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> I'd agree with this assessment of developers. However I've come into these exact moral dilemmas myself in the line of working for various companies doing web

> I'd agree with this assessment of developers. However I've come into these exact moral dilemmas myself in the line of working for various companies doing web programming. How did I resolve them? By making the decision that affected my own bottom line favorably. That would be _not_ having a strong sense of personal values and ethics. If your good morals always lose out to the promise of more money, that's you not having good morals. Just own up to it instead of pretending the real culprit here is a lack of governing bodies that should be protecting you from all the evil money out there.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
You cannot build the world based on the strength of individuals' moral spine, because a) there's plenty of people with weak ones who will happily outcompete individuals refusing unethical work, and - the more important - b) people respond to incentives. For instance, we have the law and the police even though people in general seem naturally good - they exist to counterbalance incentives that make people do bad things. Saying "just own up to it instead of pretending the real culprit here is a lack of governing bodies that should be protecting you from all the evil money out there" ignores the most basic fact about humans - people do respond to incentives. Moral dilemmas don't look like "do I accept this high salary for doing evil, or prefer a slightly smaller salary for not doing evil". Moral dilemma is what a hypothetical Jane faces, after one of her parents died and the second is unemployed, when she has to provide for the parent and her younger siblings, while also trying to start her own life with her fiancée. For her, abandoning a high-paying salary that is actually eaten up entirely to let two families live in stability and with dignity, is not a trivial problem. The idea of having support of governing bodies is to turn such life-quality-threatening situations into easy choices, so that people don't get severely punished for doing the right thing. Also: ethics can be, and is, used to abuse people. In Poland, we have this situation with paramedics, nurses and doctors on residency, who are severely overworked (to the point it's a serious health threat, and causes an occasional suicide), severely underpaid, and on top of that they're told by everyone that they can't protest because that would mean providing worse care for patients, which is obviously unethical.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  This is a great post. However, it seems also that it is impossible to build the world based solely on official policy and law. We need people to continually make moral decisions in their own lives, to the best of their ability. This involves making sacrifices and ignoring incentives at times. How do we find this balance? I'm not sure. I think we may always be searching for it.
  - dcow 9y ago
    This is were abstractions like religion come into play. Unfortunately it's taking awhile for them to modernize and adjust to the point where they're culturally relevant again so we can stop socially shaming people who participate in religious groups/orginaizations. But I do believe we as a society have, of late, over-zealously crusaded against the religious archetype in a rather naive stance that science will lead the way...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I agree. What I mean is recognition of human nature. We do respond to incentives, there's no working around that (at least for now; maybe we'll have some mind-engineering tech in the future). We want people to do good, and to achieve this we need to both strengthen individual sense of morality and shape the incentives and engineer systems that protect from pressure - because we recognize no human is immune to incentives. Will we find the right balance? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. The balance we have now is dynamic - people do bad things, but not enough of them to cause a societal collapse. Incentives are recursive, too - institutions are formed not out of abstract thinking, but because there were enough bad things happening on that some people had a powerful incentive to stop them.
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      Fully agree, I just wanted to stress both aspects. I do think the systemic and incentive based side of things is more difficult to understand, so it's good to articulate those concepts. Either way, I think it's important to keep having these conversations.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

You cannot build the world based on the strength of individuals' moral spine, because a) there's plenty of people with weak ones who will happily outcompete individuals refusing unethical work, and - the more important - b) people respond to incentives. For instance, we have the law and the police even though people in general seem naturally good - they exist to counterbalance incentives that make people do bad things. Saying "just own up to it instead of pretending the real culprit here is a lack of governing bodies that should be protecting you from all the evil money out there" ignores the most basic fact about humans - people do respond to incentives. Moral dilemmas don't look like "do I accept this high salary for doing evil, or prefer a slightly smaller salary for not doing evil". Moral dilemma is what a hypothetical Jane faces, after one of her parents died and the second is unemployed, when she has to provide for the parent and her younger siblings, while also trying to start her own life with her fiancée. For her, abandoning a high-paying salary that is actually eaten up entirely to let two families live in stability and with dignity, is not a trivial problem. The idea of having support of governing bodies is to turn such life-quality-threatening situations into easy choices, so that people don't get severely punished for doing the right thing. Also: ethics can be, and is, used to abuse people. In Poland, we have this situation with paramedics, nurses and doctors on residency, who are severely overworked (to the point it's a serious health threat, and causes an occasional suicide), severely underpaid, and on top of that they're told by everyone that they can't protest because that would mean providing worse care for patients, which is obviously unethical.

dwaltrip 9y ago
This is a great post. However, it seems also that it is impossible to build the world based solely on official policy and law. We need people to continually make moral decisions in their own lives, to the best of their ability. This involves making sacrifices and ignoring incentives at times. How do we find this balance? I'm not sure. I think we may always be searching for it.
- dcow 9y ago
  This is were abstractions like religion come into play. Unfortunately it's taking awhile for them to modernize and adjust to the point where they're culturally relevant again so we can stop socially shaming people who participate in religious groups/orginaizations. But I do believe we as a society have, of late, over-zealously crusaded against the religious archetype in a rather naive stance that science will lead the way...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I agree. What I mean is recognition of human nature. We do respond to incentives, there's no working around that (at least for now; maybe we'll have some mind-engineering tech in the future). We want people to do good, and to achieve this we need to both strengthen individual sense of morality and shape the incentives and engineer systems that protect from pressure - because we recognize no human is immune to incentives. Will we find the right balance? I don't know, but I certainly hope so. The balance we have now is dynamic - people do bad things, but not enough of them to cause a societal collapse. Incentives are recursive, too - institutions are formed not out of abstract thinking, but because there were enough bad things happening on that some people had a powerful incentive to stop them.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Fully agree, I just wanted to stress both aspects. I do think the systemic and incentive based side of things is more difficult to understand, so it's good to articulate those concepts. Either way, I think it's important to keep having these conversations.