Democracy requires informed consent, and an education on the facts. A truly free people are trusted with the facts, and it is the ethical duty of journalists to provide this education, and as such Assange has acted to the highest ethical standards.
I don't claim there is some higher power (e.g. the direction of history, science) from where democracy as a societal telos (i.e. end goal) gains its legitimacy. I just think most people desire democracy as a telos for society, and this collective desire is a basis for ethics.
The version of ethics according to which Assange is unethical is a jurdical view of ethics, where the laws created by the state are taken to be the laws of ethics. But the moment you accept that this juridical ethics is a transcendent source of objective truth, you've taken an extremely one sided partisan political position i.e. that of the elites, who wrote the laws, and created the laws of ethics that reinforce the status quo.
I don't claim there is some higher power (e.g. the direction of history, science) from where democracy as a societal telos (i.e. end goal) gains its legitimacy. I just think most people desire democracy as a telos for society, and this collective desire is a basis for ethics.
The version of ethics according to which Assange is unethical is a jurdical view of ethics, where the laws created by the state are taken to be the laws of ethics. But the moment you accept that this juridical ethics is a transcendent source of objective truth, you've taken an extremely one sided partisan political position i.e. that of the elites, who wrote the laws, and created the laws of ethics that reinforce the status quo.