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It's hard to feel sympathy for anyone here - either the site admins or their users.
This is such a common knee-jerk reaction, and it is false. You cannot dish out judgement to people simply because their thoughts and actions do not align with yours .. This is equivalent to saying "I don't feel sorry for people who die in hospital abortion bombings" or "I don't feel sympathy for people who released the private records of millions of meat eaters because I'm a vegetarian".

No matter who you are I guarantee there is a club you belong to that, if someone released your private information through this club's security breach, someone will have this knee jerk reaction for YOUR information.

How about treating people equally despite whether you agree with their ethics for once? Have we learned nothing?

> How about treating people equally despite whether you agree with their ethics for once?

No. In fact, treating people differently based on what you think of their ethics is the basis of justice and civilisation.

The only way your position works is if you assume that all ethical systems are objectively equal - or that ethics doesn't matter.

It's also a position that reduces to absurdity very, very quickly. Consider how you might advocate I treat someone whose ethics approves of murder or rape, and you'll see why.

In fact, I'd go further and say that as a society we don't discriminate on ethics anywhere nearly as strongly as we should.

Edited to add:

> You cannot dish out judgement to people simply because their thoughts and actions do not align with yours

Okay, I'll bite. On what basis should one judge people?

I'm curious - I keep getting downvoted whenever I criticise Ashley Madison on the grounds of morality. Why is this?

This isn't a whinge about downvoting (if I didn't want to get downvoted I wouldn't keep posting about A-M), but a genuine inquiry into the reasons.

Is it that people see discussions of morality as off-topic for HN? Do people disagree with my moral judgement of A-M? Or disagree with moral judgement in general?

gawker must be wetting themselves with glee about this; now they have content for the next year at least!