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If you can professionalize a certain set of ethics, you can make it impossible for your employer to find anyone to complete the job. For example, capital punis

If you can professionalize a certain set of ethics, you can make it impossible for your employer to find anyone to complete the job. For example, capital punishment is increasingly hard to carry out because anesthesiologists refuse to participate and drug companies won't supply the drug.

walrus01 10y ago
I'm not sure the capital punishment part is a good comparison... It's because north american governments are squeamish about solutions that look brutal but efficient. I'm sure that if a state wanted to implement capital punishment via firing squad and advertised for death penalty proponent rifle marksmen they would have no lack of candidates.
- lolc 10y ago
  Yes but how would that look? The death penalty relies on the "humane" veneer, or it would be abolished very quickly. If there were the slightest hint that the people killing other people in the name of the state are actually enjoying it, there would be a huge outcry. Similarly for surveillance, if you're only able to implement crude solutions people will be disgusted. "So you're saying Yahoo was compromised because no good engineers wanted to work there due to government interference?" We don't know whether it's true, but the assumption is already damning.
  - barry-cotter 10y ago
    > The death penalty relies on the "humane" veneer, or it would be abolished very quickly. If there were the slightest hint that the people killing other people in the name of the state are actually enjoying it, there would be a huge outcry. It seems unlikely you know anyone you know supports the death penalty. The death penalty has almost universally been abolished despite public support for it. I say almost only because I am too lazy to check whether or not it was in fact universal. Norway was among the first countries to abolish the death penalty and they brought it back especially for Vidkun Quisling. I'm not going to go looking through the Pew World Survey for attitudes to the death penalty but at a guess Sweden probably has the highest proportion of the population opposed. If you got less than 1,000 people volunteering for the firing squad for the kinds of crimes that get the death penalty in the USA I'd be very surprised.

walrus01 10y ago

I'm not sure the capital punishment part is a good comparison... It's because north american governments are squeamish about solutions that look brutal but efficient. I'm sure that if a state wanted to implement capital punishment via firing squad and advertised for death penalty proponent rifle marksmen they would have no lack of candidates.

lolc 10y ago
Yes but how would that look? The death penalty relies on the "humane" veneer, or it would be abolished very quickly. If there were the slightest hint that the people killing other people in the name of the state are actually enjoying it, there would be a huge outcry. Similarly for surveillance, if you're only able to implement crude solutions people will be disgusted. "So you're saying Yahoo was compromised because no good engineers wanted to work there due to government interference?" We don't know whether it's true, but the assumption is already damning.
- barry-cotter 10y ago
  > The death penalty relies on the "humane" veneer, or it would be abolished very quickly. If there were the slightest hint that the people killing other people in the name of the state are actually enjoying it, there would be a huge outcry. It seems unlikely you know anyone you know supports the death penalty. The death penalty has almost universally been abolished despite public support for it. I say almost only because I am too lazy to check whether or not it was in fact universal. Norway was among the first countries to abolish the death penalty and they brought it back especially for Vidkun Quisling. I'm not going to go looking through the Pew World Survey for attitudes to the death penalty but at a guess Sweden probably has the highest proportion of the population opposed. If you got less than 1,000 people volunteering for the firing squad for the kinds of crimes that get the death penalty in the USA I'd be very surprised.