h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"The very act of hacking is what's causing the moral revulsion here, and it's the active nature of it that's the problem, I think. Listening in on a conversation that's being broadcast is, once you've acquired a scanner, an essentially passive act."

Listening in may be passive, but selling it to a journalist, publishing it in a newspaper, and making it available to listen to on a premium rate phone line clearly isn't.

Most people have a strong moral intuition that there's a moral difference between 'active' and 'passive' - that we're more morally responsible for what we do than for what we fail to do. It's known in moral philosophy as the acts/omissions doctrine, and it comes up a lot in debates about euthanasia.

Problem is.... it's based on an error. The move from thinking "we're generally more responsible for our acts than our omissions" to "an act is morally worse than an equivalent omission" is confusing a heuristic rule of thumb with an absolute rule.

I'm not aware of one single example where it's the bare fact of the act/omission that makes a moral difference. The moral difference always turn out to lie in another factor - often related to temptation.

Even then - selling it on to the journalist is, I think, defensible, depending again on the person whose conversation you're listening in on.

I couldn't give a monkey's who Ryan Giggs chooses to stick bits of himself into, because by choice I contribute almost nothing to what he earns, and he's welcome to spend his time and money any way he chooses. There's not, I think, a legitimate public interest defence for targetting him. The Royal family are different in that respect, very different.

Here's the thing, then: if someone had, with a scanner, listened in passively on the Dowler family's calls, say, I think the public would consider that poor form. I don't think there'd have been the visceral revulsion there's been to what happened. If it got sold on, then I can imagine it would have been worse. I cannot picture for a second any paper buying it, as it goes, let alone putting it on a phone line.