There is a fundamental flaw when most people talk about morality. The common assumption is that there are only two things to think about when talking about morality, a binary of right and wrong, good and evil. There are at least three main categories of actions (even in religious moral thinking): obligations, restrictions, optional, and two sub-categorizes under optional, preferred, and (for this post I'll say) discouraged. There is one additional category, the supererogatory, which covers all actions that are optional, but go beyond obligation (“above and beyond the call of duty”). There are three main things to consider about morality: the right (right, wrong, and optional actions), the good (what makes an action good or bad), and moral value (the value of a person, thing, or action).
A good action is good because it is an obligation. A wrong action is wrong because it is restricted. Anything that is neither an obligation or restricted is optional, but given the weight placed upon the moral value, optional actions may be preferred or discouraged. In fact, the value that we place on any given action may swing it out of the right or wrong category. Lying is wrong, but lying to save 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust is the very reason we consider Oskar Schindler a good person. His supererogatory act of lying to his own government and his own political party (for which he had been a spy), compounded again and again, was wrong, but the moral value that we place on life means that lying with the intent to save even one life, let alone 1,200, means that the lying becomes a least a prefered option, if not an obligation.
Note, this is not Moral Relativism, or more the more pedestrian "situational ethics" --although I'm not against using a principle of love in weighing actions, I'm just not sure it is adequate-- but a basic, undisputed fact that non-moral facts of any situation have immediate bearing on moral decisions. Schindler's position in the Nazi party gave him the option of trying to save lives, while an average German citizen did not have the same opportunity, not to the same degree. The classic example is if I can't swim, then I can't rescue a drowning child, but if you can, then it becomes a supererogatory action, or even an obligation.
I use Schindler here as one token example of this kind of behavior. I very easily could have pointed to Charles Hippolyte Labussière, a low-level clerk that "lost" and disposed of records necessary to take legal actions (try, convict, and execute) against hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners during the Reign of Terror at the beginning of the French Revolution. He saved lives of people, regardless of the apparent guilt or innocence, by hiding the files away for a time, and later soaking them in water and throwing them in the river, simply because the power of the State had become corrupt.
In this country, we claim that we value freedom, liberty, free expression, and justice, but when someone exercises those in a way that we don't like, we are quick to denounce them. Our actions tend to show that we place more value on conformity than we do liberty. We categorize actions that for a free people should firmly be between optional to preferred optional, like exposing governmental corruption and abuses of power as in the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the NSA's spying programs, or war crimes in Iraq, and we try to make them restricted. We do this partly because we disagree with the message that we have allowed our government to become corrupt, or the means by which they communicated the privileged information they had access to by nature of their position.
If we were to apply the same standards to all situations, then we would be forced to conclude that Schindler and Labussière were nothing but criminals and traitors. The very fact that the government wants certain people to shut up is the reason we should hold those people not only blameless for any alleged wrongdoing, but praiseworthy for correctly valuing freedom, truth, and justice over obedience and conformity, and choosing to take the supererogatory path at great personal risk.
We should all be as grateful to these people, which not only risked their own necks for us, but also likely saved lives by exposing the corruption they were in a unique position to see, as the Schindlerjuden, and the French that were saved from the guillotine. Had they not spoke out, we would have no idea (or at least no proof) about how far out of hand things have gotten.
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