The homepage of hacked AshleyMadison.comashleymadison.com

Executions, stonings, UFC fights: since the dawn of time we humans have gone to a lot of effort to watch pain and misery. The Ashley Madison hack seems to have stoked our lust for schadenfreude once more, and the interweb is abuzz with chatter about lecherous males (there are 5 times as many men as women on the site) and their just comeuppance. But do these admittedly morally dubious characters deserve to have their lies publically unravelled and their lives ruined by hackers?

The details of around 33 million users of the worldwide dating website have been published by anonymous hackers in the seedy recesses of the Dark Web. Interestingly, the reasoning isn’t primarily a witch-hunt; the hackers used the breach to try to leverage a complete shut-down of what they saw to be a scam website. Their hack was a protest against both the $19 fee for a complete account deletion, and the preponderance of fake female accounts created to lure lustful men into the scam.

Already, we have reason to be suspicious. The attack on the website might have worked, in that any credibility it might have had has vanished, but the real victims are the users. Can we call adulterers victims? According to the hackers, the cheaters who have become collateral damage are “cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion.” But to take such a blanket view of so much data (and so many individuals) is completely insensitive to the nuances of the situation. The Guardian published five anonymous accounts from people finding their names on the Ashley Madison list. It included a man who had never used the site, but signed up out of curiosity then requested full deletion, only to find his $19 had gone to waste.

To repeat the logic of the puritanical police-state: “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. Perhaps, and it is already a big perhaps, this man (and the countless others in his situation) will be able to convince his partner that his use of the website was harmless. But this hack hasn’t whispered indiscretions in the ears of spurned spouses. It has publically posted the information on the internet. Friends, family, future employers: anywhere between dozens and hundreds of people to whom he'll have to explain a rather complicated and embarrassing situation. Some of them, even when outwardly believing the story, will have their subconscious impression of him irrevocably altered. More than that, the humiliation caused to the spouses of those found in the list is inestimable. To have one’s dirty laundry aired in full view is even worse when it isn’t your supposed sins you’re paying for, but your partner's.

The hackers told their victims that they would 'get over it'.Kim Zetter

Maybe this isn’t even that significant a proportion of the users. Maybe, bar this one anonymous account on the Guardian, the other 33 million are all “cheating dirtbags”, through and through. Still, they don’t deserve this sort of McCarthyist outing. There’s a good reason why vigantilism is illegal. A small group of unelected individuals don’t get to choose what punishments people deserve. Adultery isn’t illegal because, whether or not it is immoral, the degree of immorality would depend so entirely on the individual relationship, and that's impossible to legislate for. Should we punish those using illicit affairs as an escape from an abusive relationship in the same way that we do the average serial adulterer? What if a relationship isn’t abusive but is mutually unhappy, and is being maintained purely for the sake of dependants such as children? Cheating is often a horrible thing to do to someone, but there is absolutely no chance that, of these 33 million users, anywhere near enough fit the banker-and-his-secretary stereotype which condoners of the hack are envisaging in order to justify this crusade. Even if they did, revealing the information to anyone other than the cheater's spouse is surely disproportionate.

The situation has not been helped by the appearance of countless celebrities on the list, a group we treat with the sort of moral puritanism that so thinly veils our envy, and, even worse, people who are otherwise already thought to be pretty awful. Josh Duggar, the conservative Christian TV personality already publically condemned for his Westboro Baptist-esque views on gay marriage and contraception, as well as being convicted of molesting his children, has been further humiliated by the revelation that he paid for two separate Ashley Madison subscriptions. This isolated case of a man who might actually be “getting what’s coming to him” has merely fanned the flames of our hunger for smug moral superiority, so that when the Mirror posts the poll “Are Ashley Madison users fair game for hackers who've exposed their affairs?”, 77 per cent will happily answer “Yes” and judge 33 million people based on the worst few in their ranks.

The Ashley Madison affair (my deepest apologies for the pun), will not be leaving our news feeds any time soon. The BBC reported on Monday that there have been two suicides related to the hack. On the other side of the world, Saudi users subscribed to the website to engage in homosexual affairs, which carry the death penalty in their country, fear discovery and persecution. The pursuit of this sordid moral self-satisfaction has cost us dearly.