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Comment by sw007 | Hacker News Reader

Always amazes me how HN is full of incredibly intelligent people yet some are so spectacularly void of common sense. Only on HN would the discussion turn to whether or not the kid would be annoyed at an email that's forwarded without someone asking him. Course he wouldn't - they are all lauding him. His email has achieved exactly what it set out to do - it's got him a gig at an investment bank.

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Course he wouldn't - they are all lauding him.

So basically, the ends justify the means?

That's like suggesting that me giving away your credit card number is okay if you end up buying the product that the third party tries to sell you.

The context justifies the means.

Yes to forwarding resume/cover letter email to others who might seek to hire the applicant. No to sharing others' credit card numbers. Human beings - creatures capable of judgment and discretion - don't need to reduce every decision to predefined deontological criteria.

don't need to reduce every decision to predefined deontological criteria.

Actually, I'm pretty sure history suggests that we do.

Do you care to elaborate? History, to me, suggests quite the opposite; you might argue that it's quite common for people to actually practice the application of a generalized set of pre-packaged criteria to all situations, but the actual patterns of events we can observe indicate that we might all be better off with fewer and fewer people doing so, and more and more developing the native intelligence necessary to evaluate every unique conjunction of circumstance on its own particular merits.

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