Earlier quoted context omitted.
The term "hacker" describes someone skilled at tricking systems into doing what they can't. Mitnick was not only one of the first popular hackers he also had many famous exploits. His arrest was a major rallying cry for the hacker community at large (now known as the overly corporate "infosec community"). There's no redemption arc. You do not need to do what society considers "good" to be considered righteous. There'…
> There's no such thing as objective moral and ethical good. I'm curious how your framework handles some particularly unpleasant examples. E.g., is there nothing universally wrong with what Hitler / Mengele did to Jews? Or how about raping, torturing, and then killing toddlers? I have trouble accepting an ethics in which there's no real basis for telling such people that what they're doing is genuinely wrong. (I apol…
You can of course pick examples 99% of people agree with. Hitler is bad, killing kids is wrong, beating your wife is bad, Mao killed millions, stalin killed millions, etc. This still doesn't make these objective. Just agreed upon. An objective system is one in which there is no other possible answer. I'm am sure we can find at least one person for each example of these whose moral and ethical system is consistent with the tyrant's behavior. It runs afoul of society at large and generally how we expect people to behave. But it is still subjective. Whether it deserves respect is what I think you are conflating objectivity with.
Take a less inflammatory (but still inflammatory) example: dropping the nuke on Japan. Was that evil? On one hand it's true it killed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. However, on the other hand it stopped an unnecessary blood bath that could've killed millions more. You would be neither right, nor wrong, if your moral and ethical system agreed or disagreed with this behavior. For you and me we have the upside of hindsight to make a final call.
All right and wrong is dictated by a moral and ethical system. What I consider wrong is my subjective view of morality and ethics. Just because society often agrees with me because I am a polite member of society does not suddenly make it objective. Society has a commonly agreed upon moral and ethical system but it does not make it right for every single case. If you really wanted to corner me you'd have brought up abortion. But, in fact, abortion is the perfect example of a subjective interpretation of morality and ethics. What a religious person might refer to as the laws of man. In the case of Kevin Mitnick, I do not see him as a criminal. I see him as a victim of a system that failed to understand computers. You may disagree. Your opinion is as valid as mine. But to drive home we've talked about, the hacker community at large has a moral and ethical framework consistent with Mitnick's behavior. That makes you the odd man out.