Ghoulish Hobbies
So over the last 24 hours or so, I've taken to putting my skills with Google to a semi useful purpose, and trying to solve the mystery of one of my professors. It's quite interesting what you can and cannot find about people on the internet, especially if they are an academic. With some simple file digging, I managed to trace this person across thee continents, four universities, and about seven years of their life.
With a little help from things mentioned in relation to current events, I managed to get a fix on their undergraduate work, adding another university to the list, and 4 more years accounted for, along with the majority of their childhood by making some assumptions based on those timelines of events. The only problem is, there is a gap in the records which spans nearly 7 years, and it troubles me.
I've found that I am dangerously good at this sort of thing, this pattern tracking of people through the internet, and I see that as only lending credence to my previous beleifs in my talents at pattern recognition. The only problem is, once I start on a hunt, it becomes almost an obsession. I almost feel as though I'm stalking the person, to the point almost of digging through their underware drawer in terms of privacy violation.
But the data is there...
I'm not Doing anything with the data, other than satisfying my own curiosity, but is what I am doing ethical and moral? I have yet to come to grips with this question. What I am doing is no different in method than data mining for a person's history, done often by creditors and employers, but my use for the data is entirely different. Nothing I am going to do with the data will affect my impressions of this person, nor in any way influence my opinions or treatment of them, and certianly I see no way that I could use any of this information to harm this person. It is simply a list of dates and locations, publications and teaching schedules, degrees and assignments, not anything truely secretive and sensitive.
But if it is wrong to gather this data for one use, shouldn't it be wrong to gather it for any use? I'm not sure. Intent weighs allot with my moral and ethical judgements, as do consequences, and while this may make my rules less hard set, I think it gets more at the nature of how human beings actually make moral decisions.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and hell its self is built on them - are intent and result really a good basis for ethical choise? I simply cannot put down my foot one way or another on this question. Something inside of me wants to say that there ARE moral and ethical rules that are hard and fast, no matter the situation, intent, or result; almost to a Kantian degree I want a set of universal ethics that I can work and live by as a framework for the rest of my moral and ethical choises.
To do harm to someone is wrong...harm both physical and mental - but I cannot help but put stipulations on that. If the harm outweighs the good, then it should not be done - but what if the good outweighs the harm? And how can you tell? Over what scale? Moments, hours, days, years, decades, lifetimes? Answers to these the utilitarian in me cannot find, and it is perhaps the most lacking thing in my ethics at the moment. Intent makes this all the more complicated - what if you intend good, but harm comes of that intent, as it so often does? I am tempted to answer this as such: That if you intend good, but do harm, what you have done is still harmful, and thus, still wrong. But if you intend wrong, and do good, the negative intent cancles out the goodness of your actions, for it was not your intent to do good by doing what you thought was wrong, but the good outcomes lessen the wrongness of your intent. This may be flawed, but it seems to work at least in part.
There is so much I still need to work out in my own ethical theories. But I know it is there, and I can find it. It is simply going to take logic, and allot of hard thought.
