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When you say a job is unethical, who exactly is being unethical? As far as I know, only human beings can act either ethically or unethically; inanimate objects

When you say a job is unethical, who exactly is being unethical? As far as I know, only human beings can act either ethically or unethically; inanimate objects can neither be ethical nor unethical. So is your claim that any human being who does a job is acting unethically? I still remember some of my grade school teachers. They had a profound, and I would argue, very positive impact on me. Was it unethical for them to become teachers?

p4wnc6 11y ago
By doing seemingly ethical things on a day to day basis, you can be helping the larger organization to do such significantly unethical things overall that it more than overtakes the aggregation of your small ethical actions. So the choice to you is: since I can personally behave ethically in my job each day, in which role will the aggregation of my labor output up through the organizational hierarchy end up least enabling unethical higher-ups to carry out larger-scale unethical agendas? My feeling, which is certainly debatable, is that this doesn't work out significantly differently whether you work for an NGO, Volkswagen, Nickelodian, or Goldman Sachs. Unless you try hard to actually be one of the unethical higher-ups carrying out bad larger-scale agendas, then in virtually any mode of employment, you'll be acting equally as ethically, in terms of your own personal daily actions. But I do think that part of an individual's duty to act ethically involves accounting for whatever others might do with the output of your labor. If I write software and don't do anything unethical all day, but I know that my boss will use it to cheat on emissions testing, then every time I don't quit my job or blow a whistle, I am being unethical, directly. I doubt this applies to many people in their day to day jobs though, since they are not aware of how their labor products are being aggregated for less ethical purposes. So whatever job those folks are doing, whether it's performing free dental work to orphans in a third-world slum, or writing some code for a big bank, the degree to which those individuals are "being ethical" is about the same, certainly not different enough to make some big hand wavy guffaw about how bad banking or finance is compared to the rest of industry. Maybe there can be outliers, like someone who not only donates labor to the third world, but also thinks about it in an effective altruism way to make sure that the by-product of that donated labor doesn't end up contributing to something bad in some counter-intuitive microeconomic way that is hard to think about when we're all consumed with the warm fuzzies of thinking about third-world labor donation. Or a pre-school teacher that is not tied into really any management hierarchy that could possibly be extracting anything from the teacher's labor output for some other, unethical purpose. But I think we'd all agree that these modes of employment are exceptionally rare. Clearly even if every single labor market participant wanted such a job, only a small fraction could physically get them. We'd still need people doing all kinds of ethical-for-them-in-the-day-to-day-but-unethical-in-terms-of-its-aggregated-affect-on-society jobs.

p4wnc6 11y ago

By doing seemingly ethical things on a day to day basis, you can be helping the larger organization to do such significantly unethical things overall that it more than overtakes the aggregation of your small ethical actions. So the choice to you is: since I can personally behave ethically in my job each day, in which role will the aggregation of my labor output up through the organizational hierarchy end up least enabling unethical higher-ups to carry out larger-scale unethical agendas? My feeling, which is certainly debatable, is that this doesn't work out significantly differently whether you work for an NGO, Volkswagen, Nickelodian, or Goldman Sachs. Unless you try hard to actually be one of the unethical higher-ups carrying out bad larger-scale agendas, then in virtually any mode of employment, you'll be acting equally as ethically, in terms of your own personal daily actions. But I do think that part of an individual's duty to act ethically involves accounting for whatever others might do with the output of your labor. If I write software and don't do anything unethical all day, but I know that my boss will use it to cheat on emissions testing, then every time I don't quit my job or blow a whistle, I am being unethical, directly. I doubt this applies to many people in their day to day jobs though, since they are not aware of how their labor products are being aggregated for less ethical purposes. So whatever job those folks are doing, whether it's performing free dental work to orphans in a third-world slum, or writing some code for a big bank, the degree to which those individuals are "being ethical" is about the same, certainly not different enough to make some big hand wavy guffaw about how bad banking or finance is compared to the rest of industry. Maybe there can be outliers, like someone who not only donates labor to the third world, but also thinks about it in an effective altruism way to make sure that the by-product of that donated labor doesn't end up contributing to something bad in some counter-intuitive microeconomic way that is hard to think about when we're all consumed with the warm fuzzies of thinking about third-world labor donation. Or a pre-school teacher that is not tied into really any management hierarchy that could possibly be extracting anything from the teacher's labor output for some other, unethical purpose. But I think we'd all agree that these modes of employment are exceptionally rare. Clearly even if every single labor market participant wanted such a job, only a small fraction could physically get them. We'd still need people doing all kinds of ethical-for-them-in-the-day-to-day-but-unethical-in-terms-of-its-aggregated-affect-on-society jobs.