“The user of social software is the group, not the individual.”
This, as Shirky points out, is why government always springs up, even among anarchists. You need some form of government to protect the group from destroying itself. And if you see government as merely a pact to protect user rights, and not as something to adjudicate what Chief Justice Souter called competing goods, you’re lost.
In any case, I used to worry about banning, because I misunderstood my obligation as a site manager as being an obligation to users. It’s not. The obligation is to the group. Part of what makes a healthy group is consistency, transparency, and fairness in banning, but that’s still a question about the group, not the user. The question is always what sort of society are we aspiring to on the site — as an admin, you have to understand that user rights on the site derive from that vision, not the other way around.
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