What If Everyone Online Behaved Exactly Like You?: What We Can Learn from Kant

Here's a thought experiment I want you to sit with for a moment.

Imagine that every single thing you do on social media - every comment you leave, every post you share, every time you subtly misrepresent something to make your point land harder, every pile-on you participate in, every person you quietly block rather than honestly engage with - imagine all of it became the universal law of online behaviour.

Not just you. Everyone. All the time.

What would that world look like?

This is essentially what Immanuel Kant was asking, over two centuries before social media existed. And his answer - simple on the surface, devastating in its implications - might be the most important thing we're not applying to our digital lives.

I will express opinions in digital spaces that I would express in direct human encounter.

Kant's Big Idea

Kant called it the Categorical Imperative. The core formulation is this: act only according to principles that you could, at the same time, will to become a universal law.

In other words: before you act, ask yourself, "What if everyone did this?"

Not "what if most people did this," or "what if people who share my values did this." What if everyone, universally, followed the same principle your action is based on?

If the answer is that the behaviour would become self-defeating, contradictory, or destructive at scale, then Kant says the action is morally impermissible. Full stop. Not "inadvisable." Not "probably best avoided." Impermissible.

This is different from consequentialist thinking, which asks: will my action produce good outcomes? Kant says that's the wrong question. The right question is about the principle behind the action. Because your individual action, however small, implicitly endorses a principle. And principles, by their nature, apply universally or they don't apply at all.

Now apply that to social media. Carefully. Honestly.

The Things We Tell Ourselves Are Fine

Let me walk through some of the everyday behaviours we normalise online, and let's run them through Kant's test.

Sharing something without checking if it's true

The principle: I will share content that confirms my existing views without verifying its accuracy.

What if everyone did this? We already know the answer because essentially everyone does do this. The result is an information ecosystem so polluted that shared factual reality has become almost impossible to maintain. Misinformation spreads faster than correction. People make significant life decisions - political, medical, financial - based on things that are simply not true.

The universalised principle destroys the very thing that makes sharing information valuable: its reliability.

Kant would say: the principle is self-defeating at scale. Therefore, it is impermissible even when you do it once.

Saying online what you'd never say to someone's face

The principle: I will express opinions in digital spaces that I would not express in direct human encounter.

What if everyone did this? They do. The result is a communication environment so degraded by cruelty, contempt, and bad faith that genuine dialogue has become nearly impossible. People disengage. Reasonable voices go quiet to avoid the onslaught. The most inflammatory voices dominate by default.

The universalised principle makes meaningful online discourse impossible, which is precisely what we have.

Performing outrage rather than engaging honestly

The principle: I will respond to things I disagree with in ways designed to signal my virtue to my community rather than to genuinely engage with the other person.

What if everyone did this? Again, they do. The result is that social media becomes not a place of exchange but a theatre of tribal loyalty, where the point is never to understand or be understood, but to demonstrate your allegiance. Nobody changes their mind. Nobody learns anything. The performance substitutes for the conversation.

Kant would say: a principle that, when universalised, makes genuine communication impossible cannot be a valid moral principle.

Reducing a person to their worst take

The principle: I will treat people as representative of the most extreme or foolish version of their position.

This one is worth sitting with carefully, because it connects to Kant's second formulation of the Categorical Imperative - one I find even more piercing than the first.

The Formula of Humanity

Kant had another way of expressing the same moral law: act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means.

Never merely as a means.

This is a remarkable standard. It says that every human being - not just the ones you agree with, not just the ones who share your identity or your values - has inherent dignity that cannot be subordinated to your purposes, however noble you believe those purposes to be.

Now look at what social media regularly does to human beings.

It reduces them to avatars. To representatives of positions. To targets for collective disapproval. The pile-on is perhaps the clearest example: a person says something wrong, or clumsy, or even genuinely offensive, and, within hours, thousands of people are treating that person not as a complex human being capable of reflection and change, but as an opportunity to demonstrate their own moral superiority.

The person becomes a means. A means to your performance of virtue. A means to your social standing within your tribe. A means to the dopamine hit of righteous collective action.

Kant would find this morally intolerable. Not because the original offence doesn't matter. But because the response treats a human being as an instrument rather than a person.

The Uncomfortable Inward Turn

Here's what I find most valuable about applying Kant to this question - and most challenging.

Consequentialist thinking lets you off the hook relatively easily. You can tell yourself: my one share of this misleading article won't change anything. My one sarcastic comment won't hurt anyone. The cumulative effect of my online behaviour is negligible.

Kant doesn't allow this escape route.

He says the moral question is not about your individual impact. It's about the principle you are endorsing through your action. When you share without checking, you endorse the principle of sharing without checking. When you perform outrage rather than engaging honestly, you endorse the principle of performance over engagement. When you treat a person as a stand-in for a position you despise, you endorse the principle of treating people as means.

You endorse these principles whether or not anyone is watching. Whether or not your action has any measurable effect. The moral question is about who you are choosing to be, and what kind of world you are choosing to endorse through your choices.

This is where the shamanic traditions I work within converge with Kant in a way that I find genuinely striking.

What the Ancestors Would Say

In the Andean tradition, ayni, the principle of right reciprocal relationship, governs all interaction. Not just the dramatic ones. Every exchange, every word, every gesture either honours or violates the web of connection we all inhabit.

There is no such thing, in this cosmology, as a consequence-free action. Everything you send out into the web of life ripples. The Andean teacher doesn't ask, "Will this specific action produce a measurable result?" They ask, "Is this in right relationship? Does this honour the living connection between us?"

Kant, from a completely different tradition and methodology, arrives at something remarkably similar. The moral weight is not in the outcome. It is in the quality of the choosing.

The Norse concept of wyrd, the web of fate and causation that connects all things, carries a similar understanding. What you weave into the web, you are also weaving into yourself. The person who habitually treats others with contempt online is not just affecting those others. They are forming themselves. They are becoming the kind of person who treats others with contempt. Character, as Aristotle also knew, is a habit. Online behaviour is not separate from your real life. It is your real life.

The Practical Test

So here is a practice I want to offer: genuinely practical, grounded in Kant's framework but applicable right now, in the next five minutes, the next time you pick up your phone.

Before you post, share, comment, or engage online, ask yourself three questions:

One: What is the principle behind what I'm about to do? Not the justification. Not the intention. The actual principle, stated honestly. "I am about to share this because I want people to think X." "I am about to say this because I want this person to feel Y." "I am about to do this because it will signal Z about me to my community." Be honest with yourself about what you're actually doing.

Two: Would I be willing for this principle to be universal? Not "would the outcome be okay if most thoughtful people did this?" Would the principle, applied by everyone, always, create or destroy the conditions for meaningful human connection and honest exchange?

Three: Am I treating the person on the other side of this screen as a full human being? Not a position. Not a symbol. Not a means to my performance. A person with their own inner life, their own struggles, their own capacity for growth and error and change.

If the honest answers to these questions give you pause, then pause.

The World We're Choosing

Kant understood something that we seem to have forgotten: that morality is not primarily about dramatic choices. It is about the ordinary ones. The ones we make without thinking, dozens of times a day, that gradually, cumulatively, almost invisibly, shape the kind of people we are and the kind of world we collectively create.

Every time you engage online, you are voting for a version of the world. You are endorsing a principle. You are choosing who you want to be.

The question Kant presses us to ask is simple, but it requires courage to answer honestly:

If everyone chose the same principle you're choosing right now, would that be a world worth living in?

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner. The question of how we treat each other , both online and off, sits at the centre of everything I think about and everything I do. If this sparked something, I'd love to hear from you at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

What would change about your online behaviour if you took Kant's test seriously? I'd genuinely love to know.