Are you essentially positing that the only relevant consideration to whether publishing information about someone is ethically defensible is whether or not the subject feels good about having that information revealed? It seems to me there is a material difference -- and a vast one at that -- between "I have done serious investigative work and wish to present evidence that Joe Foobar is a criminal kingpin who can be linked with drug-running and murders" and "I am publishing personal information about Joe Foobar because he said something mean about a group I identify with and I wish to screw with his life."
The concept of "criminal kingpin" is entirely based on "a group I identify with". In this case, some nation or government or whatever. So, as I see it, there's arguably no fundamental distinction between your two examples. It's arguably all about power.
Dude, please. Laws are abstractions and relative and whatnot, but Really Bad People do exist and the public has a right to know. Otherwise, why have journalists or even laws at all?
I personally give up once a person gets so defensive that they start excusing murderers. That a person will so quickly sacrifice their morals for their face on an internet forum, is disheartening.
All too often, people confuse groupthink with morals. With a little dialog, I suspect that we could identify some accused murderers that you would excuse.
And you're conflating moral absolutism with groupthink.
Not everyone subscribes to moral relativism, as much as you might want them to.
Groupthink would be to eschew one's morality entirely, and merely subscribe to some sort of prevailing opinion on morality. Which is ironically what you're asking the parent poster to do.
But myerbergs_army's stated rationale was not that Le Roux is fair game for doxxing because he's so bad, it was that he was fair game because his activities are newsworthy.
Honestly, I don't have a clue. Who gets to decide? Some murderers are presidents, and others are on trial. There's really no point in arguing about it.
and is in fact deeply flawed on a fundamental level.
I can accept that it has flaws, but on the fundamental level? It seems pretty solid at that level. The creators thought through the problems and difficulties of government more deeply than most.
It's debatable whether this is a "fundamental" flaw, but the American Consitution is basically a set of procedural rules of the game. Civil rights are an afterthought.
Most modern constitutions also need all the procedures, of course, but they put certain "inalienable rights" square in the middle of it all. The procedures are merely there to support those rights.
The assumption of the time was that it was common-sense that the Constitution was a whitelist, not a blacklist. There was pushback against having an enumerated Bill of Rights because then there would be a whitelist of rights, and the Founders feared this would mean that they'd miss something and in the future their government would become oppressive.
I am not arguing that murder is OK. But I do suspect that Paul Le Roux is being railroaded. I also suspect that Barack Obama, who clearly has far more blood on his hands, will never face trial.
Use the Bible. That's something a third of the world agrees on, and the whole west is founded upon it.
But seriously, murder being bad is pretty much a human moral universal. You'll find that basic idea wherever and whenever you look (+/- various caveats).
