What would you prefer, some amorphous undefinable moral relativism where everyone is somehow a good person, and we're all the same? Public shaming is a pretty decent prosocial incentive.
How about people not sticking their noses into other people's relationships?
We used to have the state jail, or even torture, adulterers. Society eventually agreed that it's not their job to do that. Let's hold off on forming lynch mobs.
Where are the lynch mobs? For the vast majority of these people, they're being called assholes because they were being assholes. I'm okay with that. The same "not sticking our noses into other people's relationships" was the root of the Family Values crowd in the 80's saying that domestic violence is a family issue, incest is a family issue, etc. Where do you draw the line at sticking your nose into other people's relationships? I find public shaming for deplorable behavior to be perfectly fine.
And if a ton of these people are non-monogamous, then perhaps we as a society should have a discussion abuot how our values are shifting and what new families look like, but something tells me that there aren't suddenly millions of non-monogamous marriages.
They're not just being called assholes, they're having all personal and financial details dumped in the process. There's a difference.
We've generally determined that sexual practices, as long as they're consensual and do not involve harm to anyone outside the participants themselves, should not be subject to persecution. This includes incest, as much as it may disgust you. A lot of people are disgusted by coprophagia, that doesn't mean we should publicly shame people for having sexual tastes that aren't to our fancy. It is as arbitrary as shaming people for musical preferences.
Domestic violence is a wholly separate problem altogether. There's nothing that doxing will do to solve it.
The incest I was talking about was wrt the Family Values discussions in the 80's in which there was some discussion of molestation being a family issue that should not be handled by the courts. Admittedly this was a fringe view, but still discussed.
I agree that financial data being dumped is over the top.
> And if a ton of these people are non-monogamous, then perhaps we as a society should have a discussion about how our values are shifting and what new families look like
Why should we have that discussion? If my spouse was cheating, I'd want to have that discussion in private, without gawkers, and without social pressure from the uninvolved.
If you had the option of knowing that your spouse was cheating via dox, or not knowing at all which would you choose?
I would still contend that you do get to have the discussions surrounding all of this in private, if you choose, or in public amidst people who are going through the same thing that you are through discussions like these, the legal system, etc.
What about the scores of people to whom cheating is a dealbreaker, who now have the means of divorcing their cheating spouses? What is the net outcome of the situation?
The same "not sticking our noses into other people's relationships" was the root of the Family Values crowd in the 80's saying that domestic violence is a family issue, incest is a family issue, etc. Where do you draw the line at sticking your nose into other people's relationships?
How about we put the line somewhere between physical force and broken promises? Just an idea.
It's worth pointing out that even traditional Western morality looks askance at "detraction" which is "the sin of revealing another person's faults to a third person without a valid reason."
To what end? There's clearly a social benefit to people not always minding their business. Do you really prefer that people stick their head in the sand instead of looking at social problems and discussing them, even on an individual level?
We used to have the state jail, or even torture, adulterers. Society eventually agreed that it's not their job to do that. Let's hold off on forming lynch mobs.