#4. The argument made by many, yourself included (or so it seemed to me), is that those who were committing adultery or misusing company resources deserved no sympathy for the treatment they got from Fortuny; that it was just punishment for their crimes. I was addressing that point.

#5. Clearly not a nonsequitur, and worthy of mention as you yourself then attempted the same rationalization in your response to #1.

I already discussed the issue of legal vs moral arguments. Laws are enacted in
part to codify society’s moral judgements; it’s trivial to reel off a list of
laws that exist purely because someone had a moral code that said something,
and got it written into law. In fact, UK copyright law explicitly refers to
morality, talking about the “moral rights” of the creators of artworks.

Hence, the existence of law is at least circumstantial evidence that there is a
corresponding moral principle that is widely held. In the case of copyright,
I believe that you will find that most people believe that morally, someone
who creates an artistic work has the right to stop other people copying it and
selling the copies, meaning that there is a fundamental moral basis to the
existence of copyright law. (Of course, there are specifics of current
copyright law that may not be entirely supported by public morality.)

Anyway, you asked for moral reasons, you got them. I don’t think that any of
the moral principles I outlined are unusual ones. The fact that you don’t share
the same common moral code doesn’t alter the fact that you were presented with
what you asked for.

If you meant to ask for moral reasons according to your
moral code why Fortuny was wrong, well, you should have said so.
I doubt you’d have gotten any replies, since you already said that he was in
the right according to your moral code.

We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the rest.

You say that “Some decent folks may be discouraged, but all [bad persons] will be, too.” This is somewhat of a fallacy. I see no evidence that the virtual flashers will be proportionately more discouraged than ordinary folks. Intuitively this might seem so, but to assume it is a fallacy.

Fortuny’s prank might have been a good one had he just withheld all of the sensitive information and just posted select clips with the purpose of getting a chuckle or two. Doing it by posting everything out there is just irresponsible.

On your last point, I think it cuts both ways. Some decent folks may be discouraged, but all the virtual flashers and unavailable adulterers will be, too. So the overall personals experience may *improve* for the person placing the ad.

Surely you agree with me that the implicit assumption is reasonable in this case. People expect personals and letters in general to be kept private.

Now, tell me how the internet magically makes the same behaviour ethical. It doesn’t. The same behaviour is still just as unethical as it was before. Sure, it is easier to copy and post the information, but that doesn’t make it any less wrong.

You claim that expecting the same standards to apply on the net is unreasonable. I would counter with the fact that how right or wrong a deed is does not depend on the vehicle that was used commit the deed in question. To hold people to the same behavoriall standarrd and expect a certain courtesy of them on- as well ass offline is not unreasonable in my opinion. I do understand your argument, but I do not agree with it.

You and I may both agree that it’s foolish to post one’s personal information to someone you don’t trust. This may be so. However, that does not mean that anyone has the moral right to publish what you’ve written to them in confidence. Just because you can do something does not make it right.

So, where is the harm in all this? As others have posted, this is a multipronged issue. The first is the people this directly affects, namely the poor saps that took Fortuny’s bait. These may be divided in two distinct camps: Those that were harmed because they were exposed to loved ones, coworkers or acquintances, and those that were harmed by losing their faith in the personal system.

I am sure that marriages were wrecked because of this episode. Perhaps those that posted under the nose of their wives deserved it, but I would still not like Fortuny to be the judge, jury and executioner in that case. Besides them, there are those who’s lives were made just a little bit harder by being outed. In some conservative circles, BDSM is not merely frowned upon but practicioner may find themselves ostracized completely.

Besides those that were directly harmed, there is the larger question of people being more wary of using personal sites. This may not seem like a problem for you, but I think people should be free to pursue happiness whichever way they choose as long as they hurt noone. If someone is discouraged from answering a personal due to this debacle, it is a clear loss.

Obviously the assumption existed, or folks wouldn’t be outraged. But it’s not a reasonable assumption in the internet context.

Now, you might say that there is nothing about letters that are inherently private. Yet, letters are protected by law until the recipient gets them. There is an assumption that the letters are private, and most correspondence works using this assumption as a basis. If the replies to the personals would have been meant to be public, they would have been posted publically, such as at a bbs.

I couldn’t disagree more about this point. Virtually everyone chooses what parts of their lives to share with others and what parts to stay private.

In the same way, most of us have sections of our lives that we separate out and don’t share with everyone. I don’t talk about my sexual escapades at work because it’s not appropriate, but I also don’t share them with my mother because she doesn’t need to know. It would make her uncomfortable and it would make *me* uncomfortable.

That doesn’t mean I’m ashamed of being who I am, it just means I take some care about who and how I share these things.

I know people who have lost jobs or friends because the “wrong” people found out about their activities. The people who were “outed” against their wills face the same kinds of consequences due to the very public nature of the “prank.”

I think that people have a range of very good reasons to be outraged by this “prank” but few people are conversant enough in the language of ethics to articulate just *why* they are outraged.

Unfortunately, I am not well qualified to articulate the ethics here, either.

“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”
–John Stuart Mill

It seems to me that we rely on learned ethical behavior to be able to be in society with one another. Just because the ethical “rules” aren’t generally articulated doesn’t make them less powerful.

For instance, most of us learn at a fairly early age not to point and laugh when we see someone that amuses us walking down the street. We learn that it’s not polite, and if we are evolved we also learn that it’s hurtful to the other person.

We also learn not to tell secrets that our intimates share with us, and for the same reasons.

Both of those examples have their limitations, and it’s the responsibility of the person telling the secret or walking down the street in funny clothes to know that they might get betrayed or mocked.

Even *with* that foreknowledge that the ethics might be breached, they still have every right and reason to be hurt by the behavior.

Someone wrote about Brad Pitt’s performance in ‘12 Monkeys,’ “Just because you *can* do it, Brad, doesn’t mean you *should* do it!”

As someone who answers personal ads from time to time, I *do* have an expectation of privacy and will be hurt, outraged, and amazed if anyone breaches that expectation.
On the other hand, I realize that I’m taking a chance and I weigh the risks against the potential benefits.

In your “alone with a lover in a silent house” example, you have an expectation of privacy, and I agree with you that the expectation is a reasonable one. Breaching it would be, and is, sleazy.

In the current example, it’s clear that many of the personals respondents similarly had an expectation of privacy. One of my points is that such an expectation is not reasonable, precisely because of the public nature of anything you send to strangers on the internet. There’s no reason to expect your privacy to be protected, though many people mistakenly do.

For those of you who are pursuaded by laws, some states have laws against “surreptitious videotaping” — laws aimed at the folks who conceal cameras in hotel rooms, beach changing rooms, public toilets, etc. Those laws usually contain language limiting their scope to cameras in areas “where the subject of the photography has a reasonable expectation of privacy”, to prevent criminalizing photography on, say, public beaches where people sometimes go topless.

That’s what I find so fascinating about this whole dispute. People were putting an amazing amount of personal information “out there”, so much that it’s clear they probably did have an expectation of privacy. And that expectation is so astonishingly unrealistic and unreasonable, as indeed Fortuny’s actions prove. This is not an abberation, this is what happens to bits when you let them off their leash. And people clearly don’t like that fact; indeed, they are so unhappy that they’ll get angry with anybody they can find who is handy rather than confront the reality of digital information flows.