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information should never be more free than the maturity and tolerance of the society its embedded within permits at any given time.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. It sounds like you're justifying censorship, and I'm not sure why.




Some forms of secrecy are good, in certain contexts. A homosexual hiding his or her sexuality in Saudi Arabia, for instance. That is the sort of openness commensurate with the maturity of your society I was referring to.

Ideally, no one should have to hide anything about themselves. But we unfortunately aren't quite there yet.


Ideally, people would be able to to what they want without having to hide or proclaim it.

My sincerest desire has always been to just be left the hell alone.


> Some forms of secrecy are good, in certain contexts

I disagree. Because my ethic says that secrecy always benefits those of ill-intent. I must not make exceptions for those of goodwill, because exceptions disprove the rule. I am not wary of those of other intent.

An ethic doesn't need to be practical. Subscription is not required for it to be virtuous.


> because exceptions disprove the rule.

You may be aware (since you turned it around), but the phrase "the exception proves the rule" is meant to provoke thought about the rule in question, not announce it as broken. This is so because the meaning of "prove" in that phrase is "test", as noted in https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prove at 2.a.


No offense, but your deflection into another topic of debate (that you seem to care about) has no bearing on my ethics. You completely ignored the point, which was the issue of ethics vs practicality that you seem to misunderstand.


Sorry perhaps I wasn't clear. Maybe I should have said that some forms of secrecy are necessary or justified in certain contexts.

Surely you don't believe that homosexuals living in countries where they might be put to death ought to be outed against their will?


> Surely you don't believe

An ethic doesn't need to be practical (just to stay on the point I was trying to make). An ethic is a goal for some value of "preferred individual behavior", not a life choice. Subscription to an ethic is not required for the virtue of the ethic to exist, e.g. If I believe that secrecy is bad, I may still practice it for pragmatic reasons, but this does not change the ethic as an ideal model.


You should maybe reread my original post, as that is exactly what I said :p.


Indeed.




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