You always have to be careful with people who do bad things for "good" reasons (ie the difference between Sci-Hub and reselling pirated papers for a profit).

You want a gulf of difference between the punishment for nefarious activity and the punishment for well-intended-but-unlawful activity.

She is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee:

> Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence

But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference.

Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not representing Google anymore?

> She is an authority on Ethics

This is so pretentious. Ethics is a branch of philosophy and even religion with deep debates raging from 4000 years ago and no end in sight. Hundreds of specialists have been going at it in multi-decades efforts and yet any of their opinions must not carry more weight than the average citizen's. Mitchell has a BS in Linguistics an MS in computational linguistics and a PhD in CS. Her fist paper about something even tangentially related to ethics is from 2015.

Philosophers have already identified the problem. There is no universal standard of morality or ethics.

The core of ethics derives from evolution. Societies with certain sets of cooperative and competitive values destroy, dominate, and expand. Mutations are constantly happening and some of those ethics can lead to the self-destruction of a culture, while some make a culture even more dominant. Some are neutral and just background noise and have no substantial impact on the society.

In the grand scheme of things the only thing that matters for morals and ethics is whether the culture that embodies those ethics can survive against pressure from other cultures.

Some ethics have been selected into the genome as they provide superior fitness of individuals.

The idea that we should pursue equal outcomes is a mutation. In general it has been shown to destroy a culture (socialism) when competing with more capitalistic cultures. The victim type culture is likely to be much weaker than one where people constantly compete to rise to the pinnacle of power and wealth.

Ultimately power and wealth drive innovation; and innovation, especially of weapons, drives domination. There are other types of domination, such as media, food, language, etc.

Good luck trying to find a consensus in philosophy, specially in such a contentious field like ethics. There isnt, for myriad of reasons, from the banal (PhD theses, and tenure decisions depend on "new approaches"), to the historical(there are several 'schools' in ethics, with their subdivisions), to the sociological (society in general does not grant to professional philosophers the monopoly on deciding what is wrong or right)

Were Snowden's leaks ethical?

It's pretty common for rule-breaking and law-breaking to be ethical when rules, laws, and norms are unethical.

Pretty debatable. Is the law equivalent to morality? If not then I can't see how corporate law is either, since corporations aren't even democracies.