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by peterwwillis
2205 days ago
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> an attack by the administration on a member of the community Prosecuting someone for breaking into your network and using it for illegal activities is attacking them? > What's really evil is Every time I see someone use the word evil in a debate, I just ignore everything else they say, because there's no rationalizing with emotions. "Evilness" is subjective, which is why we have laws. I tend to stick to the laws and not demonize people for doing things that were according to it, since if it were truly evil the people would at least demand the law be changed. If we all really cared enough about open access journals, there would be a world-wide boycott of science education until a national law was passed blocking all public funding to anything but open access. But that's not going to happen, and we all know why: it's not evil enough for us to drop everything and use collective action, but we still want to pose it as evil because we're really angry, and we're really angry because we don't know enough about how it all works to find a better solution. |
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It depends on where you draw the boundaries between "yours" and "ours." My family can walk into my closet. A stranger can't. From the perspective of most of the MIT community, Aaron didn't break into the MIT network. He had both legal and moral access to use it, and he did that like many other community members. People plug things into MIT network jacks all the time. I did that too. I never hid that I did that, and no one thought I was breaking, stealing, or doing anything else wrong. I saw others do likewise. It's how the place worked at the time.
He did bypass protections on JSTOR's systems. If someone had grounds to press charges, it was JSTOR, not MIT.
> Every time I see someone use the word evil in a debate, I just ignore everything else they say, because there's no rationalizing with emotions. "Evilness" is subjective, which is why we have laws. I tend to stick to the laws and not demonize people for doing things that were according to it, since if it were truly evil the people would at least demand the law be changed.
That's a very culturally narrow point of view. It places you as being mostly likely of either of Western European descent or Japanese, but there are a few more cultures which define morality in terms of following the law. I think this is the point at which you check out from the conversation -- most monocultural people get very uncomfortable with foreign things, but:
That worldview completely breaks down when Hitler makes it a crime to kill Jews, you have BLM protests in the US, or democracy protests in Honk Kong. It breaks down in more subtle ways across the board.
And yes, people did push for change. Aaron's Law was almost passed, but ultimately, it was blocked by Oracle. Oracle is a pretty evil corporation too, although for the most part, it does a good job following the laws. That's your queue to check out, I guess.
But the point is that the laws are at least as subjective and arbitrary as people's cultural biases about what constitutes good and bad. If you want more rational opinions of good versus evil, you can start with utilitarianism and other philosophies of morality.