What I really love is how they point to Aaron's wonderful piece on morality (and I mean this sincerely). Aaron points out that you can logically justify almost any evil if you think only of the overall good.
Had I read the piece when it was posted I would have thought it was a call to figure out how philsophers (especially utilitarian philosophers) solve the dilemma of "the ends justify the means" in such a way that you wouldn't optimize for committing minor sins to effect major benefits.
But based on hacktivism since, now I'm not so sure. Aaron seemed to fall into his own philosophical quandry, but if we assume that Aaron was justified in what he did then we could use the same logic to say that this defacement is justified as long it achieves some greater good.
I personally don't agree with that logic, and I think it's because it tends to justify things like this defacement. Whenever you're lead by logic to a false conclusion it means either your logic wrong or your axioms were wrong. Now I'm almost confusing myself though; I'm not even sure what axioms we'd be using for this...
It's impossible to really measure how and how much something achieves in the long run. Not that I want to compare this defacement to that, but just to point out the impossibility to measure such things: does the photography of James Nachtwey help to improve the world? I'm thinking "of course it does, there is no way it doesn't", but nobody can know how much.
If this made just 10 people reflect a bit on stuff they otherwise wouldn't have reflected on, how much trouble and costs would this have to cause to not have been worth it? Everybody fuzzes this kind of "math" for themselves based on their perception and biases, there is just no clean, objective way to go about it IMHO.
Had I read the piece when it was posted I would have thought it was a call to figure out how philsophers (especially utilitarian philosophers) solve the dilemma of "the ends justify the means" in such a way that you wouldn't optimize for committing minor sins to effect major benefits.
But based on hacktivism since, now I'm not so sure. Aaron seemed to fall into his own philosophical quandry, but if we assume that Aaron was justified in what he did then we could use the same logic to say that this defacement is justified as long it achieves some greater good.
I personally don't agree with that logic, and I think it's because it tends to justify things like this defacement. Whenever you're lead by logic to a false conclusion it means either your logic wrong or your axioms were wrong. Now I'm almost confusing myself though; I'm not even sure what axioms we'd be using for this...