Recently, a film critic and self-described fan of Amy Schumer tweeted a selfie with the comedian, accompanied by a (possibly offensive) joke. Schumer tweeted back a reply that was characterized by at least one media outlet as “shaming” the fan. A different media outlet, however, described the fan’s own action as “shaming.”

The dueling headlines read, “Amy Schumer Calls Out Twitter Troll for Slut-Shaming Joke” and “Amy Schumer Ridiculously Shames Kid for Doing an Amy Schumer Joke.” The latter article pointed out that the fan/troll/critic was 17 years old; the former noted that Schumer’s tweet “quickly made the rounds online, which prompted a ton of negative feedback for the film critic and praise for the comedian.”

Is online shaming just a new version of something that humans have always done, or is it substantially different, now that the shaming is taking place via the Internet? And, either way, is it the right thing to do?

Online shaming has been a hot topic over the last year. An entire book (“So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed“) has already been written about it, and many articles have struggled to define it and analyze the phenomenon. Is it just a new version of something that humans have always done, or is it substantially different, now that the shaming is taking place via the Internet? And, either way, is it the right thing to do? Does the answer to that depend on the power differential between the “shamer” and the person or people being “shamed,” as several commentators have suggested? Does it depend on what triggered the shaming? Does it depend on what exactly “a ton of negative feedback” really means?

Perhaps one reason we are struggling with this phenomenon is that it presents an ethical dilemma, in which justice arguments are made on both sides. Some may see online shaming as a way of standing up for justice and equality, especially when powerful people say something mean or stupid and are socially shamed in response (“punching up at a category of smug, entitled, misogynist dudes,” as Caitlin Dewey put it in a Washington Post article describing a particular set of cases).

Others, however, may see it as inherently unethical because the shamer has no real control over the proportionality of the response: In many cases of online shaming, the effects seem to be disproportionate to the offense that set them off (when the shaming goes viral and then marks the person, both online and off, potentially forever) — and proportionality is a key part of a just response.

We might want to be the kind of people who stand up for ourselves or people we agree with — but do we want to be the kind of people who shame others, meting out (potentially disproportionate) vigilante justice?

Online shaming may also pose a conflict between justice concerns and virtue ethics. We might want to be the kind of people who stand up for ourselves or people we agree with — but do we want to be the kind of people who shame others, meting out (potentially disproportionate) vigilante justice? In fact, sometimes the people who start an online shaming “wave” later regret their actions. Regret, in this case, seems to be a recognition of the fact that their own actions didn’t match up with their values.

And the common good is involved, as well. We’ve decided, as a society, that public flogging and scarlet letters are not appropriate responses to wrongdoing. Why? Perhaps because we now believe that public shaming diminishes not just the person shamed, but all the people who are participating in it or observing it. As Jon Ronson, the author of “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” notes, “It’s so corrosive to create that kind of society.”

Even more than older types of public shaming, online shaming lacks context. It occurs, usually, not within an ongoing relationship between the people involved — and is therefore more likely to be triggered, unfairly, by misunderstandings. It also usually doesn’t offer those who are shamed the ability to either explain themselves or redeem themselves. And it is often hasty — a wave that grows out of individual drops of shame triggered by easy, spur-of-the-moment clicks of a button. The wave then crashes on someone’s head; explanations, apologies or other efforts to respond never go viral in the same way as the shaming; and the attention of the denizens of a particular Internet platform (and related media coverage) moves on.

The private/public platforms on which so many of us communicate these days play a part in this. They allow us to easily reach out to people we don’t know well (which means we may misread each other). At the same time, they often foster the impression that we’re communicating with “friends” — and (if only by virtue of the fact that we’re all sitting at our own computers, seemingly “private”) obscure the fact that those friends are themselves nodes in great networks, which can quickly and easily forward communications to other nodes.

What should we do, then? Do we just resign ourselves to others’ insults or threats online and do nothing, for fear of triggering a shaming wave? No — that would not be an ethical response, either.

The private/public platforms on which so many of us communicate these days play a part in this. They allow us to easily reach out to people we don’t know well (which means we may misread each other). At the same time, they often foster the impression that we’re communicating with “friends.”

One thing we might do is learn to modulate our responses better. We can take a bit longer to respond. We can try to respond less publicly, at least at first: Give people a chance to clarify, explain, recant or apologize — privately. In addition, if we’re not directly involved, we can also decide to let the wronged person respond, without feeling the need to jump in ourselves and magnify that response. And, even if we feel that public shaming is warranted sometimes, we could try to limit it to truly egregious cases (assessing whether the benefits would outweigh the “corrosive” effects on society).

Finally, as others have noted, we also need more forgiveness on the Internet. However much some people condemn the European efforts around the mistakenly dubbed “right to be forgotten,” the need for some kind of Internet forgetting is clear, too — and, as philosopher Luciano Floridi has noted, it’s very much related to forgiveness.

In the story about Amy Schumer and the unfortunate joke, as soon as the self-described fan realized that Schumer had not taken it in stride, he apologized. Schumer accepted his apology. But we haven’t yet figured out how to make forgiveness go viral.

Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University. Follow the Internet Ethics program @IEthics.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

When Sam Gregorsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he reached for his e-reader. It was somewhere under his back, as hard as armored plate. He must have fallen asleep while reading, and then rolled on top of it. He pulled it out, but didn’t turn it on. Instead, he stretched his arm to the edge of the pillow, where his phone was buzzing. A text. “Your personal library has been upgraded. Enjoy!”

The text had come from Amaizin — the maker of his e-reader. Sam was intrigued. He used lots of Amaizin services and products, but the e-books were his favorites. Far from being tempted by the siren songs of YouTunes or the visual richness of UsTube, he preferred to sit quietly, alone, vicariously experiencing the sights and sounds and smells and tastes and touches of other lives, so different from his own — through books.

The old-fashioned, paper kind of books were long gone. After a certain point, nobody had wanted to carry them, buy shelves for them, turn their pages, or figure out what to do with them once they were read. You could fit hundreds, thousands of them on an e-reader. You could get rid of read ones with the swipe of a finger. Trees were spared. Ink was used elsewhere. Luggage got lighter. Presents for avid readers no longer had to be wrapped.

Sam was indeed an avid reader, and his friends often bought him books. Well, usually they bought him Amaizin cards, so he could get for himself whatever books he wanted. To be nice, he sometimes asked the gift-giver for recommendations, but really, most of the time, Sam already knew what he wanted to read next. Or, if he didn’t, he was happy to rely on Amaizin’s recommendation engine.

The recommendation engine was a thing of wonder, fed by many springs of information. It kept track of what Sam read, when he read it, and for how long at a time. It kept track of books he didn’t finish, or that he made his way through slowly. It noted others that he devoured in one sitting. It kept track of what he highlighted, and words that he looked up via the e-reader’s dictionary. And it did that for all his friends, too, and all the other readers who read some of the same books that he did.

But Sam had never before gotten an announcement about his library being upgraded. And it was not his birthday. As he wondered what had triggered the upgrade, he opened the hard shell and turned on the e-reader.

At first, things didn’t seem different. Then he noticed that certain books had disappeared. He remembered old stories, from back in 2009, about how certain books had disappeared from a different brand of e-reader: George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm,” for example. The New York Times had written about one particular customer: “A 17-year-old from the Detroit area was reading ‘1984’ on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. ‘They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,’ he said.” Sam almost shuddered. He had lots of notes in his e-books, too.

And he remembered another old story, from back in 2012, when a publisher had replaced a particular word in a classic novel with another: As the headline in Ars Technica had noted at the time, “Nook version of ‘War and Peace’ turns the word ‘kindled’ into ‘Nookd.” Of course, the change was made on “War and Peace” in translation; still, Sam thought books should keep their words as originally published.

Weirdly, though, he also noticed books that had appeared in his collection overnight, but that he’d never bought or borrowed or asked for. Some of them sounded interesting — for example, a memoir by a guy who called himself “Bono’s Doppelganger.” Sam had heard of Bono. But that reminded him of another story he had read. Back in 2014, many Apple users had realized one day that a certain U2 album had appeared in their iTunes libraries “all by itself.” And many of them were not pleased.

This was weird, Sam thought. What if he lived in a country in which possession of certain books was illegal, and his e-reader was full of those books? What if his e-reader was now full of pornography? Or documents that contained trade secrets — or state secrets? His eyes scanned the list, hoping not to come across “Mein Kampf.” But there were so many books …

Marx seemed to have disappeared, but so had Poe and Nietzsche and Ursula K. LeGuin. He didn’t recognize the titles and authors of many of the books, but he was too worried to either click on them or look them up online to see what they might be. Who knows what inferences might be drawn about him based on those clicks or those searches? What if people found out, and judged him, and started treating him like a giant cockroach?

“The Circle,” by Dave Eggers, was also gone; he hadn’t had time to read that yet.

He scanned the list of books one more time, and he was jarred by a discrepancy. A Ray Bradbury novel was still there. Its title, though, was now “Fahrenheit 75.”

Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University. Follow the Internet Ethics program @IEthics.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

While some writers like to imagine what Plato would have said about the Googleplex and other aspects of current society, when it comes to life regulated and shaped by data and algorithms, Charles Dickens is the one to ask. His novel “Hard Times” is subtitled “For these times,” and his exploration of oversimplification through numbers certainly makes that subtitle apt again.

“Hard Times” is set in a fictional Victorian mill town in which schools and factories are purportedly run based on data and reason. In Dickens’s days, the Utilitarians proposed a new take on ethics, and social policies drew on utilitarian views. “Hard Times” has often been called a critique of utilitarianism; however, its critique is not directed primarily at the goal of maximizing happiness and minimizing harm, but at the focus on facts/data/measurable things at the expense of everything else. Dickens was excoriating what today we would call algorithmic regulation and education.

Explaining the impact of “algorithmic regulation,” social critic Evgeny Morozov writes about

… the construction of “invisible barbed wire” around our intellectual and social lives. Big data, with its many interconnected databases that feed on information and algorithms of dubious provenance, imposes severe constraints on how we mature politically and socially. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was right to warn — in 1963 — that “an exclusively technical civilization … is threatened … by the splitting of human beings into two classes — the social engineers and the inmates of closed social institutions.

Dickens’s “Hard Times” is concerned precisely with the social engineers and the inmates of closed social institutions. Its prototypical “social engineer” is Thomas Gradgrind — a key character who advocates data-based scientific education (and nothing else):

Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of fact and calculations. … With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weight and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.

Today he would carry a cellphone in his pocket instead of a multiplication table, but he is otherwise a modern man: A proponent of a certain way of looking at the world, through big data and utopian algorithms.

Had Dickens been writing today, would he have set his book in Silicon Valley? Writers like Dave Eggers do, in novels like “The Circle,” which explores more recent efforts at trying out theoretical social systems on vast populations.

Morozov frequently does, too, as in his article “The Internet Ideology: Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley,” where he argues that the “connection between the seeming openness of our technological infrastructures and the intensifying degree of control [by corporations, by governments, etc.] remains poorly understood.”

Dickens was certainly concerned by the intensifying control he observed in the ethos of his age. “You,” says one of his educators to a young student, “are to be in all things regulated and governed … by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it.”

Fancy, wonder, imagination, creativity — all qualities that can’t be accurately quantified — may indeed be downplayed (even if unintentionally) in a fully quantified educational system. In such a system, what happens to the questions that can’t be answered once and for all?

As Dickens puts it, “Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections. Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never wonder.”

And what about the world beyond the school? In “Hard Times,” the other people subjected to “algorithmic regulation” are the workers of Coketown. Describing this fictional Victorian mill town (after having visited a real one), Dickens writes:

Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The … school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

The overarching point, for Dickens, is that many of the most important aspects of human life are not measurable with precision and not amenable to algorithmically designed policies. “It is known,” he writes in “Hard Times”:

… to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants…. There is no mystery in it; there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for ever.

Does the exponentially greater power of our “calculators” challenge that perception? Does big data mean “no mystery,” even in human beings?

We are buffered by claims that Google or Facebook or some other data-collection entities know us better than we know ourselves (or at least better than our spouses do); we are implementing predictive policing; we ponder algorithmic approaches to education.

As we do so, Dickens’s characters, like Thomas Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa, call out a warning from another time when we tried this approach. In a moment of crisis, Louisa (who has been raised on a steady diet of facts) tells Gradgrind, “With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment appeased; with an ardent impulse toward some region where rules, and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute; I have grown up, battling every inch of my way.”

In “Hard Times,” all the children who are shaped by the utilitarian fact-based approach, with no room for wonder and fancy, are stifled and stilted. Eventually, even Gradgrind realizes this. “I only entreat you to believe … I have meant to do right,” he tells his daughter. Dickens adds, “He said it earnestly, and to do him justice he had. In gauging fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and in staggering over the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do great things.” But this is not a Disney ending; Gradgrind’s remorse does not reverse the damage done to Louisa and others like her. And the lives of the algorithmically-governed people of Coketown are miserable.

In a recent Scientific American blog, psychologist Adam Waytz uses the term “quantiphobia” in reference to the claim that creativity is unquantifiable. He describes himself as “bugged” by such claims, and wonders “where such quantiphobia originates.” He then writes that

… both neural and self-report evidence show that people tend to represent morals like preferences more than like facts. Getting back to the issue of quantiphobia, my sense is that when numbers are appended to issues with moral relevance, this moves them out of the realm of preference and into the realm of fact, and this transition unnerves us.

Is it irrational to be “unnerved” by this transition? What Waytz fails to address is the assumption that numbers or facts provide greater or more objective truth than unquantified “preferences” do. Of course, the process through which “numbers are appended to issues” is itself subjective — expressive of preferences. What we choose to measure, and how, is subjective. How we analyze the resulting numbers is subjective. The movement into the realm of fact is not equivalent to a movement into the realm of truth. The refusal to append numbers to certain things is not “quantiphobia” — it is wisdom.

This is not to dismiss the very real benefits that can be derived from big-data analytics and algorithmic functions in many contexts. We can garner those and still acknowledge that certain things may be both extremely important and unmeasurable, and that our policies and approaches should reflect that reality.

Dickens throws down a gauntlet for our times: “Supposing we were to reserve our arithmetic for material objects, and to govern these awful unknown quantities [i.e., human beings] by other means!”

Dear Reader, if you are a “quant,” please read “Hard Times.” And no, don’t count the lines.

Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University. Reach her @IEthics.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.