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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
by 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 agowhile 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 agoYou 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 agoWhat could be an objective basis for morality?
- Nav_Panel 9y agoJonathan Haidt's work on "Moral Foundations" could be worth investigating. They determined 5 major cross-cultural "moral foundations," to which each person assigns various degrees of importance: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, suggesting these stem from a biological/neurological source. From Wikipedia: > Haidt and Craig Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality... From their review, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. According to Haidt and Joseph, each of the ethics formed a module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently. Perhaps these four "building blocks" -- suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity -- are sufficient for an objective basis upon which an intersubjective understanding of morality can be determined. Then again, even the notion of objectivity is questionable and culturally-dependent...
- kerkeslager 9y agoOkay, but it's important to note that studying the evolutionary and neurological bases for morality give us a description of morality, not a prescription for morality. In other words, Haidt can only describe how people behave, he can't prescribe how people should behave. There's a big logical leap between (for example) observing that many cultures proscribe lying, and saying that one shouldn't lie.
- steve_g 9y agoGod or nothing. See Arthur Leff's article: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2814/ http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2814/
- bjl 9y agoIf its god or nothing, then how do you explain the fact that most philosophers are both atheists and moral realists?
- beaconstudios 9y agoI don't believe that myself, but I do believe that people advocating for a specific ethic are usually supporting their own point of view, which may be closer or further away from the ideal.
- ndespres 9y agoBoth can be true. I do believe anyone supporting the administration's efforts on immigration and many other issues, and anyone working to assist ICE in these efforts, etc to be acting unethically. I think there is such thing as an ethical Ideal, and my own ethics are an attempt to get as close to the ideal as possible. I like to think that they don't exist in a vacuum.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y agoIs it unethical to follow law? Is it ethical to break a law you personally don’t agree with? The whole way society works is that we all agreed to follow the system even if we don’t always agree with that it says all the time. You can say whatever you want about it freely. When it’s real naughty we’re supposed to end it. Selective enforcement of the law is actually unethical. If you don’t like it, you need to work to change it. Saying something is unethical just because you don’t like it is not rational. Moritality is personal, ethics are societal. Maybe your morals state open borders should be a thing, but our shared ethics don’t. In this case, immigration law is messed up in both directions. Why do you feel like you feel like you should judge the side following the rules? Are the people who support the people following the law unethical too?
- gnode 9y agoI don't believe selective enforcement of the law is unethical, if enforcement of the law would be immoral. However, criminalization of acceptable behaviour with an aim to selectively enforce it for some other motive may be immoral. E.g. if you wanted to imprison a particular race, so criminalised something acceptable which everyone does, and more aggressively policed that race.
- walshemj 9y agoIt depends as Seward said "There is a higher law than the Constitution" And Soldiers are legally obliged to not obey illegal orders
- kiliantics 9y agoI have no idea how people can believe this kind of thing. The law is not in anyway ethical. Most of our law was handed down to us by monarchs and slavers. Almost no one agreed to it. We get a performative charade once every couple years which pretends everyone has agency in changing it. People who actually try to make real change, however, are usually murdered or locked up and forgotten.
- watwut 9y agoWell, yes. The thing is, if you believe that ICE is bad or you are about to complain that a doctor ignored some regulation, you should not work for Palantir or Uber.
- humanrebar 9y agoWell, the irony of those two examples is one is using tech to skirt laws and the other to enforce laws. It's hard for me to consider both of them unethical at the same time without resorting to raw partisanism.
- watwut 9y agoI don't think there is ethical need to follow laws you find despicable. I think that one should follow laws as long as those laws don't require you to do something bad. And there is no ethical requirement to contribute to law enforcement - it is not even against the law. You can also agree with law and find agency tactics bad.
- mbrumlow 9y agoYes, but what is "bad"? Maybe I find it despicable that I can't scam you out of money if you happen to be dumb enough to let me. There are actually cutlers int he world that are "shame on you if you get scammed" That is the entire problem when you talk about ethics at all beyond a few truths that 99% of people can agree on. So one could argue not following any law becomes unethical -- and the only ethical thing to do is follow the law until it is changed, which puts us at a interesting juxtaposition -- that sometimes you have to be unethical to be ethical! This will always be the hard part of making rules or laws on things that are so subjective such as ethics.
- watwut 9y agoWhen we talk about my personal ethics or morality as a developer, I do not need wide consensus over the issue. It is about what I personally will or will not do. Or under which circumstances would I do it. The discussion with others does help me to decide and they can bring arguments I did not considered, but decision is mine. There is wide agreement about many ethical questions through. I also think that ignoring ethics question completely is easy cop out - yes one should do it no matter what job. I don't think that law and ethics is the same. I think that following law is ethical where law species competition rules (accounting, regulation etc).
- ryandrake 9y agoHistory is full of atrocities (and milder bad behavior) committed “by the people currently in power” with strong popular support.
- humanrebar 9y ago...using tools and weapons developed by the last regime. If we're that worried about abuse of power, we need a better conversation than "that guy is bad; vote for our guy". We need to talk about actually reforming systems, laws, and norms.