And as I pointed out illegal =/= ethical.
Not pertinent to the discussion engendered by the OP. I’m merely refuting the validity of what seems to be the crux of your arguments in favor of outing. And in this thread, you have already been conflating legal with ethical, illegal with unethical. I disagree with your argument and I find your reasoning incomplete and specious.
How do you reconcile these 2 statements? In the first, you seem to be saying that as long as your actions don’t clearly and directly harm someone, that it’s ok. Yet in the second, you mention revealing HIV status or sexual history. I don’t see much difference between saying “TAH DAH, poster Tastes of Chocolate is really Jane Smith”, and saying “Jane Smith had an HIV test and the results were xyz.” In neither case am I doing something that unambiguiosly causes harm. In both cases all I could claim that my purpose was something other then to cause harm.
I don’t see how you can get this out of the text you quoted. I was responding to Oakminster’s statement that the only reason to out someone was to harm them with pointing out that even if someone is harmed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that was the outters primary purpose, and so still could be defensible. I didn’t say (or even say anything that suggested that) just because something doesn’t harm someone makes it OK.
Well, often times those who would out an anonymous person would not have any appreciation of the harm it might cause. As was shown before, a blogger relating his candid views on the industry he works in may face professional consequences. Someone writing dirty stories on the Internet may have their spouse divorce them. Someone sharing his pro-gun views on the Straight Dope may be run out of Berkeley, California, on a rail.
And as others have said, your argument of ethics and law is overly simplistic. For example, you seem to be saying that harassing telemarketer calls were ethically neutral right up until the moment that the legislature banned them. Unless you are equating legal with ethical, and illegal with unethical, your constant references to outing the anonymous is simply a red herring.
Furthermore, analogies are never perfect, but at least if they are honestly proposed and critically analyzed they can help illuminate one’s thinking on matters. Unfortunately, when asked about analogous situations, I’m afraid it appears as though you simply don’t want to answer the questions for fear that it would undermine your case. For example, if one were to admit that in the absence of laws to the otherwise, telemarketers would be wrong to zealously track down customers so as to run roughshod over someone’s interest in privacy, one would also be admitting that a person is entitled to a degree of respect for efforts to remain private.
One could then go on to point out and disagree as to whether a blogger is entitled to privacy when they are publishing their views on issues, but that’s not what you’re doing. Your argument is merely that you won’t answer the question because aggressive telemarketing is illegal.
A more factual statement would be “Outing bloggers hasn’t been found a public nuisance yet”.
I’ll join the “legal and moral ain’t synonymous” dogpile, btw. As **ashman **says, laws are only the manifestation of the current consensus on ethics and reasonable compromise. Going by the extant law to figure out right and wrong is… well, foolish. It’s akin to opening a crate with the crowbar that’s inside it.
Typo: constant references to the LEGALITY of outing…
Again, my deal with telemarketing being illegal vs legal isn’t that one is automatically moral and one isn’t, it’s that comparing a legal action to an illegal one doesn’t tell us much of anything about the morality of one vs the other, because while some legal actions may be unethical and vice versa, I think its pretty clear that something being illegal does carry a lot of moral baggage, its illegality certainly has to be strongly considered in a discussion of whether its ethical or not.
OK, you say, then lets go back in time to before legislation creating the do-not-call list. Now there’s no legal question, is telemarketing to unlisted numbers unethical? I’d say the answer is still somewhat ambiguous, the first guy who tried doing it was probably OK, after all, telemarketing seems to be a natural growth from mail-solicitations or door-to-door salesmen, and there are plenty of places to get numbers from that aren’t public listings but are still outside the private sphere. But as the number of telemarketers increased, it became an increasingly obvious it was an annoying nuisance, and I’d say that an ethical person would’ve stopped at that point.
But here’s the thing, none of these issues exist with outing bloggers. Outing a blogger isn’t a public nuisance. There isn’t a growing trend of outing bloggers. We’ve entered into a whole discussion about telemarketers that really doesn’t inform what we wanted to discuss. And indeed, this thread has been bogged down in analogies. I never said anything about outing a blogger being ethical because it was legal, but my arguments against an analogy is being mixed in with my argument against outing being unethical, which while I’m sure is an honest mistake, rather shows how easy it is for using analogies in debates to make a mess of other peoples arguments.
Except again, this isn’t a good analogy. The problem with telemarketers calling you isn’t the fact that they get your telephone number against your wishes, but that they use it to call you during dinner against your wishes. Indeed the Do Not Call list protects you from being called against your wishes by giving your phone number to the telemarketers and telling them not to call it.
No it isn’t, I summarized my argument in the last post.
Just thought I’d throw in a link to the horses’ mouth.
The assumption that you don’t have to feel bad for screwing someone over if you can’t find a specific moral imperative for not doing so? Bitch was asking for it?
I kept in your final sentence because I think it directly contradicts the sentiment of the prior one. I can agree that “in many cases” it isn’t nice and may be unethical, but “it is not necessarily so”. There are always exceptions to any rule, after all. Many of us will agree that when a cigarette company uses a shill of a scientist to spread misinformation about lung cancer (effectively using the scientist as a living pseudonym) , the connection should be pointed out; presumably the same would apply to a company shill using a synonym to conceal their bias and ulterior motivations.
But then to leap from there to “I found out Cecil/Britney’s identity, so I guess it’s alright to spread it around for no reason whatesoever!” seems to completely blow away your own admission that “in many cases” the secret should be kept. If you really agreed with your own words, you wouldn’t default to the exceptional-case condition!
Sorry, no. Either it’s okay to try and sabotage a person for no reason, or it’s not. I say it’s not. Your own argument says its not. The possibility of extenuating circumstances does not mean they are assumed to exist. Even if you really really want to be mean and not be criticized for it.
[nitpick]
pseudonym folks, not synonym
[/nitpick]
Just pretend that “synonym” is a pseudonym for “pseudonym”; that makes “pseudonym” a synonym for “synonym” (both in the original and pseudonymical senses of the term(s)), which clearly makes it all right.
LOL 
It seems a little mean-spirited to reveal personal information unless there is good reason. How can something be ethical and mean-spirited at the same time?