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Are you seriously comparing the murder of millions of Jews to a multinational corporation ignoring taxi regulations? Uber fanboys have lost their minds.

by bjl 9y ago

sushid 9y ago
His analogy was definitely bad, but he's right. Legality does not equate morality. However, I do find it weird that they would ask you to describe an instance where you broke the law during a job interview.
- GauntletWizard 9y ago
  Did they ask "the law" or just "the rules"? I did end up accepting an offer at Uber, and yes, I was asked if I'd ever broken "the rules". Uber's culture is pretty toxic, and honestly, I'd say that either form of the question is probably a bad sign, but there's a clear difference between them.
tzs 9y ago
No, he is not comparing them. He's using the Nazi and Schindler case to argue for a general proposition (law can be at odds with morality), and then trying to apply that proposition to Uber. Suppose you are arguing for that proposition with a much milder illustration, such as someone breaking a law requiring obtaining a permit before giving food to homeless people. It's easy for people to try to pick holes in that example. They might argue that feeding the homeless without a permit reduces pressure on the homeless to seek aid at shelters, which in turn increases the likelihood that they won't get help to get out of being homeless, and conclude that your example fails because your behavior was not moral, and so is not an example of morality being orthogonal to law. If you want to try to save the argument, you then end up in a debate about the merits of various approaches to helping homeless people, and cannot get back to the original point until that is resolved. That is much less likely to happen if you use Nazis. Almost everyone is going to agree that the SS behavior was immoral, and the Schindler behavior was moral, and since the former was legal under German laws at the time and the latter was not, there really is no way to dispute that this is an example where morality and legality are opposite. It's basically a slam dunk. They have to concede that the general proposition is true. That lets the subsequence argument focus instead on under what circumstances morality overrides law.

Are you seriously comparing the murder of millions of Jews to a multinational corporation ignoring taxi regulations? Uber fanboys have lost their minds.

by bjl 9y ago

Are you seriously comparing the murder of millions of Jews to a multinational corporation ignoring taxi regulations? Uber fanboys have lost their minds.

sushid 9y ago

His analogy was definitely bad, but he's right. Legality does not equate morality. However, I do find it weird that they would ask you to describe an instance where you broke the law during a job interview.

GauntletWizard 9y ago
Did they ask "the law" or just "the rules"? I did end up accepting an offer at Uber, and yes, I was asked if I'd ever broken "the rules". Uber's culture is pretty toxic, and honestly, I'd say that either form of the question is probably a bad sign, but there's a clear difference between them.

tzs 9y ago

No, he is not comparing them. He's using the Nazi and Schindler case to argue for a general proposition (law can be at odds with morality), and then trying to apply that proposition to Uber. Suppose you are arguing for that proposition with a much milder illustration, such as someone breaking a law requiring obtaining a permit before giving food to homeless people. It's easy for people to try to pick holes in that example. They might argue that feeding the homeless without a permit reduces pressure on the homeless to seek aid at shelters, which in turn increases the likelihood that they won't get help to get out of being homeless, and conclude that your example fails because your behavior was not moral, and so is not an example of morality being orthogonal to law. If you want to try to save the argument, you then end up in a debate about the merits of various approaches to helping homeless people, and cannot get back to the original point until that is resolved. That is much less likely to happen if you use Nazis. Almost everyone is going to agree that the SS behavior was immoral, and the Schindler behavior was moral, and since the former was legal under German laws at the time and the latter was not, there really is no way to dispute that this is an example where morality and legality are opposite. It's basically a slam dunk. They have to concede that the general proposition is true. That lets the subsequence argument focus instead on under what circumstances morality overrides law.