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I think, Mr. Zuckerberg is a more evil exploiter with weak ethics than I'm willing to accept.
by olaf 16y ago
I think, Mr. Zuckerberg is a more evil exploiter with weak ethics than I'm willing to accept.
- dhimes 16y agoMy take is that Mr Z. is a relative kid (that is, relatively inexperienced), sitting in a room with a bunch of cagey investors who made him an "instant" multimillionaire, and are now asking, "So, what are you going to do for us?" He has no idea. My guess at a phenomenological relationship for ethics as a function of time in this situation would be E = E0 exp(-ĸt) where E0 is am empirically determined constant, and dependent on the individual, and ĸ = a measure of the social debt owed to the people pulling the strings. Note that the unit of ĸ is inverse time. This indicates that when the string-pullers obtain their leverage quickly, as in this case, ĸ is large. [/humor]
- julio_the_squid 16y agoMy impression is that Jim Breyer has been running the show for a while.
- tfh 16y agoMoney has proven to be very effective in bending ethics. Many people would do worse for a fraction of Mr. Zuck's money. I think judging him as a evil exploiter with weak ethics is a little harsh.
- joe_the_user 16y agoMoney is an effective ethics bender but when the ethics are bent, you still get judged and rightly so. Does a hitman who kills for a thousand dollars have weaker ethics than a hitman who kills for a million dollars? Would the million-dollar-hitman deserve less jail time?
- Silhouette 16y ago> I think judging him as a evil exploiter with weak ethics is a little harsh. Why? Doing something bad doesn't become OK just because you got paid a lot of money to do it. Indeed, a reasonable definition of ethical behaviour would be doing the right thing even when faced with significant incentives not to.
- philwelch 16y agoI have never been forced to choose between becoming a billionaire and holding onto my ethical convictions, and I suspect you haven't either. I'm not comfortable with either of us standing in judgment of someone who has.
- kingkilr 16y agoI've also never been faced with the decision to torture someone or not, that doesn't stop me from making moral judgement about those actions either. The point of an ethical system is to help you make judgements about decisions, if your answer to every ethical question is, "I've never had to make that decision" your ethical system is useless.
- foldr 16y agoThere's a difference between saying "what John did is wrong" and "John is a bad person." I think the OP was saying we should be cautious in making judgments of the second sort.
- Silhouette 16y ago> There's a difference between saying "what John did is wrong" and "John is a bad person." I disagree. As the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. If John repeatedly does bad things, then John is a bad person. How are we to judge a person fairly, if not by how they conduct themselves?
- foldr 16y agoSurely it has to be possible for a good person to do bad things (at least occasionally). I think it would be going a bit far to eliminate the distinction entirely. >How are we to judge a person fairly, if not by how they conduct themselves? That is kind of the point. Arguably, you just can't judge people fairly, because you never know what's going on inside. That doesn't mean that you can't criticize people's actions, just that you should be cautious about making more fundamental judgments about their character.