W. D. Ross once
said “there is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without
doing harm to someone else, and vice versa.” Aaron's downfall started with his
willingness for greater good, he saw problems with certain aspects of Academia
and the Government. Aaron knew how corrupt the system was and he was always
trying to cast it in front of the public eye. was always trying to make the
world more efficient and less hectic. He had political aspirations towards the
end and I feel if Aaron was able to climb ranks he could have made a positive
impact. Aaron was brought down by a broken judicial system. The judicial system
is faulty as we know it, out dated laws, wrongful punishments, the over
extending of power, and abusing power to make examples out of people.
Did the courts intentions start out as good ones or bad ones with Aaron's case? did they want retribution for the academic journals and awareness
or did they want to strike him down and dismantle him. To me Aaron's actions
were righteous but the courts would try to convince you he was a deviant and he
needed to pay for his actions. Aaron said this in his Gorilla Manifesto “Information
is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over
centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up
by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the
most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to
publishers like Reed Elsevier” Lets flip the script and say Aaron had his way
and all of this knowledge was public and we didn’t have to pay it and anyone
who didn’t have the proper means to purchase it could take in the articles. I
would consider that a great thing. There are people being born every day that
could have a chance to change the world for the better, but what if they are
under privileged and never get the information they need to shine. Aaron saw
keeping this information away as an injustice to us all. How can a brilliant
mind grow without its roots? now with that said who does the good harm according
to Ross's quote. The money grubbing site Jstor and any other vendors like them.
It hurts them financially technically but does that "harm" outweigh the good? I don’t believe
so.
the reality is there were not any good out
comes from Aaron's trial, jstor still charges for articles and he took his own
life because he feared that the 30 year sentenced they threatened him with
would stick. I used W. D. Ross's quote
as positive and a negative but both led into Aaron's Corner in my mind. It
comes down to whether the good outweighs the bad.
http://ethicalstudies.co.uk/?page_id=61
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
http://www.ditext.com/ross/right1.html
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