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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 oppressi

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.
        michaelt 9y ago
        Isn't that just a tautology, though? I mean, if someone says "No moral viewpoints are more or less true than others; a person acts ethically as long as they think their actions are fully justified" and "People only do things they think are fully justified" then immoral action is impossible.
      - gnode 9y ago
        I was only drawing attention to an alternative meta-ethical philosophy. You can't talk about murder objectively because murder is subjective. In a legal context, jurisdictions differ over what circumstances make a death considered murderous, just, accidental, or even causal.
- 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.

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.
      - michaelt 9y ago
        Isn't that just a tautology, though? I mean, if someone says "No moral viewpoints are more or less true than others; a person acts ethically as long as they think their actions are fully justified" and "People only do things they think are fully justified" then immoral action is impossible.
    - gnode 9y ago
      I was only drawing attention to an alternative meta-ethical philosophy. You can't talk about murder objectively because murder is subjective. In a legal context, jurisdictions differ over what circumstances make a death considered murderous, just, accidental, or even causal.
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.