Yesterday Ross Douthat published a kind of response piece to Amanda Hess’ essay “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.” Douthat’s piece comments on a lot of aspects of Hess’ essay, and offers few scattered conclusions. He argues that misogyny is present across the right/left divide, that some genuine masculine anxieties entwine with illegitimate ones to produce this kind of viciousness, and that root causes should be submitted for consideration along with solutions.

Some people objected to the column or parts of it; major criticisms were that Douthat is only repeating, sans source, what women writers have already proposed about the online harassment of women, and that he too harshly indicts ‘left-wing’ narratives about sex and gender (a.k.a. sexual liberation) in explaining its root causes.

But for all that can be legitimately criticized of Douthat’s work here, I was very interested in the final two paragraphs, which seem to contain the closest thing he has in mind to a solution. He writes:

I don’t think either the left or the right quite understands this worldview: feminists tend to see it simply as a species of reaction, social conservatives as the dark fruit of sexual liberation, when it’s really a combination of the two. And because it channels some legitimate male anxieties alongside its chauvinism and resentment, it probably can’t be shamed or driven underground — or not, at least, without making its side effects for women that much more toxic.

Instead, it needs to be answered, somehow, with a more compelling vision of masculine goals, obligations and aspirations. Forging this vision is a project for both sexes. Living up to it, and cleansing the Internet of the worst misogyny, is ultimately a task for men.

Emphasis mine. I don’t know about this worldview stuff; I have no window into men’s souls. God only knows what’s going on with men who harass women online: as with most crimes, there are probably a multitude of motives even within each individual perpetrator. But this raises an interesting question: if men harass women online in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons, how do we propose a solution that will come close to stopping a large chunk of it, if not the majority?

This is where Douthat gets interesting.

Someone who objects to harassment on principle but does not identify as a feminist or even approve of women writing online could easily say: “it’s categorically wrong to harass people, and therefore the solution is to delete comments, punish harassers legally and otherwise, and to transmit the message that harassment is not permissible.” But as Douthat points out, this doesn’t do anything to actually root out the ideologies that make harassment appear to be a good choice — and they are ideologies, as in plural, not a single way of thinking.

Likewise, somebody who objects to harassment because they have a particular view of rights (e.g. the classically liberal notion that one should be free to lead the good life as they understand it unencumbered by infringements upon their liberties by others to the greatest extent possible) might well disapprove of the harm done to women’s freedom to live, write, pursue happiness by the harassment, but again — the solutions will thus come down to mitigating actual harm, since the harassers, too, have their liberties.

But there is a third sort of path, which doesn’t deviate totally from the other two, but does provide some avenues for moral repair that they don’t. This is the ethical approach known as ‘virtue ethics’ or ‘character ethics’, and it’s been of interest to Christian theologians and ethicists for sometime. Hauerwas explains:

“But our moral lives are not simply made up of the addition of our separate responses to particular situations. Rather, we exhibit an orientation that gives our life a theme through which the variety of what we do and do not do can be scored. To be agents at all requires a directionality that involves the development of a character and virtue. Our character is the result of our sustained attention to the world that gives a coherence to our intentionality. Such attention is formed and given content by the stories through which we have learned to form the story of our lives. To be moral persons is to allow stories to be told through us so that our manifold activities gain a coherence that allows us to claim them for our own.”

Now, whether or not it was intentional, this is precisely the kind of moral procedure Douthat is suggesting in his last paragraph. The notion that masculine “goals, obligations, and aspirations” should be formed into such a shape that they produce people who are not the sort of people who harass women on line is a profoundly character-oriented view of ethics. The idea is that what we need is a story, of sorts, that gives us a kind of map of what a good man is like, and through the many pieces of that story (which includes things like obligation, goals, aspirations, responsibilities, ideas of personal shame and pride) men can measure and adjust their internal orientations and outward behavior.

When it comes to moral visions, I like this one. I think it’s far more amenable to the project of women’s equal treatment on the whole, because rather than making women safer online, it would make women safer everywhere. That women are subject to vile and cruel harassment online is a symptom of moral disorder, and you can expect its expressions reach outside the domain of the web. So a better cure — a more totalizing project — is one that seeks to put people in better relation to one another by bringing them together with entwined and interdependent moral stories. By this I mean that ethical formation (the process by which people learn what it is to be ethical people) would be aided by giving people narratives about how good people live (e.g. through helping, caring, seeking the greater good, putting oneself at the service of others) and emphasizing the harmony between those different narratives — that is, a good child is different than a good adult, but the goodness of adults puts them in the best relation to children, and the goodness of children puts them in the best relation to adults. The same can be said of men and women, within the Christian (virtue) ethical frame, and this is the kind of improved narrative for masculinity that Douthat is getting at.

This kind of moral foundation seeks to make us better people instead of better commenters or better denizens of the internet. So, whether or not Douthat intended to articulate a more totalizing vision of moral repair toward harmony in the feminist/egalitarian sense, he pulled it off.