The question at hand is whether online catfishing is wrong. Now honestly, this question could be answered with facts, research, studies, but I will try and answer this question informally because I believe a personal approach would be best for this sort of issue. Catfishing is wrong for many reasons, but first and foremost, it is lying.
We can only go so far with lying, and even if we are successful in catfishing someone, the pleasure will be for a moment as pain is most likely to follow suit. Beginning a relationship with catfishing is equivalent in my eyes to poisoning something before it begins. It is incredibly harmful to most relationships but more harmful to the person catfishing, not just because they might lose that relationship but because the person who is catfished could hate you for who you are. One of the world’s worst feelings is when you connect to someone on an emotional level, but they begin to hate and dislike you because you had no power controlling like race, gender, and religion.
Morality and care now come into play when discussing catfishing. As I stated earlier, this question would be better answered informally, and I will now show why. Love makes people do crazy things, and I could sit here and continually write about why catfishing is wrong and why everyone should be a righteous person in their online activities, but at the end of the day, I have not been in their shoes. In relation to the Heinz dilemma, I had assumed that most people would view not stealing the drug, and letting their wife die would be the morally correct answer. Still, truthfully after further thoughts, it seems that that would be the politically correct answer. If you truly love someone, you are more than likely to do something crazy in other to prove that love, and a perfect example of this is the Netflix show How to sell drugs online. In this shows, one of the main characters is a disabled man who truly loves a woman he met and talked to on Discord. As their relationship progressed, it was evident that she loved him for he was(personality), before she even knew what he looked like. Still, as she began pressing him to meet in real life, he was afraid of her reaction to his disability and decided to use a fake picture of one of his good friends to trick her. Just as Gilligan’s idea stated, the male main character lacked ethics of care and used moral reasoning to fuel his fear of disapproval from his online relationship.
At the end of the day, the woman found out the truth about who he was, and she was enraged, but in a turn of events, she realized while talking to him face to face that his feelings and personality were genuine and chose to look past the lie made. Conclusions like this are rare, but it made me realize the rationality of choosing to steal the drugs for your wife in the Heinz Dilemma. Most people would use moral reasoning to let their wife die if this question were asked to them, but there are those whose ethics of care transcend moral reasoning and will do anything in there which, in this case, is catfishing to find love.
