CAUTION: The above video is quite likely not safe for work, unless your boss is a vehement racist

All of the most compelling moral discussions I've had in the past few years have been about the Internet. It's such an interesting platform for ethical debates because we still refer to it as an alternative to "real life". That implies the Internet isn't real and thus not subject to the same rules as the world in which we walk. That's a pretty arbitrary assumption to make, but we've got to start somewhere and it seems to be the cultural consensus, at least for now. Everything from hate speech to sexual harassment to reckless endangerment get frequent passes for being involved with sites like Youtube. As always, the first thing that makes people think we ought to hold the Internet to the same moral standards as "real life" is the disturbing behavior of children.

Earlier this week, a 24-year-old dolt from Bridgeport, Connecticut named Josh Eastman was arrested for encouraging an 8-year-old boy to use profane and racist language for a Youtube video (not the video featured above. Eastman's video has since disappeared). The official charge is "impairing the morals of a child". On the one hand, it's pretty ridiculous that our society still has hopelessly subjective, nebulous laws on the books that really have no basis in the U.S. Constitution or, for that matter, logic. On the other hand, there probably ought to be some sort of law that punishes people for being creepy to children.

As the story goes, Josh Eastman got it in his head one day to upload a video to Youtube of a child using profanity because like recording cats doing cat-like things and hicks hurting each other for fun, that's just something people on Youtube do. Eastman, being but a lonely bachelor, had no child of his own to turn into a foul-mouthed parrot for his own amusement, so he decided to borrow his neighbor's kid for the cinematic endeavor. After being arrested, Eastman said, "If they didn't like the video they could have just asked me nicely to take it off, and I would have taken it off." This is why people need to be re-educated about the way society works. The crime wasn't recording the kid swearing, it was messing around with somebody else's child in an unsettling way. It seems that a certain subset of our culture is starting to forget that there are more serious concerns than violating the Terms of Service on their favorite website.

The other side of this case is the 8-year-old's clueless mother. Her reaction, in the grand fashion of mothers everywhere, was based on the sentiment that her child "really isn't like that". I'm sure I won't be the first to point this out, but kids are far from innocent. I remember being 8 and how profane my peers and I were. For the exact same reason why Josh Eastman thought it was hilarious to hear a kid swearing, kids think it's fun to swear. When social mores tell you not to do something, it's automatically appealing. That's why drinking Southern Comfort in America is awesome when you're 18 and sad the moment you turn 21. So, no, I don't buy the idea that the Swearing Kid (one of many) was a gentle, unblemished soul before Josh Eastman came along.

At the bottom of this moral argument, I can say that Josh Eastman still did something wrong, though what was wrong about it is a bit more abstract than making a kid swear. The problem was that he used somebody else's kid for his own amusement knowing full well that the kid's parents wouldn't approve. That's the tack we ought to take in the world post-Youtube. Underneath all the modern media trappings, there's the kernel of something that remains fundamentally the same throughout time.