On the Morality of Ghosting #
is ghosting (on dating apps) immoral?
From: https://philpapers.org/archive/LOPLOR.pdf
First of all, many people place their hopes in dating apps. Specifically, they hope that by engaging in personal interactions in dating apps, they will achieve something that is important for their sense of meaningfulness, such as partnership, companionship or intimacy. This is a form of intentional hope, meaning that it is a ‘hope that p’ : an attitude (for example, a belief or a desire) directed at an event one wishes happening. Ratcliffe (2013) differentiates intentional hopes from pre-intentional hope, which itself determines what kinds of things one feels that one can hope for, but does not have an object (it is not a ‘hope that p’). Like love, pre-intentional hope is a background orientation that determines one’s sense of meaningfulness. When putting their intentional hopes on dating apps, some users become vulnerable with respect to their pre- intentional hope—a vulnerability that is similar in kind to the vulnerability constitutive of committed relationships I discussed in the previous section.