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The order of your choices hardly matter. Whether you decided to give them away and then obtained illegal copies, or obtained illegal copies and then decided to give them away, you broke the social contract with the authors and other rights holders of those works by using illegal copies to allow you to give away other copies of the work.
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No, I broke the social contract to gain electronic copies for personal use without going through the tedium of making the copies myself. Giving the books away was an afterthought after getting tired of looking at the boxes.
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Ethics are not up for an individual choice.
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Ethics are most certainly up for individual choice. It is one of the most individualistic things there are! There is some influence by society, but we each chose our own code to live by driven by individual factors. Poaching is wrong, but what if a man is trying to feed his family? If you are alone on a street and find a $5 bill, do you turn it in to the police or take out an ad to find the rightful owner or do you pocket it? What if it were a $10 or a $50 or $100?
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The first group is the authors and other rights holders, many of whom have stated an express desire not to have their works distributed this way.
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I agree that this is the only group of people that might have a legitimate beef against my actions.
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Somehow, I think you might have a different opinion if you were the one who perceived yourself the victim. Or are you saying that I can't tell a murderer not to kill me or a thief not to steal from me either?
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You can certainly try to tell the murderer or thief that and for your sake, I hope it works!
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Indeed, I even noted that I had no particular problems with people who download copies of books they already own, provided they are planning on keeping or destroying the physical copies they own (Because the person has paid the rights holder once already, and is not increasing the supply of the book while doing so, it is essentially a zero sum transaction, having no practical impact on value of the works in question).
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Yes, this is where we really disagree. I can't throw away something that still has use. I can give it away or sell it if I don't need it anymore, but I can't destroy it.