions or words remains the same irrespective where you say it. Condoning killing online is just as wrong as condoning it in real life. It is a dangerous road to travel to confuse etiquette and morality, one we should take care to avoid.
Secondly, You are spectacularly over simplifying the nuanced and complex nature of morality. Our moral intuition adapts to each situation it is presented with. So, in one situation, we may find a consequentialist (or utilitarian) action morally palatable, even acceptable, but in another completely similar situation we may find a non-consequentialist outcome much more acceptable.
For example, take a bomber pilot that is instructed to attack an enemy factory. The destruction of the factory would result in the deaths of a certain number of civilians but would end the war and save ten-fold more lives. The death of the civilians is not required for the completion of the act. If they were absent the attack would still happen
Now imagine the same situation, but this time the death of the civilians and not the destruction of the factory is required to end the war. Without the civilians present the attack would not take place.
The outcome is the same for both situations, but the MEANS of action makes the latter an intuitively more irreprehensible and vulgar action than the former.
This moral complexity and nuance you simply cannot ignore or pretend to predict.
The case is no different with Amy Whinehouse and the Norway massacre. Death was involved in both (killing in one and death in the other, between which we also make a moral distinction) but in the case of Amy Whinehouse, whose cause of death is still unconfirmed, she chose to drink, to take drugs and generally indulge in actions that made her more prone to dying unnaturally.
If you take the case of the Norway killings, as is the case of most killings, these kids had no choice in their fate – they didn’t have the chance to die naturally if that were to be their cause in the future – they weren’t given a chance to live life.
There IS a moral distinction between these two events. While both are terrible, one is immoral – and the other is either self inflicted – or natural – and thus, those of us who recognise this distinction feel upset that others perceive a Amy Whinehouse’s death to be more of a problem than a callous, immoral act of violence.
Thirdly, cyberspace has connected millions of people to each other and exposed alot of differing cultures and perspective. At the same time it has allowed many people to see, somewhat, the extent to which many of us have fallen into a sort of moral depravity where our moral intuition is ‘out of tune’ with the others. I think this disjunct, where some cared more about Amy Whinehouse, than Norway, proved to be an eye opener for many, including myself.
I agree with you that both are tragedies, but one does deserve the attention of more people than the other. It’s not that the tragedy of Amy Whinehouse’s death is lessened because of the Norway incident, it is that they are perceived as morally different events. The problem arises, I think, from what i said above, that we are slowly discovering this divide of moral sensibility across users of the internet – but in no means is it to do with the fact that users have a different sense of morality online – an online morality as you put it.
Long rant i know.