Short Paper on Wikileaks: Utilitarian View
Wikileaks: utilitarian's view
How transparent to publicity is an international political arena? More general question is, should everything be revealed to everyone? One British journalist stated in article in Guardian: “Information wants to be free, but it just needs a little help.” I think that this is a sort of statements that strongly polarizes the modern society. This ongoing dispute has found its milestone in creation of well-known journalistic initiative called Wikileaks. The heat around Wikileaks topic is still kept in social media. It has been one of the headliners for many years, starting from 2006, when the group of activists registered the domain name of this notorious project, reason for this social turbulence.
The story behind Wikileaks was turned into an action movie, making society actively engage into discussion.The story behind Wikileaks was turned into an action movie, making society actively engage into discussion. To set the starting point and expand our discussion, we should understand how the Wikileaks topic would be projected onto the scope of one of such systems of values. What is the utilitarian vision of free information? Definition of utilitarianism states that a proper or moral action is one that maximizes utility or happiness. In other words, utilitarian considers something is moral if the plurality benefits from it. Clearly one of the parties that benefits from disclosing classified information are regular people, not directly involved in anything published by Wikileaks. They had a chance to read the classified documentation, secret governmental conversations and backstage activity among politicians. For example, Wikileaks published 779 secret materials relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo detention camp. In my opinion, majority of disclosed information did not surprise readers, but only confirmed their assumptions and suspicions. I don’t think learning about the secret conversation between American military and
How transparent to publicity is an international political arena? More general question is, should everything be revealed to everyone? One British journalist stated in article in Guardian: “Information wants to be free, but it just needs a little help.” I think that this is a sort of statements that strongly polarizes the modern society. This ongoing dispute has found its milestone in creation of well-known journalistic initiative called Wikileaks. The heat around Wikileaks topic is still kept in social media. It has been one of the headliners for many years, starting from 2006, when the group of activists registered the domain name of this notorious project, reason for this social turbulence.
The story behind Wikileaks was turned into an action movie, making society actively engage into discussion.The story behind Wikileaks was turned into an action movie, making society actively engage into discussion. To set the starting point and expand our discussion, we should understand how the Wikileaks topic would be projected onto the scope of one of such systems of values. What is the utilitarian vision of free information? Definition of utilitarianism states that a proper or moral action is one that maximizes utility or happiness. In other words, utilitarian considers something is moral if the plurality benefits from it. Clearly one of the parties that benefits from disclosing classified information are regular people, not directly involved in anything published by Wikileaks. They had a chance to read the classified documentation, secret governmental conversations and backstage activity among politicians. For example, Wikileaks published 779 secret materials relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo detention camp. In my opinion, majority of disclosed information did not surprise readers, but only confirmed their assumptions and suspicions. I don’t think learning about the secret conversation between American military and