here is no better indication of what a person is like than what the individual does when there is no accountability whatsoever for her or his actions.  And by this measure the website JuicyCampus.Com tells us two important things.  One is that there are a lot of morally bankrupt people in the world.  The other is that one can be morally bankrupt without ever pulling the trigger of a gun or plunging a knife into someone.  Utterly nastiness and derisive comments issue from none other than a morally bankrupt character. 

JuicyCampus.Com allows for complete anonymity and so entirely eliminates any accountability.  And what we find is painful.  One student visiting the site put things very aptly in response to someone pointed out that the student, too, was on the site:

Replied on: 09-25-2008

yeah i fucking check it and hope I don't see my own name on here, or my friends. I would NEVER post personal shit about other people

A student can only hope that she or he does not become the object of someone’s mean-spiritedness. 

The sexual behavior of women is talked about with reckless abandon: which females sleep around; who had an abortion.  There is speculation about the sexual orientation of students.  And there are expressions of racial hostility that make one shudder.  Names are mentioned.  And notice that all of this comes, not from the so-called naïve and uneducated, but from students in college. 

By the way, there are 412 “Juicy Campuses”; and Syracuse University is one of the most popular campuses on the site.

JuicyCampus.Com epitomizes one of the evils of the internet, namely that it allows for complete unaccountability by way of complete anonymity. 

Does this mean that human beings are naturally evil?  Not quite.  What it does mean, though, is that human beings can be shaped by their environment.  All of us feel angry and hostile from time to time.  All of us want to vent upon occasion.  These are sentiments are natural enough. 

In the old days (circa the 1990s), these hostile sentiments were held in check by the mere fact that there was no way of acting on them without exposing oneself.  So we did not act upon those hostile sentiments; and guess what: these sentiments passed; and we went on living decent and meaningful lives. 

The anonymity of the internet, coupled with the horrendously mistaken view that self-restraint is a vice, is making for a much worse society for all. 

Indeed, the very idea of freedom of speech is being perverted.  For the idea was not that a person should be able to say whatever she or he pleases and then go into hiding.  Rather, the idea was that a person would be answerable for the views that she or he presented, wherever those views were presented and whenever those views were presented. 

Free speech as we now seem to understand it amounts to no more than an entitlement to ventilate, no matter how absurd the person’s utterances might be.  And we have made matters worse by allowing that feelings alone automatically have credibility in that they properly deserve expression otherwise a person is not being true to herself or himself. 

If self-restraint is not a vice, then it has to be false that feelings all by themselves thereby have credibility.  Well, think about it.  Here is a crass example: No matter how sexually arousing I may deem another man's wife to be, it is manifestly clear that self-restraint is in order here; and that I should keep my feelings to myself. .

Or, to take a page, from the extraordinary film The Elephant Man: It may very well be that I think that a disfigured person is absolutely grotesque in his appearance.  Yet, if anything is clear, it is clear that I should not say to him: “Oh my, you are the ugliest person I have ever seen”.  I should not say this even if that is precisely how I feel about the matter.  To say such a thing would be cruel and mean-spirited beyond measure.  Again, this counts as self-restraint.

In either case: How true am I not being to myself if, in these instances, I keep my feelings to myself?  Needless to say, if being true to myself turns upon expressing my feelings in either case, then I have a major psychological problem. 

In the context of anonymity: Liberty without self-restraint is none other than a moral monster.  And sites like JuicyCampus.Com are an illustration of precisely that.  And therein lies one of the fundamental problems of modern technology. 

Unless we find a way to cultivate self-restraint in the vast moral space of freedom afforded us by the anonymity of the internet, society will invariably become worse off.  Notice that in the name of free speech privacy, on JuicyCampus.Com, has essentially been trampled upon.  What is more, there is no protection against either slander or libel. 

Finally, notice that a time-honored principle is floundering mightily.  That principle called, The Golden Rule, reads as follows: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Again, it was not too long ago that this principle actually animated the lives of people.  Anonymity is serving to undermine the moral force that this principle routinely had in the lives of ordinary people. 

There are signs everywhere that we human beings are not ready for technology.  Why?  Because increasingly we human beings are proving ourselves not to be capable of the self-restraint that is necessary in order to live well in a world that affords us both liberty and anonymity at every turn. 

The brilliant thinker Ray Kurzweil, author of the The Singularity is Near, is more than a little besotted by the reality that technology may afford human beings something akin to immorality.  And he may very well be right about that.  What Kurzweil seems to have overlooked is that immorality admits of at least two configurations.  One goes by the name of heaven.  The other goes by the name of hell.  And given the choice between death and the immorality of hell, it is rather clear to me that I would refer death.