Moral reasoning premised in attachment theory(which has been a very productive field in the past decades) and extrapolated to the inanimate would draw a differe

Moral reasoning premised in attachment theory(which has been a very productive field in the past decades) and extrapolated to the inanimate would draw a different conclusion. If you are that tied to your work you may be treating it as a child, and as a child, your moral reasoning will proceed with the underlying premise: "what is good for the child is good", leading towards a parenting of the project ahead of other needs. But a software system is not a child, in fact. It's just an expression of ideas. "Skin in the game" signals that you've been dragged into being a parent. Is being a parent for software the right thing? Perhaps, if the software's premise draws upon a strong justification. But most of these tools have not been emerged from standalone justifications, but from solving something else, which neatly ties back into the author's argument: the corporate needs are what are complex. And here attachment-based morality recurses: if the corporation is the child and you are tending to it, once again, you will put it ahead of other needs, and hence will develop the justifications for software complexity. But if we zoom out a bit and look at the world generally, it's operating from a point of indifference: if the output of the corporation is pragmatically convenient, it is good, if it presents an obstacle then it is bad. And ideas - and hence software - that persist in the indifferent world, outside of the attachment relationship, are the ones that survive. Which perhaps means that all of it is wrong, which isn't a very stunning conclusion if you still have to work with it. But that is philosophy for you.