[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.