[trutannus]

> I believe that if all health records leaked tomorrow, the world would end up a better place

Let's say I'm a Saudi National, who worked in the United States. While there I disclosed to a doctor that I'm gay. I return to Saudi Arabia. This document gets leaked. How exactly does this make the world a better place?

Summary of possible outcomes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Saudi_Arabia#Su...

Notice the first line:

Same-sex sexual activity: Fines, prison time up to life, and capital punishment.

[Fernicia]

How does this refute OP's point? He proposed that the benefits outweighed the downsides, not that there weren't any downsides. Your point is that there are ultra-low frequency, high salience risks. This doesn't speak to the argument at all.

[trutannus]

> He proposed that the benefits outweighed the downsides

I thought it was self-evident. Killing someone innocent for the good of others is never acceptable; people are ends in themselves. This is a general precept in most ethical systems with the notable exception of Millian Utilitarianism. To be clear, I am not making an argument against justifiable self-defense, as that is almost always accepted as a different kind of situation.

Example: we allow people to be killed for the good of others as long as their death allows the survival of more people. This is the poster's argument distilled. As such, it would be morally justifiable to kill random people for their organs, as one person contains enough organs to keep dozens of people from dying. If you need a liver, and your neighbor needs a spleen, then there would be nothing wrong about abducting the first person you see, butchering them, and taking what you need.

This argument is essentially that we should allow people to be killed, harmed, maimed because the number of people it help would outnumber the number of people harmed. They are the same argument. They both treat people as means rather than ends.

There are many nations in the world where you can be brutally killed for being gay, or any number of other things which shows up in medical records. If we include imprisonment, the number rises. The cost isn't just "some people might get embarrassed". It's a lot more like "hundreds of thousands of people will be brutally murdered by others or their state".

[Fernicia]

The argument is that it saves more lives than it kills.

>Killing someone innocent for the good of others is never acceptable

You make this trade off all the time by e.g. not giving all your money to charity.

[trutannus]

>The argument is that it saves more lives than it kills

Which I've said is unacceptable. If anyone dies as a consequence of this, it's not acceptable. That's my response to that argument. Their position is "the good outweighs the bad" and mine is that "the bad is not the sort of bad that can be counter-balanced", or more clearly "no, it does not".

> You make this trade off all the time by e.g. not giving all your money to charity.

This is a completely nonsensical, borderline facetious argument. This is equivalent to saying that by sleeping at night rather than going out to help the homeless, I'm killing people. Or that standing still and not acting is killing people. To kill is a violation of an individual's inherent right to life. It is the result of an action of an agent. It is not, however, a violation to someone's inherent right to life not to prevent their death insofar as I have not caused their death. For instance, if I have a life preserver, I have not killed you by keeping it for myself, but should I have taken it away from you, then I have.

Clearly there's a difference here. The active action of releasing a medical document is the proximate cause of the harm, therefore not allowable. The first event is strictly necessary for the second.

Me not donating money to prevent someone's rights being stripped is not the proximate cause of the wrong doing, therefore not subject to ethical calculus. There is no strict necessity given this lack of causality. The action which is subject to ethical calculus is the proximal cause of the deprivation of the individual's rights. That which is strictly necessary for the consequence is all that can be reasoned about.

[Fernicia]

>If anyone dies as a consequence of this, it's not acceptable

Right, then you are just down some bizarre philosophical rabbit hole if you truly believe that.

Under this logic policing is unacceptable, vaccine research is unacceptable, driving a car is unacceptable, etc.. They all make trade-offs between number of deaths caused vs. some benefit (sometimes lives saved).

[trutannus]

> you are just down some bizarre philosophical rabbit hole if you truly believe that

What I've said isn't anything radical, and like I've mentioned above, this is a common tenant of pretty much every ethical system that life is an end in itself. This perspective is outlined in Nozick, Kant, Scanlon, Nagel, Rawls and countless others. Some of these authors have influenced the legal systems of entire nations. Rawls and Kant, for example, are considered "main stream" ethical theorists.

> Under this logic policing is unacceptable

No, because as I've already stated, justified self-defense is a different situation entirely. The situation of extrajudicial killings by police is, however, unacceptable.

> vaccine research is unacceptable, driving a car is unacceptable

This is a false equivalency. The key difference here is the informed consent that's associated with the actions. Nobody is consenting to having their confidential data released. In the above situations you listed, one of the stipulations of engaging in, say, a vaccine trial, is a clearly stated risk. A vaccine trial on someone unwilling is wrong. Someone who willingly agrees to 'open-source' their data and gets killed as a result is also in a different situation that the one we are discussing.

To pretend that someone who's willingly engaged in a dangerous activity and died has experienced the same sort of wrong as someone who'd date was leaked against their will, and as a consequence was murdered, is just nonsensical. Notice how I said "if anyone dies as a result of this" not "anyone dying makes any situation automatically wrong".

If I walk on a sidewalk and get hit by a car, I am the one who decided the sidewalk's risks were worth it. There was no gun to my head. As my life is mine, I can dispose of it and use it as I see fit. That's not something anyone else can do or decide for me.