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What kind of job can you get that actually is ethical? I don't know of any. To me, it seems like you just have to pick which vertical scam you want to give your

by p4wnc6 11y ago

What kind of job can you get that actually is ethical? I don't know of any. To me, it seems like you just have to pick which vertical scam you want to give your labor to, and choosing between them based on which affords you a better/more comfortable life isn't unreasonable. If there actually was a credible alternative, that would be one thing. But what is it? Start-ups? Yeah right. Non-profits. Please. Government? Medicine? Law? Commerce? Entertainment? Education? Research? Who considers any of these ethical? Some fields may have generally nicer people within them, but the people on top (executives, university or hospital administrators, corporate attorneys, investors, whatever) are generally paid way beyond the value they add through capital or labor, and implement many policies or pursue regulatory capture or whatever else to ensure this type of arrangement persists to their benefit. The only thing that makes sense to me is that it's a problem of mate selection. If by agreeing to work in a certain field you are tainted with a social stigma that prevents you from attracting the type of mate you want, that might motivate you to use some kind of ethics argument as a rationalization for the true behind-the-scenes status argument. But I have a hard time believing this matters to finance. Money still tends to be a huge factor in mate selection, ethics be damned. Maybe it matters if you're very low-level in a huge bureaucratic bank, so you get all of the social stigma downside but not a lot of the financial upside. But apart from that... I don't see it. No other choice available to you is significantly "more ethical" than just personally being honest and working in a financial corporation whose higher-level scamminess you can't influence or control. I mean, it's certainly depressing that it's like this... but this is just how it is.

Nicholas_C 11y ago
>What kind of job can you get that actually is ethical? I don't know of any. To me, it seems like you just have to pick which vertical scam you want to give your labor to, and choosing between them based on which affords you a better/more comfortable life isn't unreasonable. >If there actually was a credible alternative, that would be one thing. But what is it? Start-ups? Yeah right. Non-profits. Please. Government? Medicine? Law? Commerce? Entertainment? Education? Research? Who considers any of these ethical? Maybe they are not ethical, but what, exactly, is unethical about them? Unless you work for a company that exists to game the system and/or exploit people/resources you are adding value to the world and making it a more efficient and better place for other humans.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand. Can you give an example of an organization that doesn't "game the system and/or exploit people/resources" under whatever operational definition you're using? That might help me better understand what you mean. I don't disagree that organizations, over time, have improved life and added value. Financial organizations have done this as much as most other genres of organization in the past few hundred years. But I'm not sure that the moral accounting works out in the black for any marginal employee in any modern mode of employment.
smt88 11y ago
> If there actually was a credible alternative, that would be one thing. But what is it? Start-ups? Yeah right. Non-profits. Please. Government? Medicine? Law? Commerce? Entertainment? Education? Research? Who considers any of these ethical? You're not making an argument. You're just dismissing perfectly valid (and widely-held) viewpoints as though they're foregone conclusions. I have friends in education and research that harm no one, make very little money, and make the world a better place. It's easy to argue that their jobs are ethical. They create more value than they accept. Many scientists are in this category.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I don't know the specifics of your friends' jobs, and with more data about them I am completely open to being wrong about it. Most people in financial jobs also harm no one, and though they accept higher wages, they also create far more value, and there could be endless arguments over whether or not there is trickle-down value, whether managing pension plans adds value, etc. But what concerns me more is that most employees in any organization exist solely for the short term gain of their bosses (somewhere up the food chain). A fourth-grade teacher exists more to make a principal look good for advancement to superintendent than for endowing society with the value of educated children. The fourth grade teacher has to put up with arbitrary state standards, political fighting between staff, inappropriate parental involvement, turning the other way on some issues they feel strongly they should not turn the other way on. It's a political shitstorm like anything else, where a few people on top of something (no matter how small scale that something may seem by comparison to a huge bank) are applying pressure to make the teacher's job more about subservience and fealty than about efficacious results. I think that problems get worse and worse as you go up the academic and research food chain. You might be able to make an argument that being a pre-school teacher in a small rural town, or the pastor of a small community's church (modulo one's beliefs about whether promoting religious faith can ever be morally or ethically good), are actually "ethical" jobs, but I'm not totally sold that you can, and I don't believe much beyond this can even enter the discussion. It's not so much about whether you overtly participate in something wrong. It's about whether the aggregation of all the tiny little microscopic job duties you do to comply with bureaucratic hierarchy ends up summing up to unfair gains mediated towards someone who doesn't economically deserve them, or that the gains end up being wasted.
lsc 11y ago
See, This is what people mean by "shades of gray" - And yeah, I was pushing 30 before I figured this out (and amusingly, I read a lot of philosophy in my teens and 20s trying to figure this out. Which... actually helps; you read enough, and you find that only crazies are certain of themselves. There aren't really answers to be had of the absolute sort, not in philosophy.) Yes, nothing you do is going to absolutely harm no one else; No job is going to be absolutely "good" from a ethical perspective. Life is messy, and perhaps more to the point, ethics are messy. However... this doesn't mean that some things aren't better than other things. Most people would agree that, say, the way you are usually expected to act as a surgeon, when working for, say, an organization like doctors without borders is more ethical than the way you are expected to act when working in sales or finance, say, for a company like Enron, even if you are expected or required (to keep the job) to do some things we might agree are unethical as a surgeon.
wfo 11y ago
Literally everyone believes what doctors and nurses do is ethical. Public defenders, absolutely. Nobody has an ethical problem with artists (i.e. entertainment) -- musicians, actors, writers. Being an educator is a highly ethical profession. Research can go either way; most would consider research on biological weapons unethical but research on vaccines or cures for disease or basic research quite ethical. I don't know who you are talking to but you've just listed a huge number of very ethical professions and said "who considers any of these ethical?": the answer is literally everyone. Everyone considers at least one of those fields ethical. Ethical doesn't mean you sacrifice your life to help starving children in Africa. Ethical means you don't do things that are evil. The surprising thing is that bright business students are now deciding finance doesn't satisfy that criteria. I mean if you want to pretend it's all about some evolutionary psychology mate selection criteria that's fine but the cause and effect work the other way. Nobody wants to mate with an unethical person; if they're willing to commit unethical acts and screw over others for money how could you ever trust them with a family or not to cheat?
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  See my other comment: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10560943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10560943 >.

by p4wnc6 11y ago

Nicholas_C 11y ago

>What kind of job can you get that actually is ethical? I don't know of any. To me, it seems like you just have to pick which vertical scam you want to give your labor to, and choosing between them based on which affords you a better/more comfortable life isn't unreasonable. >If there actually was a credible alternative, that would be one thing. But what is it? Start-ups? Yeah right. Non-profits. Please. Government? Medicine? Law? Commerce? Entertainment? Education? Research? Who considers any of these ethical? Maybe they are not ethical, but what, exactly, is unethical about them? Unless you work for a company that exists to game the system and/or exploit people/resources you are adding value to the world and making it a more efficient and better place for other humans.

p4wnc6 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand. Can you give an example of an organization that doesn't "game the system and/or exploit people/resources" under whatever operational definition you're using? That might help me better understand what you mean. I don't disagree that organizations, over time, have improved life and added value. Financial organizations have done this as much as most other genres of organization in the past few hundred years. But I'm not sure that the moral accounting works out in the black for any marginal employee in any modern mode of employment.

smt88 11y ago

> If there actually was a credible alternative, that would be one thing. But what is it? Start-ups? Yeah right. Non-profits. Please. Government? Medicine? Law? Commerce? Entertainment? Education? Research? Who considers any of these ethical? You're not making an argument. You're just dismissing perfectly valid (and widely-held) viewpoints as though they're foregone conclusions. I have friends in education and research that harm no one, make very little money, and make the world a better place. It's easy to argue that their jobs are ethical. They create more value than they accept. Many scientists are in this category.

p4wnc6 11y ago
I don't know the specifics of your friends' jobs, and with more data about them I am completely open to being wrong about it. Most people in financial jobs also harm no one, and though they accept higher wages, they also create far more value, and there could be endless arguments over whether or not there is trickle-down value, whether managing pension plans adds value, etc. But what concerns me more is that most employees in any organization exist solely for the short term gain of their bosses (somewhere up the food chain). A fourth-grade teacher exists more to make a principal look good for advancement to superintendent than for endowing society with the value of educated children. The fourth grade teacher has to put up with arbitrary state standards, political fighting between staff, inappropriate parental involvement, turning the other way on some issues they feel strongly they should not turn the other way on. It's a political shitstorm like anything else, where a few people on top of something (no matter how small scale that something may seem by comparison to a huge bank) are applying pressure to make the teacher's job more about subservience and fealty than about efficacious results. I think that problems get worse and worse as you go up the academic and research food chain. You might be able to make an argument that being a pre-school teacher in a small rural town, or the pastor of a small community's church (modulo one's beliefs about whether promoting religious faith can ever be morally or ethically good), are actually "ethical" jobs, but I'm not totally sold that you can, and I don't believe much beyond this can even enter the discussion. It's not so much about whether you overtly participate in something wrong. It's about whether the aggregation of all the tiny little microscopic job duties you do to comply with bureaucratic hierarchy ends up summing up to unfair gains mediated towards someone who doesn't economically deserve them, or that the gains end up being wasted.

lsc 11y ago

See, This is what people mean by "shades of gray" - And yeah, I was pushing 30 before I figured this out (and amusingly, I read a lot of philosophy in my teens and 20s trying to figure this out. Which... actually helps; you read enough, and you find that only crazies are certain of themselves. There aren't really answers to be had of the absolute sort, not in philosophy.) Yes, nothing you do is going to absolutely harm no one else; No job is going to be absolutely "good" from a ethical perspective. Life is messy, and perhaps more to the point, ethics are messy. However... this doesn't mean that some things aren't better than other things. Most people would agree that, say, the way you are usually expected to act as a surgeon, when working for, say, an organization like doctors without borders is more ethical than the way you are expected to act when working in sales or finance, say, for a company like Enron, even if you are expected or required (to keep the job) to do some things we might agree are unethical as a surgeon.

wfo 11y ago

Literally everyone believes what doctors and nurses do is ethical. Public defenders, absolutely. Nobody has an ethical problem with artists (i.e. entertainment) -- musicians, actors, writers. Being an educator is a highly ethical profession. Research can go either way; most would consider research on biological weapons unethical but research on vaccines or cures for disease or basic research quite ethical. I don't know who you are talking to but you've just listed a huge number of very ethical professions and said "who considers any of these ethical?": the answer is literally everyone. Everyone considers at least one of those fields ethical. Ethical doesn't mean you sacrifice your life to help starving children in Africa. Ethical means you don't do things that are evil. The surprising thing is that bright business students are now deciding finance doesn't satisfy that criteria. I mean if you want to pretend it's all about some evolutionary psychology mate selection criteria that's fine but the cause and effect work the other way. Nobody wants to mate with an unethical person; if they're willing to commit unethical acts and screw over others for money how could you ever trust them with a family or not to cheat?

p4wnc6 11y ago
See my other comment: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10560943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10560943 >.