cience of the community we still would be "expressing the highest respect for law" and would not be committing a crime in the process. It is not possible to find a place in Biblical tradition that address' the fact that there should be a new law because God would be admitting that he was wrong, or at least not entirely correct, so we must look to the other traditions. Thomas Aqunias in Summa Theologica wrote, "Consequently every human law has just so much of character of law as is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it differs from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a corruption of law."(97) The moral law acid test of a law could be to see if it [the law] conforms to the natural law. The paragraph above shows that willful damage is wrong, so saying that it is illegal to write viruses wouldn't be an unjust law or a law contrary to the law of nature.One can now see that it may be a good idea to outlaw viruses altogether. But the best way for anti-virus personnel to learn how a virus works is to create one. Also, writing a virus is undisputedly one of the easiest ways to master assembly level programming which is the most powerful tool any computer user can have. To write a good (or bad depending on your view point) virus, you have to know how to trick the computer into believing that what it knows exists, the virus, really doesn't. Computers would never have become the incredible tools they are today if LIM (Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft) had not found a way to trick them into thinking that what they knew didn't exist, memory over 640 kilobytes, really did. Maybe viruses aren't as bad as they first seemed.So far we have only looked at the bad in viruses and came to the conclusion that they should be eliminated, but what if we added their potential good to the equation? Utilitarianists would weigh the help and harm of the technology and decide from that. To determine this we would use Jeremy Bentham's fo...
