Caught on the net

What, if anything, should a moral, liberal-minded person think about the hacking of the infidelity website Ashley Madison? And by ‘liberal-minded’, please note, I do not mean ‘Liberal Democrat-minded’, for such a person would perhaps merely think ‘Can I still join?’ and ‘I wonder if my wife is already a member, though?’ and ‘But will I find anybody prepared to do that thing I like with the pillow and the chicken?’

Rather, I mean somebody who believes in the sometimes jarring moral precepts that ‘People should be free’ and ‘People should not be a bit of a scumbag’. Ashley Madison, you see, is a website claiming 37 million users worldwide that exists to facilitate marital infidelity. According to slightly breathless — and, although I may have been imagining it, also rather worried — coverage across the global press, the site has been bust open by some hackers who are about to release the details of everybody on it. And, on the assumption that those 37 million people actually exist, and aren’t mainly robots, duplicates or outright lies for marketing purposes, I’d say that the ‘bit of a scumbag’ count here must be pretty high. Indeed, I’d say that it covers almost all of them, and the people who made the site, too.

It seems to me, though, that the freedom to be a bit of a scumbag is a fairly essential one. You might even regard it, in fact, as a defining principle of western liberalism, and one under threat from every turn. The authoritarian wishes to remove your power to be a scumbag. ‘Ban it!’ he says, whatever ‘it’ is. The libertarian, meanwhile, won’t stand for you being called a scumbag at all. ‘Do what you like!’ he says. And what gets lost between the two, I think, is a more sane and sensible middle ground.