If we take your description ("usurping the copyright") at face value, then the answer is no, it isn't ethical. It's usurping, which is defined as seizing and holding something without legal right to do so; barring some highly unusual circumstances (and certain views about the relation of law to morality), that's going to be unethical. Similarly, "copyright" is by definition a legal protection. If "usurping the copyright" isn't precisely what you meant, but rather are curious about the ethical status of using internet content without the permission of the original source, then you've hit on an important and fascinating issue, from both the ethical and the legal standpoints. It's an issue still in the process of being worked out. Some internet content is explicitly copyrighted -- sometimes technically so, sometimes by virtue of the site owner slapping a copyright symbol on the page. Not beign a copyright lawyer, I'm not sure what difference this would make to a judge. But it does indicate that...

In Mere Christianity (don't let the title prejudice you), C.S. Lewis has some insightful things to say about why one should be moral. Without morality, which he characterizes as "rules for operating the human machine," we tend to do damage to others, damage to ourselves, and fail to realize our purpose. He uses (among others) the analogy of a fleet of ships. In order for the fleet to sail well, three things have to happen: (1) Each individual vessel must be seaworthy; (2) The vessels have to avoid colliding with one another (and Lewis notes that these conditions are mutually necessary: if the ships are not seaworthy, they will probably collide, and if they collide, they will probably not remain seaworthy for long); and (3) it must arrive at the port it was intended to reach. Where religious belief serves morality best is by providing the "port." In Lewis' case, of course, the port was fixed by Christian religious belief. But others have fixed it in other ways: Kant used the principles of...

There's a good bit (pardon the pun) of variation in definitions of good, but I think what most of them will reduce to is, "That for the sake of which...". A good is an end, or goal, chosen for its own sake, and other things are "good" insofar as they tend toward such an end. "Bad" or "evil" is sometimes defined as the contrary of good; sometimes as whatever is inconsistent with good; sometimes (as in the medieval Christian philosophers, notably Augustine) as the absence of good.

Whether an act is moral or immoral will vary depending on the moral system that's assumed. For example, some people think morality is matter of doing one's duty, while others think it is a matter of the best overall consequences, or of building a virtuous character, and so on. I'm not suggesting that all of these moral systems are equal, but they do lead to different answers, and which system is better is a different question (a meta-ethical question) than whether a given act is moral or immoral. That being said, most moral systems would recommend the husband in this scenario not tell his wife. Confession may be good for the soul, but it's not an end in itself. It's a means to something else of moral worth: duty to God, perhaps, or character-building, or good consequences. In the absence of these ends, confession seems to be a rather selfish act. One consideration in assessing the morality of this confession would surely be whether the wife ought to know: does she have a right to this...

You seem to have encountered a problem my friend and mentor, John Marshall, once described as follows: "There is a sense in which utilitarians and Kantians pass in the dark in the way in which representatives of different cultures are said by moral relativists to do.What is more, utilitarians and Kantians will not even agree at a deep level about what at a more superficial level belongs to the core content of morality. Murder is wrong, they both say, but they do not mean exactly the same thing." Normative moral theories, like utilitarianism and deontology (of which Kantianism is perhaps the most popular, at least in philosophical circles), often operate on radically different conceptions of what makes something morally right. For utilitarians, like your friends, whatever action achieves a result adding up to a better outcome overall is, by definition, the morally right thing to do. For a deontologist, moral rightness is determined by duty, regardless of consequences. (Obviously, I'm simplifying a great...