However, I must confess I could not say what level of abuse I would personally tolerate on the web before trying to figure out who was behind the pseudonym. It seems that it could be relatively low (and that’s one reason why I could not have a regular opinion blog).

I don’t think there’s any question that you have the right (legal) to do so, and I don’t think that there is some weighty moral duty not to do it, in the case of someone making persistent personal attacks on you. Whether it is a small wrong to do so (in the same sense that it is wrong, but not illegal, to be a jerk) depends on the character of the hurtful nonsense. There’s disagreement, and there is snark and then there’s serious personal abuse, and then there’s serious abuse targeted at the same person day after day and so on up the scale to lies told everyday and so forth. It is so clear that Publius was at the low end of this scale – a sort of mezzosnarkiness, at worst – that I don’t think it could possibly be argued that Whelan was provoked to do this thing. If someone was basically a pseudonymous stalker of an individual, on the other hand – if they were, in effect, just setting out to make one’s online life unpleasant – then I wouldn’t think that exposing the pseudonym was such a terrible thing. (If Andrew Sullivan, or any other major blog-figure who inspires ‘sullywatch’-type snark blogs, was trying to figure out the identity of someone who was mocking him day in and out, I would regard that as understandable if not particularly admirable. More or less on the principle of proportional response: if you want to turn your blog into a vehicle of personal attack, you cannot expect your victim not to respond personally in kind. Live by the sword and all that. But again, the Whelan case is so far from this that it’s irrelevant.)

As to the point about being at home: well, I take it the question sort of answers itself. There is a sense in which this is our house, our rules. If you don’t like it, you can leave. The reason that doesn’t go for the web at large is that ‘this is our place, not yours’ doesn’t apply at that level. (You see this, but it seems to me it obviously makes a huge difference, so I don’t see even mild hypocrisy in enforcing norms for one’s site without demanding that the whole web observe them.)

But I think Brian Leiter’s argument is that you shouldn’t have to ignore nonsense directed at you. If someone fills pages and pages of hurtful non-sense about me on the web under a pseudonym, it seems that I should have the right to try to find who this person is, including by publicizing my efforts. Whether I have the right to publicize my findings is admittedly another matter.

Indeed, I think there might be a hint of contradiction in the position of the posters of Crooked Timber upon this: you guys (rightly, in my view) require a valid e-mail address in order to comment and that pseudonym do not change without notice, so you (again rightly in my view) ask that commenters be not pseudonymous (to you, even if they remain so for the community of readers). In that case, you apparently judged that this restriction was worth the slightly lower level of diversity this entails (and again, I agree with you). Now, the big difference is that you are at home here, while Whelan and Leiter seemingly wish to see the rules extended to the web at large, but isn’t the rationale fundamentally the same?

Someone who uses a consistent pseudonym (publius, or NRO’s Jack Dunphy) acquires, over time, an amount of social capital if their work is admired and respected by others. They can lose some or all of that capital if they behave badly online – perhaps by writing a racist or otherwise hurtful post. When hilzoy posts, we’ve come to expect careful and sensitive arguments, so we pay more attention than we might to “jane doesoso” (making up a random name). So a pseudonymous blogger has skin in the game.

I post regularly as Andrew on a tennis blog, and (perhaps like John Putnam), I value that name, and that informs what I write. The guy (Pete Bodo) who runs the site asked me about a year ago to start putting my surname up on authored posts, which I agreed to do, but it did feel a little odd for a while. Andrew just felt more natural than Andrew Burton.

I think it’s important to make the analogy with the sex case because, for some people, the joy of pseudonymity is a species of thrilling private fun. And I suspect they may feel (a bit vaguely) that it should be protected on ‘why shouldn’t I be able to do this thing I like in private’ grounds? I do agree that the fun of being pseudonymous is a good. (As the Cat said: fun is good.) But I think, ultimately, we should not think of the pseudonymity issue as one of privacy rights (set apart over and against cost-benefit analysis, in an apples/oranges sort of way). So it’s actually more helpful to identify the justification for the norm as a cost-benefit analysis.

If it’s Keith Burgess-Jackson – I remember something about this myself – then it should be said that the case seemed potentially clinical. I also think that, at this point, Leiter can be pardoned for identifying Hilzoy by her real name. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, after her outing, that there was any point in not doing so. I might easily have put the two items together in a post about the pseudonymity issue.

I’m firmly with Henry and Hilzoy on the pseudonymity issue. It seems clear to me that the cost of having lots of pseudonymous nonsense (which you can just ignore) is low, compared to the benefits that pseudonymity can bring (to individuals and to the public sphere) which can be very high. It’s good for academics, but it’s really good in other areas, where pseudonymous bloggers can act as whistleblowers in potentially more important ways. (There are areas where punishments from those with professional power over you are even more severe than in academia.)

I don’t really agree with Jacob that this cost-benefit analysis is beside the point. It seems to me precisely the point. It doesn’t seem to me that people have any general ‘right to pseudonymity or anonymity’ – a species of privacy right – to any higher degree than is generated, by implication, by other, encoded legal rights. (Like rights to have your medical records private, to vote privately, so forth. Not to have your ISP tell just anyone who you are. If someone were to pass a law, or hand down a legal judgment, that pseudonymous bloggers have a ‘right to privacy’ to preserve their pseudonymity, things would change, of course. But that would be a big legal shift.) Whelan didn’t commit any crime, by outing Publius. What he did was violate – and thereby weaken – a norm that is, I would say, clearly on balance a good one: tending to produce much more good than harm.

One thing that makes things complicated is that our intuitions about this are caught up in our sense of the ethics of ‘outing’, but there are actually big differences. We have a strong sense that sex is private. Period. (If you want it to be.) Sex is just special that way. (Hence our conventions about clothing, among other common arrangements, placements of walls and windows, etc.) Expressions of opinions about the law are not presumptively private in the same way. We also have a strong sense that hypocrisy and intentionally deceptive speech are the most plausible warrants for violating the general norm of protection for pseudonymity and anonymity. If you can make a plausible case, just by pointing to facts about an author, that the author probably doesn’t really believe what he or she is saying, then that is a pretty good argument that no one else should believe it, at least not on the basis of whatever this author has said. So these sorts of personal exposures are intellectually justified on grounds that it is always reasonable to rebut speech with excellent reasons for not believing it, if such can be provided. The thing is: sex and hypocrisy are often cozy bedfellows. So we get conflicted. On the other hand, in the case of the pseudonymous law professor: there is no strong privacy right on just plain ‘such things are private, like my private parts’ grounds. But there is obviously also no argument to be made that the facts about the author weaken the plausiblity of what the author is saying. Quite the contrary. The fact that he is a law professor can only incidentally strengthen the plausibility of what he is saying.

So we fall back on our cost benefit analysis, I think. On the whole the norm produces more good than bad, so it is a good norm, and should be observed. So I guess I’m a consequentialist about norms of pseudonymity.

Even back when my identity wasn’t widely known at all, I always used my real email address and responded to people who wrote me, using my actual name. (And my email address makes it really easy to figure out my actual name.) Obviously, it hasn’t been much of a secret for a while now. But neither is my preference for being called ‘hilzoy’ on blogs. Whenever anyone has done me the courtesy of asking, I have always said so. It just hasn’t worked.

Henry- Hilzoy herself has now posted that her identity is “no secret”, liking to the claim on her wikipedia page. See here:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_06/018518.php at the bottom

and here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Bok

Given this, I think the charge that Leiter “casually outs another academic” in his post, which came after Hilzoy’s, is at least misleading.

But this is subsumed under Jacob’s formulation, which is both better articulated and more general. For example, Brian, in the recent post that he links to above, casually outs another academic who has adopted a blogging pseudonym, under the excuse that this academic’s real identity is “no secret.” As it happens, I am aware that this academic doesn’t mind that many people know their real identity – but has repeatedly tried to ensure that their real identity isn’t published on the WWW, where it could be discovered by students or others in a casual Google search. I have no idea whether Brian tried to contact this academic for permission before writing this post (I suspect not), but under Jacob’s argument, we can reasonably question whether Brian has the right to impose his own choice on the academic in question for no better reason than a casual rhetorical flourish.

Anderson – in your defence, Brian (for all of his wounded dignity) has himself used similar language in the past to describe people (in this case, a grad student as best as I recall – his own archives are broken) whose claims he doesn’t like.

But this argument is really besides the point. The question Whelan’s actions (and Leiter’s attempted actions) raise is whether people have the right to enforce their judgment on others. Perhaps Whelan and Leiter are right that pseudonymity drags down the level of discourse in the blogosphere, but I fail to see how it follows that they should attempt to destroy the careers of their intellectual sparring partners. Even if Publius and Juan Non-Volokh were wrong, even if, in the opinion of Whelan and Leiter, they should have been using their own names, why should Whelan and Leiter’s judgment prevail? If they don’t want to engage with pseudonymous bloggers, they shouldn’t. But they shouldn’t impose their choices on other readers (who may be deprived of commentary they find valuable) or on their interlocutors.

Frankly, I find this obvious.

*I say “may” in both cases because I am not convinced of the empirical truth of either claim. Given the quality of Brian Leiter’s contributions to blog conversations, I doubt the correlation between blogging under one’s own name and a high level of discourse. I’m rather more sympathetic to the first claim.