I cannot think of ant moral analysis where that comes off as better.
I think this is a text book example of why D&D alignment's problem is the people, and not concept itself. We can't come to any agreement, even when to me something seems obvious. This doesn't mean that the idea of alignments is necessarily flawed; just that we are.
For example, if someone engages in slanderous accusations, that to me seems obviously wrong. In some religions, slander is considered morally equivalent to murder. But it would seem to me to be obviously mitigating if the person believed what they were saying was true, and was motivated out of the belief that they were correcting and chastising a legitimate problem with the intention of helping those so chastised. They might still be wrong on several levels, because they were acting on false information, or false reasoning, and perhaps not acting as kindly as they believed that they were, but at least we might see the person as "merely" wrong.
He'd still be wrong, but we won't necessarily believe that he was acting out of a wholly depraved mind. I'm not even sure we can go beyond calling him hurtful, rather than hateful without having some instrument that can read the human heart. The action might be wrong, but he wouldn't necessarily be acting out of an evil mind.
But now someone comes along and says, "But, if when he slandered, he knew he was lying and just desired a profit, this actually mitigates rather than compounds the evil." Not only in this case is his action slanderous and hurtful, but having seen into his heart and mind we find it is motivated by nothing more than complete disregard for the consequences of his action. He doesn't care who he hurts, as long as he profits from it. Now, it's less bad?
Side note, but the vast majority of racism, sexism, or other treatment of people as contemptible and worth less than yourself, isn't motivated by hate and it would be wrong to teach that it is, both because it stokes hatred and because it prevents effecting a cure. Growing up in the South, I observed racism of many different sorts, and rarely was hatred at the root of it. There was a small storm of controversy sometime back regarding to the release of a sequel to 'To Kill a Mockingbird', in that when examining the heart of that book's protagonist Atticus Finch, he was found not to be the moral paragon some imagined, but a more flawed and realistic person. In turns out, Atticus was conceived quite like too many of the older Southern gentlemen that I met. They would never knowingly act wrathfully, or hatefully, or unkindly, or unjustly toward any black, but not because they believed the black man to be their brother, their equal, and having equal worth, but rather solely because they felt it beneath their own dignity to behave in that manner, even to someone who they thought their inferior. When accused of hatred, they were baffled, as no such emotion as we think of as hate animated their being. Accusing them of hatred in the traditional sense was not only unhelpful, but possibly unjust. But that didn't make them right. If you want to cure an illness, you have to understand what it is. Too often screaming "hater" at someone, is just validating your own hatred - an acceptable form of hatred if you will.
Final side note, I have encountered something like the quoted moral analysis before. One example was in the Kama Sutra of all places, which as a guide to moral behavior asserted that it was ok to break any of the taboos asserted by the text, if your motivation in doing so was self-interest or vengeance on an enemy. For example, adultery was considered wrong, but a specific exemption was made for committing adultery with someone's wife, if in doing so you avenged yourself on a husband that had wronged you. In that case, what had been wrong was made right by the self-interest. The number of specifically called out self-interest exemptions was so great in the text, that I wondered by the end of it if there was a case that couldn't be excused by at least one of them. Another example is in the writings of Ayn Rand. Whether self-interest exists as a virtue in and of itself, we probably should leave to another thread.
