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> moral flexibility It's not necessarily an issue of morals. Take cellular tracking [1], for example: avoiding carrying a phone around with you 24/7 is the onl
by paavoova 7y ago
> moral flexibility
It's not necessarily an issue of morals. Take cellular tracking [1], for example: avoiding carrying a phone around with you 24/7 is the only real way to address things like carriers from selling your realtime location data. Then, simply borrowing someone else's to make a convenient call doesn't open you up to anything. And then morals do come into it because you can say "well, at least I'm trying".
And convenience and other values such technology offers is non-arguable, it's just unfortunate it's so anti- freedom and privacy. In that regard you can't blame Stallman for participating when society as a whole is pushing such complete and utter reliance on mobile devices. That's like calling someone who advocates for privacy disingenuous for using a CC over cash 100% of the time; you can't even book most hotels without a CC, (and ID, and other identifiable information tying you to that exact location at that exact date). So what choice does even the privacy-advocate have, besides camping out on the road in a tent and boycotting anti-cash establishments? I've read of some Scandinavian countries already phasing out cash, which is once again a reliance society fosters. If Stallman walks into a store and asks someone to pay for his purchase with their CC because the store doesn't take cash, are you too going to make some contrived anti-vaccination comparison?
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/10/phone-companies-are-selling-your-location-data-now-some-lawmakers-want-federal-investigation https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/10/phone-c...
- SeanBoocock 7y ago> It's not necessarily an issue of morals I'm not sure if the original poster had this in mind, but Stallman's behavior in this regard would be hard to reconcile under a Kantian ethical framework [1]. 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#CatHypImp https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#CatHypImp
- ikeboy 7y agoI don't think he would say it's ethically problematic for him to own a phone. He just prefers not to because he doesn't want to own a device that he cannot control. No Kantian issues, others need not share his preference.
- em-bee 7y agoright, if enough people share his preference they'll develop alternative tech to solve the communication problem. things like the wiphone which is wifi only. surely stallman would be fine to use that, just as he is fine to use a laptop with wifi. it means he needs to get wifi access to make calls but it would still solve the tracking problem.
- mcguire 7y agoTo expand, as I understand it, the Kantian ethical categorical imperative is something like, "behave as if what you do will be universal." Stallman's behavior requires enough people to not do what he does that he is not inconvenienced. If he's advocating not carrying a phone under the current situation, he shouldn't be asking to use someone else's.
- em-bee 7y agoi keep thinking about this with regards to rechargeable public transit cards. they are anonymous, but each card still has an ID and allows to track movement patterns. so to mess things up i like to swap cards around...