Our moral action in the world is often fucked up and messy, owing largely to the chaotically woven relationships of power in the modern world. That makes deciding the right course of action difficult, so I'm open to a reading of this whole thing that sounds like "I believe his intentions were good but Bob Woodward really fucked this up."

But anything short of that means reducing the weight of *any* of our decisions to endlessly speculative conversation about impact when there's a pretty clear, concrete way to evaluate what Woodward's decision meant here. The federal government abdicated their responsibility on COVID, which means that people were left on their own to take care of themselves.

So, if sharing this audio back when it was recorded would have prevented the loss of a single person's life by simply convincing them, as an individual, not to believe the President and to treat COVID as a serious threat to their life, then that's the relevant site to evaluate "impact." He took a pass on that. If it was for profit, he's vile and should repent before God. If it was because he got twisted about what the right way to reveal this was, then he chose wrong - and we should make sure to tell him so.