BURNING THE WITCHES:

Many people had no idea Ashley Madison, a "dating website marketed at would-be adulterers," existed before this week. Now, they're not likely to forget it. The site's hacking has resulted in the release of information from 32 million users of the site. As these users' emails--and thus, their identities--have come to light, a manhunt has begun.

The site's very existence seems rather odd, at least at first glance: who would give their personal information to a website publicly set up to help you cheat on your spouse? It seems the risk is hardly worth taking. It seems some, at least, would fear that their membership would come back to haunt them.

But while it's impossible to know exactly why so many signed up for Ashley Madison accounts--with their work emails, no less--one can imagine that there was an extent to which the website's mere existence, its promise of a sheltering and complicit community, soothed many consciences.

Because that's what Ashley Madison did: it organized and fostered a community around cheating. We speak of the importance of private associations, their ability to inculcate habits of virtue. But here, we see the opposite: we see an association fostering and even facilitating vice. And this is the dark side of community that we forget about: we forget that peer support and approval will motivate us to do things we may otherwise have avoided--or at least felt guilty about.

But in the past several days, in the massive manhunt for guilty parties, we see a social ethic of truth and moral indignation (tinged by revenge and a lust for sensationalism) engulf Ashley Madison's community of complicity. 

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