o one in antiquity could possibly have grasped the anonymity that is a defining feature of modernity.  In antiquity, the utter anonymity of modernity was possible only if one lived apart from others as a hermit.  And, if truth be told, the anonymity of a hermit is quite like the anonymity of modernity.  In antiquity, the very idea of two psychological healthy people living next door to one another for years on end all the while knowing next to nothing about one another would have been all but conceptually incoherent.  And, of course, there is the extraordinary anonymity afforded to internet users with virtual rooms and social environments (chat rooms, message boards, and the like). 

This is interesting because it means that however the great moral thinkers conceived of responsibility they simply did not think of it from the standpoint of being an entirely anonymous person. 

If nothing else anonymity shifts lowers the bar of temptation.  There are lots of things that people never gave any thought to doing, even a few centuries ago, if only because it was very difficult to do those things without it becoming known that one did them.  People have never been perfect, but the community of yesteryear in which people lived provided a form of moral suasion—a very high barrier to temptation, if you will—that no longer exists.  This the community of yesteryear did if only because no one wanted to be known for having done that sort of thing. 

In a word, there was the issue of shame that came with being known for having violated the widely held standards of the community.  This applies even to situations that we do not normally countenance as a moral wrong. 

When communities thrived, then parents showed up at meetings for the publicly scheduled meetings between parents and teachers because, among other things, no one wanted to be known as the parent who was not concerned enough to show up.  No one wanted the shame that not showing up occasioned. 

It is no coincidence, then, that with the rise of anonymity it turns out that moral shame has declined precipitously.  A most poignant example of this truth is the rise in pedophilia. 

Before the anonymity of the internet, pedophilia required making initial contact with a child; and this often required a degree of contact with the child in some sort of public venue.  But now, as the scenes from To Catch a Predator indicates, it is possible (thanks to the internet) to establish considerable rapport with an under-aged child via a chat room, where both the predator and the under-aged child are interacting anonymously by way of an alias. 

What I assume to be true is this: Many of the men who would never ever have gone on a school playground in order to seduce a child (because these men would not have wanted to be seen in that kind of public space) are now availing themselves of the anonymity of chat rooms in order to seduce children. 

With pedophilia the bar of temptation has been lowered mightily in a world where it is possible to interact routinely with children all the while remaining anonymously.  For those individuals with a sexual inclination for children, anonymity simply makes it easier to give in to the temptation to behave in that manner.

Let us consider a quite different example.  It is now possible to express anonymously quite horrendous and inappropriate outrage by way of the internet.  I may go to your site and create a pseudonym and then express my anger unwarranted anger to my heart’s content.  To be sure, you may delete my expressions of outrage.  Still, you will not have done before I have expressed my unwarranted and means-spirited outrage. 

So in terms of having simple self-control anonymity has been inimical to itself development or, in any case, its sustainment. 

Once upon a time, many a hostile word did not get said simply because those words had to be said directly to another’s face.  And we simply thought that it was better not to utter the words at all than to do so directly to the person’s face, especially if this meant doing so in a public venue.  Again, no one wanted the shame that came with doing such a thing.  Whatever satisfaction that came with having gotten it all out did not seem to make up for the shame that came with others witnessing such ugly behavior on our part.

Finally, anonymity has created one of the most horrendous one-line quips ever: “Who is to judge?”  This quip plays on a simple truth, namely that it is always possible that what looks like absolutely despicable behavior is not that once one properly attends to the circumstances of the behavior and the intentions with which the person acted.  And the point, of course, is that given the blanket of anonymity that prevails, who on earth has access to that sort of information?  Presumably no one. 

Anonymity, then, allows for a kind of deception that is simply not possible in the absence of anonymity.  When a grown man walks onto a play ground, there is a vividness to his actions that make it impossible for him to deceive himself with respect to his intentions.  But not so if he is in a chat room.  For there he can tell himself, that he does not really intend to do anything.  And there is a very real sense in which he has not done anything (even though he should not be in that chat room) until he actually makes contact with an under-aged child.  By contrast, there is a very real sense in which a man on the play ground, who is not there to pick up his own children, has indeed done something even he has not managed to make contact with a child; for there is the salient issue of his whereabouts, namely on the playground. 

In a world of anonymity and virtual reality, it strikes me as no accident that yelling as become so fashionable.  For increasingly, it would seem that reality is no more than what we make it; and yelling is one way, among others, to create a reality. 

The pressing question, of course, is whether we have the moral wherewithal to survive in a world of hyper-anonymity.  I am not persuaded that we do. 

To be sure, there are exceptions.  There are those who manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps regardless of the circumstances in which they find themselves.  But what we can generally expect of people cannot be based upon the wherewithal of the particularly exceptional. 

Anonymity undermines what we may refer to as personal moral history.  It is that personal moral history that precludes a certain vapidity.  The more vapid folks are, the more easily manipulated they are and more easily self-deceived they are. 

Moral responsibility at is best entails the wherewithal to take the other seriously even when one is under considerable pressure or in great pain.  Moral responsibility, then, requires a very deep sense of self; and it is the development of precisely that deep sense of self that anonymity precludes in the case of most lives. 

If this is right, then we may need one another in ways that the great moral thinkers could never have fully appreciated, precisely because they did not imagine, and perhaps could not even have imagined, a world in which anonymity had become a part of the very fabric of the culture itself—so much so that we are perhaps more likely to know who did what on some television reality show than we are to know who our neighbors are.