3 ms·
The article is meandering, but I think at its core it has some key points that are worth considering, at least to me: 1) Organizations are built of individuals
by EdgarVerona 8y ago
The article is meandering, but I think at its core it has some key points that are worth considering, at least to me:
1) Organizations are built of individuals, and while the individuals can hold strong moral standpoints, it is difficult for an organization as a whole to do so. It is also difficult for individuals to promote taking a moral standpoint as an organization, or in many cases to even notice the incongruity between their personal morals and the morals of their organization.
(This points reminds me of the banality of evil. And I think it is a valid point, and something we should be on guard about if we want our personal values to match the values of the products we create.)
2) It is easy to dismiss moral concerns in business as being something that the market will figure out for you. That is not necessarily the case.
(I have found throughout my own career that many companies are willing to appeal to a morality that is somewhere along the lines of "whatever we can get away with is our moral boundary." Measuring the morality of a decision by public approval of/success in sales as a result of that decision. That is far removed from actual moral judgment, particularly when public approval is so easily swayed by factors that are separate from whether the subject in question is helpful or even actively harming them. See cigarette lobbying until their false claims were finally debunked and their lobbying efforts exposed in the 90's. [As a side note, I'm curious who would argue that the efforts the cigarette industry made throughout the last century to spread misinformation should be considered "free speech" and their ability to do so a preservation of "personal liberty"? Let's see what pops up in the comments.])
3) We have a duty to think more actively about whether our morals align with the morals of our company, and to make that known if we would like to see that change.
There are other points that might be more interesting to those with a design-oriented focus toward the bottom of the article, but these three were the points that I took home from it.