12 ms·

Ethics can’t be a side hustle

135 points by fagnerbrack 9y ago

jstanley 9y ago
Well said.
austincheney 9y ago
> ”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean good as in “on the side of the angels.” That is a fundamentally huge misunderstanding of ethics, confusion between ethos and pathos. Ethics is about doing the right thing even if in opposition to your personal beliefs. There is nothing necessarily ethical about activities in fulfillment of a cause. This isn't the problem I most prominently see in software with regards to ethics or product quality. I far more frequently see people half-assing product quality in order to make timelines and either keep their jobs or fulfill some qualitative metric that earns a larger annual bonus.
beaconstudios 9y ago
I don't think this is a straightforward as the author claims. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Uber who believe that governments are acting in an oppressive manner by trying to come down hard on Uber. Not that I agree with that stance, but there are multiple ethical stances that co-exist in this world - that's why politics isn't a solved problem.
- dictum 9y ago
  > that's why politics isn't a solved problem There's another problem: under certain viewpoints, it's unethical to not send the bastards to a concentration camp, gulag, etc.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    of course, and ethics and politics can not only be radical or common for their time but with the shifting of the overton window, historically radical or common views can switch places (consider the radicality of being a monarchist now, or a modern liberal in 1400AD).
  - bjl 9y ago
    Except not all viewpoints are valid or true. If (as a vast majority of philosophers think) morality is objective, then those people are simply wrong about what is ethical/unethical.
    - gnode 9y ago
      Error theorists would argue that no moral viewpoints at all are true.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        I'm not sure what implications you want people to draw from that statement. It's hard to argue that murder is OK, for example, so it's hard to argue that laws are all subjective expressions of power.
        tremon 9y ago
        But your example is begging the question. If you frame killing a human being as murder, you've already decided that it's unjust or unlawful. How about the death penalty, euthanasia, extrajudicial execution, war, honour killing or jihad/crusade? In all those cases, the killing party believes their actions are fully justified.
        humanrebar 9y ago
        Nobody argues that there is no such thing as murder. It's not begging the question just because people don't agree about edge cases.
        gnode 9y ago
        You're right; I don't think anyone here is arguing murder isn't real. The argument is that murder is not an objective truth, but rather a subjective truth. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care about murder, just that murder is a conceptual reality.
        9y ago
  - golergka 9y ago
    Jumping straight from the politics of taxi regulation to nazis and death camps. Right.
    - dictum 9y ago
      If I were discussing the politics of taxi regulation, I'd be ashamed of my comment. But I'm not. It's a general observation on the difficulty of defining what is ethical and how even those who call for ethics can have different ethical systems/principles - not even prompted by the text itself. Honestly, adding disclaimers, hedges and requests for charitable readings in every reply gets old.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        Perhaps it would be worthwhile, then, to speak in ways which require a less exceptional effort of charity on the part of your audience. I mean, I have no idea what point you were trying to make by that, but I totally get why people reacted badly to it. It seems on balance to be adding much more heat than light, and I think there might be an interesting conversation here which is not yet being had as a result. (eta: I see in my first reading of the thread parent that I missed a negation, which rather changes the sense of the thing. Prior statement stands, but I no longer feel the need to eye you suspiciously sidewise as I say it.)
      - golergka 9y ago
        There is pretty widespread consensus on the difference between topics where different viewpoints are valid and acceptable (taxi regulation) and not so (murdering people that didn't commit any violent crimes). There is no difficulty in allowing different ethical systems and still have some boundaries on things that a certainly unethical.
        Bartweiss 9y ago
        > pretty widespread consensus on... where different viewpoints are not so valid and acceptable (murdering people that didn't commit any violent crimes) I take your point, and I agree that it's worth separating debate over practicalities and small influences from debate over basic humanity. One allows for "but I still think you're well-intentioned" and the other doesn't, so only one can be sustainable within a community. But... it's also worth remembering how far from universal even our consensus views are. I can think of a half-dozen contexts in the world today where people explicitly reject the proposition "it's wrong to murder people who haven't committed violent crimes". In many of those contexts, they're serious enough to actually go out and do that murder, and be judged favorably for doing so. I don't disagree with you, I'm not going to knowingly invite those people over to dinner. I just think it's worth remembering how little of morality is certain across times and cultures.
  - gnode 9y ago
    Perhaps a closer to home viewpoint for Americans would be: whether it's unethical / unjust to not execute a murderer.
    - leetcrew 9y ago
      a swift and painless death is ultimately more humane than a lifetime behind bars with no hope for release, imo. unfortunately the US system combines the worst of both worlds. the few who are executed only die after years of agonizing "will they or won't they" through the various levels of appeal. and after all that we still end up exonerating people posthumously.
      - gnode 9y ago
        > a swift and painless death is ultimately more humane than a lifetime behind bars Many would argue it's unethical for anyone to make that decision on someone else's behalf. The fact that so many death row convicts appeal their death sentence until the bitter end would imply that they themselves don't agree with your belief.
        leetcrew 9y ago
        > The fact that so many death row convicts appeal their death sentence until the bitter end would imply that they themselves don't agree with your belief. it doesn't necessarily imply that. at each point in the appeal process, there remains the possibility of having one's case thrown out altogether or reducing the sentence even further than natural life. even if you prefer death to life in prison, it would still be rational to pursue any chance of getting out entirely or getting a substantially reduced sentence. that said, if I could implement any policy I wanted, I would choose for life to be the most severe sentence but give the inmate the ability to choose death if they prefer.
- ndespres 9y ago
  I think it's less of a gray area than that. Anyone at Uber who worked on Greyball, perhaps telling themselves that they were thwarting an oppressive government who was firmly in the pocket of the taxi lobby, was naïve at best and deceiving themselves at worst. Maybe some people got caught up in the cat-and-mouse game of evading authorities and failed to question whether what they were doing was "Good." That's the author's call to action in this piece: to remind us to step back and evaluate what we are doing in an ethical context. Things seem less gray for the author's second example- developers at Palantir designing a workflow to help ICE round up immigrants. Of course there is room for counter-points in an argument about how best to handle an immigration crisis in any country (I say "crisis" because I see it as a crisis that we are doing so little to help) but at the end of the day, our individual actions need to be made on the basis of an single ethical black-or-white question, and history and indeed the present will not look favorably upon those who fail to act in the best interest of their fellow humans.
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    while I agree with you, you have to remember that the current administration and many of their supporters support ICE's actions. What you're arguing for is that the actions of Uber or Palantir's designers are against your personal ethics, or those of the wider movement you identify with.
    - gridaphobe 9y ago
      You seem to be implying that morality is subjective, which I think is a dangerous belief. People may believe their actions are ethical, but that doesn’t necessarily make them correct.
      - kerkeslager 9y ago
        What could be an objective basis for morality?
        Nav_Panel 9y ago
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  The responses here seem to have gotten into the weeds of specifics, but I think this is a fundamental point. A code of professional ethics will never get traction if it tries to be a code of personal ethics as well. If you put personal ethics into a code, there are roughly two possibilities. One is that you put in things that were already censured at another level ("we oppose convicted serial killers") and nothing changes. The other is that you put in things which are actually contested ("we oppose all lawbreaking"), and then everyone who disagrees breaks away from the whole code, and probably benefits by working with people who support their stance. A useful professional code tells you how to define malpractice, not immorality in general. Since professional censure and lost reputation are the consequences for breaking such a code, it had best be limited to actions which impugn the professional merit of the person committing them. That way, enforcing it is natural and self-interested; clients don't want to hire code-breakers, and other professionals don't want to be tainted by association. I think medicine is instructive. People hold up the field as a successful example of bounding personal morality, but the Hippocratic Oath is very much a professional statement. It happens that professional behavior for doctors produces a very clear good - lives saved - but this is not actually a feature of the code. The Oath demands that the practitioner offer their subjects competence, confidentiality, and fiduciary duty; nothing more. Questions of personal morality in the workplace go unanswered, and so the Oath outlasted massive corrections in what is moral, like ceasing to treat homosexuality as an illness. Appealing to personal morality in the workplace is fine, but it's not the same as appealing to a professional standard.
golergka 9y ago
> ”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean good as in “on the side of the angels.” And the author means "angels" as in "people who share my very specific political beliefs". > You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. If I was a US citizen, and had an opportunity to work on software that helped enforcing immigration law, I would feel pretty proud about it.
- aerotwelve 9y ago
  You may disagree with the author's political beliefs, but you also aren't the subject of the author's critique. If you help design or write a portion of a product, you are a crucial part of bringing the system into reality. If you support and believe in the mission and ends of a product, there's no issue there. The problem occurs when you work on a system that is designed to fulfill an outcome that you don't agree with, or one that you believe is bad for society. The author's thesis is clear: If you choose to contribute to the development of such a system, you cannot divorce yourself from the consequences that will follow when your work product is turned on. [edit: I'm not arguing for moral relativism; I'm trying to separate the argument from the concrete examples given in the piece.]
amelius 9y ago
I think our economic model is highest on the list of needing an ethical makeover. If the person on one end of the supply-chain makes 1000000x as people on the other end of the supply-chain, then it's time to scratch our heads and deeply investigate what's wrong and how it can be fixed. We can do ethical work within our current economic framework all day long, but that's not going to solve the most pressing ethical issues.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  What economic model with higher aspirations actually ends up in more ethical place?
- lolsal 9y ago
  Why do you think that model is ethically wrong? If every link in the chains is compensated fairly (no one is coerced) and value is added, it seems like an inevitability that one end of the chain would be magnitudes larger in compensation.
  - Firadeoclus 9y ago
    Why should it not be possible that every link gets compensated similarly? Is value added at the end of the chain necessarily much larger than that at the start of the chain?
    - lolsal 9y ago
      Because value is not added equally along the chain.
      - Firadeoclus 9y ago
        There will naturally be variation, but why is it inevitable that there are order-of-magnitude differences?
        lolsal 9y ago
schaunwheeler 9y ago
I find that people in tech, especially in my own field of data science, treat ethics as a relatively simple problem. If they were building a technical product, they would at least make an appearance of checking assumptions, and worrying about breadth and depth of stakeholder buy-in, and building tests for unintended consequences. But when it comes to building an ethical "product" to guide their work, it's like all of the best-practices go by the wayside. For example: https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to-a-hippocratic-oath/ https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to... Data for Democracy came up with an ethical code for data scientists and is now talking it up asking people to sign on to it. The thing is basically the product a few months of working groups plus a day-long hackathon, and it's already been put out on the market, so to speak. So it's not surprising that they produced something that could, in many ways, actually run counter to their goals. I firmly believe the ethical code as written is itself unethical: https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about-ethics-66acaea6f16f https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about... What I've found amazing is that the community that built the D4D ethical code has been entirely unwilling to invite criticism of the code, or even engage with those who question it. The fact that willingness to entertain criticism and consider unintended consequences is actually one of the pillars of their ethical code makes it doubly troubling.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but software needs a professional associstion (like the AMA) with teeth. Ethics are not easy, and without collective governing power, they simply won’t exist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16423328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16423328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420659
  - whataretensors 9y ago
    I disagree. Not in principle, but because I think it won't work. If an organization has teeth in this market it will be turned into a weapon to gate out or remove competition.
booleandilemma 9y ago
Can you imagine a doctor not telling you about a dark spot they found on an x-ray...Can you imagine an auto mechanic not telling you your brakes are shot because they didn’t want to deal with the problem... The problem with these examples is that doctors and mechanics have a direct relationship with their customers while software developers do not. Not unless the developer is a freelancer.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Doctors and mechanics have professional societies and/or licenses. It's not as abstract for them. They go out of business for many unethical behaviors.
Vinnl 9y ago
So what if you don't directly work on a product you consider unethical, but you know that others in the company do? Sure, you're not working on it directly, but you're keeping a company alive that does. But where else to work? What if the company you're working for isn't directly creating products you consider unethical, but is e.g. a customer at an unethical bank, or creates products that help companies that produce products you consider unethical? And what if you work at/for such a company, but you're not a programmer, but e.g. a cleaner, are making ends meet, and you're lucky to have a job in the first place?
- strudey 9y ago
  I would suggest the answer is: if it was easy, it wouldn't be ethics.
- randomsearch 9y ago
  Generally: if the company is pretty self-evidently evil, and you have feasible alternatives, choose those alternatives. Also, hypotheticals are fairly unhelpful compared to real cases. Consider whether you would personally carry out the acts involved - would you defraud middle america for your own benefit? Would you fire on civilians on behalf of a dictator buying your product?
ryandrake 9y ago
I quit a job once, for a number of reasons, but one of them being that as I learned the intended application of the technology I was working on, I grew more and more ethically uncomfortable. I was initially lured to the company for the opportunity to work on cool technology (GIS, sensors, airborne mapping), but soon realized the stuff was being primarily sold to law enforcement for the purpose of, among other things, surveillance and immigration enforcement. So the end of the day I decided I don’t want my name to be associated with that. I don’t want to have to explain to my daughter one day (whose mother is an immigrant) that I was part of building an immigrant surveillance system. So I went and found something different to do. There are lots of opportunities in software to take the ethical high road. Do I help the company try to sneakily get the user’s personal info? Do I help us cheat this benchmark? Do I hide our bugs by silently restarting the app when the user is probably not at his PC? (each of which I was asked to implement at one point in my career) Does what I’m programming sit well with my personal ethics and beliefs? I should be able to explain why I am writing the program i’m writing and be able to live with it. (EDIT)If I am the owner of a company and I’m interviewing someone and they worked at some company notorious for using dark patterns or anything else ethically questionable I think it’s fair game to ask about their involvement.

135 points by fagnerbrack 9y ago

Well said.

> ”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean good as in “on the side of the angels.” That is a fundamentally huge misunderstanding of ethics, confusion between ethos and pathos. Ethics is about doing the right thing even if in opposition to your personal beliefs. There is nothing necessarily ethical about activities in fulfillment of a cause. This isn't the problem I most prominently see in software with regards to ethics or product quality. I far more frequently see people half-assing product quality in order to make timelines and either keep their jobs or fulfill some qualitative metric that earns a larger annual bonus.

beaconstudios 9y ago

I don't think this is a straightforward as the author claims. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Uber who believe that governments are acting in an oppressive manner by trying to come down hard on Uber. Not that I agree with that stance, but there are multiple ethical stances that co-exist in this world - that's why politics isn't a solved problem.

dictum 9y ago
> that's why politics isn't a solved problem There's another problem: under certain viewpoints, it's unethical to not send the bastards to a concentration camp, gulag, etc.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  of course, and ethics and politics can not only be radical or common for their time but with the shifting of the overton window, historically radical or common views can switch places (consider the radicality of being a monarchist now, or a modern liberal in 1400AD).
- bjl 9y ago
  Except not all viewpoints are valid or true. If (as a vast majority of philosophers think) morality is objective, then those people are simply wrong about what is ethical/unethical.
  - gnode 9y ago
    Error theorists would argue that no moral viewpoints at all are true.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      I'm not sure what implications you want people to draw from that statement. It's hard to argue that murder is OK, for example, so it's hard to argue that laws are all subjective expressions of power.
      - tremon 9y ago
        But your example is begging the question. If you frame killing a human being as murder, you've already decided that it's unjust or unlawful. How about the death penalty, euthanasia, extrajudicial execution, war, honour killing or jihad/crusade? In all those cases, the killing party believes their actions are fully justified.
        humanrebar 9y ago
        Nobody argues that there is no such thing as murder. It's not begging the question just because people don't agree about edge cases.
        gnode 9y ago
        You're right; I don't think anyone here is arguing murder isn't real. The argument is that murder is not an objective truth, but rather a subjective truth. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care about murder, just that murder is a conceptual reality.
        9y ago
- golergka 9y ago
  Jumping straight from the politics of taxi regulation to nazis and death camps. Right.
  - dictum 9y ago
    If I were discussing the politics of taxi regulation, I'd be ashamed of my comment. But I'm not. It's a general observation on the difficulty of defining what is ethical and how even those who call for ethics can have different ethical systems/principles - not even prompted by the text itself. Honestly, adding disclaimers, hedges and requests for charitable readings in every reply gets old.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      Perhaps it would be worthwhile, then, to speak in ways which require a less exceptional effort of charity on the part of your audience. I mean, I have no idea what point you were trying to make by that, but I totally get why people reacted badly to it. It seems on balance to be adding much more heat than light, and I think there might be an interesting conversation here which is not yet being had as a result. (eta: I see in my first reading of the thread parent that I missed a negation, which rather changes the sense of the thing. Prior statement stands, but I no longer feel the need to eye you suspiciously sidewise as I say it.)
    - golergka 9y ago
      There is pretty widespread consensus on the difference between topics where different viewpoints are valid and acceptable (taxi regulation) and not so (murdering people that didn't commit any violent crimes). There is no difficulty in allowing different ethical systems and still have some boundaries on things that a certainly unethical.
      - Bartweiss 9y ago
        > pretty widespread consensus on... where different viewpoints are not so valid and acceptable (murdering people that didn't commit any violent crimes) I take your point, and I agree that it's worth separating debate over practicalities and small influences from debate over basic humanity. One allows for "but I still think you're well-intentioned" and the other doesn't, so only one can be sustainable within a community. But... it's also worth remembering how far from universal even our consensus views are. I can think of a half-dozen contexts in the world today where people explicitly reject the proposition "it's wrong to murder people who haven't committed violent crimes". In many of those contexts, they're serious enough to actually go out and do that murder, and be judged favorably for doing so. I don't disagree with you, I'm not going to knowingly invite those people over to dinner. I just think it's worth remembering how little of morality is certain across times and cultures.
- gnode 9y ago
  Perhaps a closer to home viewpoint for Americans would be: whether it's unethical / unjust to not execute a murderer.
  - leetcrew 9y ago
    a swift and painless death is ultimately more humane than a lifetime behind bars with no hope for release, imo. unfortunately the US system combines the worst of both worlds. the few who are executed only die after years of agonizing "will they or won't they" through the various levels of appeal. and after all that we still end up exonerating people posthumously.
    - gnode 9y ago
      > a swift and painless death is ultimately more humane than a lifetime behind bars Many would argue it's unethical for anyone to make that decision on someone else's behalf. The fact that so many death row convicts appeal their death sentence until the bitter end would imply that they themselves don't agree with your belief.
      - leetcrew 9y ago
        > The fact that so many death row convicts appeal their death sentence until the bitter end would imply that they themselves don't agree with your belief. it doesn't necessarily imply that. at each point in the appeal process, there remains the possibility of having one's case thrown out altogether or reducing the sentence even further than natural life. even if you prefer death to life in prison, it would still be rational to pursue any chance of getting out entirely or getting a substantially reduced sentence. that said, if I could implement any policy I wanted, I would choose for life to be the most severe sentence but give the inmate the ability to choose death if they prefer.
ndespres 9y ago
I think it's less of a gray area than that. Anyone at Uber who worked on Greyball, perhaps telling themselves that they were thwarting an oppressive government who was firmly in the pocket of the taxi lobby, was naïve at best and deceiving themselves at worst. Maybe some people got caught up in the cat-and-mouse game of evading authorities and failed to question whether what they were doing was "Good." That's the author's call to action in this piece: to remind us to step back and evaluate what we are doing in an ethical context. Things seem less gray for the author's second example- developers at Palantir designing a workflow to help ICE round up immigrants. Of course there is room for counter-points in an argument about how best to handle an immigration crisis in any country (I say "crisis" because I see it as a crisis that we are doing so little to help) but at the end of the day, our individual actions need to be made on the basis of an single ethical black-or-white question, and history and indeed the present will not look favorably upon those who fail to act in the best interest of their fellow humans.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  while I agree with you, you have to remember that the current administration and many of their supporters support ICE's actions. What you're arguing for is that the actions of Uber or Palantir's designers are against your personal ethics, or those of the wider movement you identify with.
  - gridaphobe 9y ago
    You seem to be implying that morality is subjective, which I think is a dangerous belief. People may believe their actions are ethical, but that doesn’t necessarily make them correct.
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      What could be an objective basis for morality?
      - Nav_Panel 9y ago
Bartweiss 9y ago
The responses here seem to have gotten into the weeds of specifics, but I think this is a fundamental point. A code of professional ethics will never get traction if it tries to be a code of personal ethics as well. If you put personal ethics into a code, there are roughly two possibilities. One is that you put in things that were already censured at another level ("we oppose convicted serial killers") and nothing changes. The other is that you put in things which are actually contested ("we oppose all lawbreaking"), and then everyone who disagrees breaks away from the whole code, and probably benefits by working with people who support their stance. A useful professional code tells you how to define malpractice, not immorality in general. Since professional censure and lost reputation are the consequences for breaking such a code, it had best be limited to actions which impugn the professional merit of the person committing them. That way, enforcing it is natural and self-interested; clients don't want to hire code-breakers, and other professionals don't want to be tainted by association. I think medicine is instructive. People hold up the field as a successful example of bounding personal morality, but the Hippocratic Oath is very much a professional statement. It happens that professional behavior for doctors produces a very clear good - lives saved - but this is not actually a feature of the code. The Oath demands that the practitioner offer their subjects competence, confidentiality, and fiduciary duty; nothing more. Questions of personal morality in the workplace go unanswered, and so the Oath outlasted massive corrections in what is moral, like ceasing to treat homosexuality as an illness. Appealing to personal morality in the workplace is fine, but it's not the same as appealing to a professional standard.

golergka 9y ago

> ”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean good as in “on the side of the angels.” And the author means "angels" as in "people who share my very specific political beliefs". > You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. If I was a US citizen, and had an opportunity to work on software that helped enforcing immigration law, I would feel pretty proud about it.

aerotwelve 9y ago
You may disagree with the author's political beliefs, but you also aren't the subject of the author's critique. If you help design or write a portion of a product, you are a crucial part of bringing the system into reality. If you support and believe in the mission and ends of a product, there's no issue there. The problem occurs when you work on a system that is designed to fulfill an outcome that you don't agree with, or one that you believe is bad for society. The author's thesis is clear: If you choose to contribute to the development of such a system, you cannot divorce yourself from the consequences that will follow when your work product is turned on. [edit: I'm not arguing for moral relativism; I'm trying to separate the argument from the concrete examples given in the piece.]

amelius 9y ago

I think our economic model is highest on the list of needing an ethical makeover. If the person on one end of the supply-chain makes 1000000x as people on the other end of the supply-chain, then it's time to scratch our heads and deeply investigate what's wrong and how it can be fixed. We can do ethical work within our current economic framework all day long, but that's not going to solve the most pressing ethical issues.

humanrebar 9y ago
What economic model with higher aspirations actually ends up in more ethical place?
lolsal 9y ago
Why do you think that model is ethically wrong? If every link in the chains is compensated fairly (no one is coerced) and value is added, it seems like an inevitability that one end of the chain would be magnitudes larger in compensation.
- Firadeoclus 9y ago
  Why should it not be possible that every link gets compensated similarly? Is value added at the end of the chain necessarily much larger than that at the start of the chain?
  - lolsal 9y ago
    Because value is not added equally along the chain.
    - Firadeoclus 9y ago
      There will naturally be variation, but why is it inevitable that there are order-of-magnitude differences?
      - lolsal 9y ago

schaunwheeler 9y ago

I find that people in tech, especially in my own field of data science, treat ethics as a relatively simple problem. If they were building a technical product, they would at least make an appearance of checking assumptions, and worrying about breadth and depth of stakeholder buy-in, and building tests for unintended consequences. But when it comes to building an ethical "product" to guide their work, it's like all of the best-practices go by the wayside. For example: https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to-a-hippocratic-oath/ https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to... Data for Democracy came up with an ethical code for data scientists and is now talking it up asking people to sign on to it. The thing is basically the product a few months of working groups plus a day-long hackathon, and it's already been put out on the market, so to speak. So it's not surprising that they produced something that could, in many ways, actually run counter to their goals. I firmly believe the ethical code as written is itself unethical: https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about-ethics-66acaea6f16f https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about... What I've found amazing is that the community that built the D4D ethical code has been entirely unwilling to invite criticism of the code, or even engage with those who question it. The fact that willingness to entertain criticism and consider unintended consequences is actually one of the pillars of their ethical code makes it doubly troubling.

IntronExon 9y ago
I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but software needs a professional associstion (like the AMA) with teeth. Ethics are not easy, and without collective governing power, they simply won’t exist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16423328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16423328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16420659
- whataretensors 9y ago
  I disagree. Not in principle, but because I think it won't work. If an organization has teeth in this market it will be turned into a weapon to gate out or remove competition.

booleandilemma 9y ago

Can you imagine a doctor not telling you about a dark spot they found on an x-ray...Can you imagine an auto mechanic not telling you your brakes are shot because they didn’t want to deal with the problem... The problem with these examples is that doctors and mechanics have a direct relationship with their customers while software developers do not. Not unless the developer is a freelancer.

humanrebar 9y ago
Doctors and mechanics have professional societies and/or licenses. It's not as abstract for them. They go out of business for many unethical behaviors.

Vinnl 9y ago

So what if you don't directly work on a product you consider unethical, but you know that others in the company do? Sure, you're not working on it directly, but you're keeping a company alive that does. But where else to work? What if the company you're working for isn't directly creating products you consider unethical, but is e.g. a customer at an unethical bank, or creates products that help companies that produce products you consider unethical? And what if you work at/for such a company, but you're not a programmer, but e.g. a cleaner, are making ends meet, and you're lucky to have a job in the first place?

strudey 9y ago
I would suggest the answer is: if it was easy, it wouldn't be ethics.
randomsearch 9y ago
Generally: if the company is pretty self-evidently evil, and you have feasible alternatives, choose those alternatives. Also, hypotheticals are fairly unhelpful compared to real cases. Consider whether you would personally carry out the acts involved - would you defraud middle america for your own benefit? Would you fire on civilians on behalf of a dictator buying your product?

ryandrake 9y ago

I quit a job once, for a number of reasons, but one of them being that as I learned the intended application of the technology I was working on, I grew more and more ethically uncomfortable. I was initially lured to the company for the opportunity to work on cool technology (GIS, sensors, airborne mapping), but soon realized the stuff was being primarily sold to law enforcement for the purpose of, among other things, surveillance and immigration enforcement. So the end of the day I decided I don’t want my name to be associated with that. I don’t want to have to explain to my daughter one day (whose mother is an immigrant) that I was part of building an immigrant surveillance system. So I went and found something different to do. There are lots of opportunities in software to take the ethical high road. Do I help the company try to sneakily get the user’s personal info? Do I help us cheat this benchmark? Do I hide our bugs by silently restarting the app when the user is probably not at his PC? (each of which I was asked to implement at one point in my career) Does what I’m programming sit well with my personal ethics and beliefs? I should be able to explain why I am writing the program i’m writing and be able to live with it. (EDIT)If I am the owner of a company and I’m interviewing someone and they worked at some company notorious for using dark patterns or anything else ethically questionable I think it’s fair game to ask about their involvement.