Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!' warns Nietzsche. 'Out of their countenances peer the hangman and the sleuth-hound.'
The Ashley Madison hack provides an excellent illustration.
There are, by some accounts, 37 million names listed in the leaked database. Even excluding bots and duplicates and horny teenagers, that's a remarkable figure, a quantity suggestive of an immense pool of unhappiness, especially when you factor in the partners and children of the straying spouses.
One response to the hack, then, might begin with an inquiry into those miserable relationships. Why are so many ordinary people seemingly so discontented with their marriages? What might be done to alleviate the wretchedness both of those who cheat and those who don't? What does the evident attraction of a site like Ashley Madison (which seems to have been run as a fairly overt scam) tell us about society, about intimacy and sexuality more generally?
But those aren't the questions dominating the media.
On the contrary, the leak has been greeted with unabashed glee by the press, with even the most respectable outlets offering links so readers can more easily paw over the files.
Most notoriously, two radio DJs informed a listener that they'd found her partner's name on the list, in a segment that recalled (entirely predictably) The Simpson's episode in which Bart plays, in slow motion, film of Lisa telling little Ralph that she doesn't love him.
'If you look closely,' he says cheerfully, 'you can actually pinpoint the exact moment his heart breaks in two.'
Well, quite.
In response to Wikileaks' release of field reports from the occupation of Afghanistan, the American authorities declared that Julian Assange had 'blood on his hands'. That claim thereafter shaped the coverage, with many outlets questioning Assange's journalistic ethics rather than analysing the new revelations about torture and civilian deaths.
Will the Ashley Madison leak result in deaths? The question doesn't seem to have crossed anyone's mind. Yet we've already heard from a terrified Saudi man, who used the (supposedly) anonymous site to find gay partners — and now fears execution for sodomy. (We might note that, as well as criminalising homosexuality, Saudi Arabia also considers adultery a serious crime, as does Pakistan, Somalia and Taiwan.) More prosaically, how long before an aggrieved man responds violently to the discovery of his wife's name on the list? Will any of her blood be on the hands of those who saw the leak primarily as