Journalism is one thing. This is enabling a predator, just as much as Foos' two wives.
> My voyeurism has contributed immensely to my becoming a futilitarian, and I hate this conditioning of my soul. . . . What is so distasteful is that the majority of subjects are in concert with these individuals in both design and plan. Many different approaches to life would be immediately implemented, if our society would have the opportunity to be Voyeur for a Day.
Also this:
> These experiences prodded Foos to concoct an “honesty test.” He would leave a suitcase, secured with a cheap padlock, in the closet of a motel room. When a guest checked in, he would say to Donna, in the guest’s hearing, that someone had just called to report leaving behind a suitcase with a thousand dollars inside. Foos then watched from the attic as the new guest found the suitcase and deliberated over whether to break the lock and look inside or return the suitcase to the motel office.
> Out of fifteen guests who were subjected to the honesty test, including a minister, a lawyer, and an Army lieutenant colonel, only two returned the suitcase to the office with the padlock intact. The others all opened the suitcase and then tried to dispose of it in different ways. The minister pushed the suitcase out the bathroom window into the bushes.
The second of your quotes I found to be just a secularized and romanticized restating of basic Christian doctrine (or just the 'Golden Rule'), which makes me further disturbed that someone would have to wade through years of voyeurism to reach that conclusion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
(Antiquity section)
Interest is nothing more than a human behavioral response to a stimulus, it typically has little to do with what people think is "moral" (which itself is usually vague and hard to define). Just think of how many people find watching documentaries about serial killers, crimes, or atrocities like the holocaust or the jonestown massacre, entertaining. Not to mention your typical news channels in the US, which tend to disproportionately showcase negative events as opposed to positive/neutral ones. Does having an interest in that kind of media somehow imply a moral approval of it?
If the documentation is there, people are going to read it, and the more out of the ordinary it is, the more likely it will be that people find it interesting. Uniformly condemning people for having interest in deviant topics is a slippery slope to justifying censorship or thought policing. Accepting that it's natural does have the consequence of possibly giving some people the idea that it's "OK" to do questionable things on the basis that it will grant them some kind of fame/notoriety, but that would arguably only happen with a small minority of people (since the barrier to entry to conduct these sort of depraved acts isn't exactly low), and thus would probably have a smaller negative impact on society than just flat-out condemning everybody for having questionable interests.
That is also why I asked what was meant... I didn't want to jump to conclusions in case it was just a miscommunication due to wording.
But more often Foos found observing his guests depressing. They argued.
They watched too much television. (This was especially irksome when the
guests were attractive and could have spent their time having sex instead.)When the "victims" have to be informed, decades later, that they even are victims, it makes you wonder.
Crimes against an infant, a comatose patient, etc. don't cease to be crimes.
If it were encryption keys he was snooping on and not sex, would your response be different?
[0]edit - I used the wrong pronoun (you) here in my initial post.
Meanwhile, the local police have no record of the murder, unsolved or otherwise.
It's possible those discrepancies could be explained, but the author left them in there to likely indicate he believes the voyeur's account is a mix of fantasy and reality. Which gives it dubious value as a research document, ignoring the ethics of how it was collected. Which in turn makes it difficult to rationalize the way in which the data was collected, if the data is of no value.
If I took one thing from this article, it's that you never know what other people do or don't do. It's the thing you know, but it's jarring when you are reminded of it.