Categorical Imperative? Wow. Did you take a Philosophy of Ethics class and stop listening halfway or something? It's almost ironic to use that to argue against

Categorical Imperative? Wow. Did you take a Philosophy of Ethics class and stop listening halfway or something? It's almost ironic to use that to argue against this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Inquiring_murderer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Inquirin... Shedding a bit more light on the ethics of the action of leaking this data, the reason why a lot of people feel conflicted about the right- or wrongness of the action, is because it is perfectly acceptable from a Virtue Ethics point of view: The fact that leaking private data would be wrong in the vast majority of cases is inconsequential because the data being that of a (generally agreed upon to be) evil organisation ascertains the moral character of the actor (in some sense). A strict moral code like the C.I. is pretty dangerous when it forces you to disclose you're hiding Jews in your attic (sorry for the "Godwin", but that's the counterexample I was taught). It's even worse if done half-assed "well obviously you don't need to take it that strict if it leads to bad things" because then you can argue your way around everything--without even having to consider "does this make me a good person?". And from that point of view, for me, the real question to ask: Would this person (or persons) have done the same thing if the emails did not belong to Scientology or neo-nazis or similar?