Sin is not what it used to be. It has lately lost its special, sneaky frisson. Back in the old days, you, the sinner, walked among us. We couldn’t see that scarlet letter inside your jacket. You held your lurid desires locked in your heart, none of us the wiser about your craving, desperate urges. Sin was not just about doing something wrong — you prideful, envious, wrathful, wastrel — but about a state of being, a stain on your soul.

You didn’t actually have to have sex with someone to be lustful, or steal someone’s money to be greedy. All it took was that private, personal, secret, sinful disposition of the heart. If you decided to act on those urges, to do a sinful thing, your quest took you to a red light district, a card room, a blind pig, a girlie show, an opium den: site of sin. You looked over your shoulder when you went. What if someone saw you?

Today, new technology has fostered a new class of fine upstanding sinners. Phone chat lines, home video and, above all, the Internet have made it possible to pursue formerly dodgy activities in the privacy of your own home. All manner of sexual favours, hard-core pornography, potions of dubious legality, games of chance and potent liquors are yours without ever taking that walk of shame.

Well, not quite for all of us. There are those who still want or need to go to a physical place. Poverty, a nosy spouse or even just nostalgia for real physical bodies can send us out drinking in the alley or steaming in a Calgary bathhouse.

The technology, however, does offer many advantages: the opportunity to experiment with different sexual identities without the sting of shame; the chance to feel not so appallingly alone with one’s own particular quirk; the ease of running up impossibly large credit card debt. But what rarely gets mentioned is how technology, and technocratic thinking, have nourished a whole new way of thinking about morality: we’ve seen a switcheroo in sin’s relationship to public and private life, our interior and exterior worlds, and how we see ourselves as moral beings.

At first blush, it looks like technology is simply helping out the cause of liberalism — squeezing many previously shameful acts into the private realm, where the state has no business sniffing. But maybe it’s not that simple. Obviously, as the newly horrifying Pete Townshend has discovered, what you do in your own home is not private when it’s done from an online computer. When you cross the line into illegal and unquestionably immoral activity, your computer is a very public place indeed.

But beyond surveillance, there’s a more fundamental sense in which this world is public. When it comes to morality, technology doesn’t reinforce the familiar liberal divide between public and private as much as it muddies the waters. For instance, if I enter a chat room via my home computer, does that mean it goes on in private? If I’m having a cyber-affair, it’s private in the sense that my spouse and Gladys across the street need never know. But, it’s not private in the way that, say, masturbating with a magazine is private. I have a relationship with my online community, even if it is anonymous.

As author Sherry Turkle has explored, many people experience the online world as simply one community among many. Life online can include social pressure, ostracism, shaming, and ALL CAPS YELLING for inappropriate — or immoral — behaviour. And in fact, online, not only are we no longer sure what is public and what is private; we can’t even tell the difference between speaking and acting anymore.

Say, for example, you’re in a monogamous relationship. You meet someone online, you share a series of sexual experiences with each other, also online. Are you having sex with someone? Did you cheat on your partner? Is writing on your computer really doing anything at all? Who knows? Some people say it’s only an affair if you’re emotionally attached to the person, if you tap out non-sexual conversations with him or her. We don’t really agree on whether activity that goes on in the electronic community should be considered an act.

It’s the slippery slope of immoral behaviour that points to how technology affects our sense of sin. Liberal philosophy tells us that there is a clear division between action and speech, between going out and committing a bad deed, and speaking, writing or exploring an idea. This is the basis for the protection of freedom of expression. Life online breaks down that distinction, because speech is the only act you can perform.

In her book, Life on the Screen, Turkle documents cases of people in online role-playing games who claim to have been raped…by text. From a strictly liberal perspective, this claim makes no sense. Yet, if our notions of “public” and “community” have changed to include online worlds, worlds that are constituted by text, that strict liberal division between speech and act doesn’t seem to hold up so neatly.

So, if that liberal split has been called into question, where does that leave the thoroughly modern sinner? Maybe it’s time to resuscitate our musty, old view of moral wrong as a state of being, as well as a bad act. Let’s say, for instance, that I’m walking around in a blind rage against my co-worker over some perceived wrong, but I’m so able to contain my fury that she has absolutely no idea anything is wrong. Have I committed a sin, or, to be more secular about it, a moral wrong?

For many of us, the answer would be no. From a self-help perspective, I should probably take some anger management classes. After all, I wouldn’t want to increase my risk of heart disease. But a moral wrong? Who’s the wiser? We think that sounds like a “thought crime” now.

What gets lost in this analysis is how much this way of thinking about our moral selves is an extension of a technocratic mindset. We have become accustomed to applying a “technology of morality” to evaluate right and wrong. Philosophy calls this a “consequentialist” way of thinking. It is, of course, the dominant way of determining public policy. Government employs an instrumental rationality that judges right and wrong in terms of outcomes, cost-benefit analysis and harm to various stakeholders.

The problem is that consequentialism has colonized much more than public policy; it has come to represent the way we think about even our personal morality. As twentieth century philosophers, and in particular the Frankfurt School, have argued, an instrumental approach to rationality has come to define what rationality even is. Similarly, considerations of right and wrong that don’t fit into the “actions and consequences” model simply fall off the map.

Today we say: as long as I didn’t pop my co-worker in the kisser at the water cooler, what’s the problem?

Mark Morley, who teaches at the Centre for Society, Technology, and Values at the University of Waterloo, has given a lot of thought to the limits of technologized reason. For him, thinking of morality exclusively in terms of acts and consequences leaves us with an impoverished sense of our true relationship to others.

“We see goodness in extrinsic terms, so what’s good is what can be accomplished. And harm occurs through doing or not doing,” he says. “Whereas understanding ourselves as being — and being in relations — sees goodness in intrinsic terms, so the relationship is intrinsically good. In that sense when we do harm to ourselves we harm the relationship. It’s affecting the quality of the relationship, and it has an effect even when the other doesn’t find out.”

In other words, we view ourselves in a liberal sense, as autonomous islands who act on others. On the other hand, if I see myself as someone who is always, already, fundamentally in relation to others, I need to think about the quality of my own interior state of being, not just how I act. If we are really in a web of interdependence, considering goodness means considering our interior lives. In that sense, the liberal separation between act and speech has always been hollow.

At the level of public policy, we might argue that this cost-benefit, instrumental approach to evaluating right and wrong is all for the best. At the very least, we should be suspicious of how value judgments about personal morality are pulled back into public discourse. We have a chilling history in this regard (and a chilling present, if recent Calgary bathhouse raids are any indication). Morley would argue, though, that this technocratic view of morality carries its own, hidden value judgments, and that we treat them as value-neutral at our peril.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that public policy has tended to take the instrumental, technocratic perspective because utilitarian cost-benefit analysis can be done and it appears to be value free, objective,” he says. “We assume that when the state is developing policy there should be some objectivity. But what ends up happening is they end up doing the value calculations according to their own values.”

When we think about our personal, moral lives, at least, what we find is a paradoxical effect of technology. On one hand, digital technology has blurred liberalism’s fondness for the speech/act dichotomy; on the other, technocratic rationality reinforces the idea that all that matters, morally, are acts. What a return to thinking about morality as an interior state of being offers us, in a purely secular sense, is not simply a return to the restless arms of guilt-tormented thought, but an opportunity to see ourselves as deeply and always nested in a web of community.