In Adam Smith’s “The Impartial Spectator,” Smith sets up a system for judging one’s own morality in which individuals must “suppose [them]selves the spectators of [their] own behavior and endeavor to imagine what effect it would, in this light produce upon [them].” In other words, to determine whether your actions are acceptable, imagine someone else is watching you. Smith believed that this concern for the judgments of other people is what gives all of us incentive to be moral in the first place, asking, “What so great misery as to be hated and to know that we deserve to be hated?”
The system of moral reasoning that Smith imagines seems to make anonymity the enemy of moral behavior. If we can be truly anonymous, then we could escape the kind of peer judgment that Smith describes, and thus, be free of the need to behave morally.
This got me thinking about one of my favorite, yet most frustrating, pasttimes: reading Internet comments sections. If you want to quickly lose faith in the decency of humanity, find an article about a controversial issue in society and scroll down to the comments sections. Racism, hatred, and libel abound on these message boards in a way that no other medium can touch. This phenomenon led author Mike Godwin to come up with “Godwin’s Law,” which asserted that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability that a comparison would be made to Hitler or Nazis approaches 100%.
These message boards support Adam Smith’s view of morality. While there were few media in Adam Smith’s day that allowed people to be 100% anonymous, the Internet has done just that, and therefore, no one seems to have an incentive to speak with any sense of moral responsibility. A Facebook official recently came under fire for saying that many of the Internet’s problems would be solved once it was no longer anonymous. I tend to agree.
