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> If you operate a SAAS company, and ICE approaches you to buy your service, you suspect it might be used in the family separation program. If you say: “I’m not

• runarberg 6y ago
  Yes, but that does not change anything. “I don't care what you are doing and will sell you the same services as to anyone else (I am only interested in your money)” is still a political decision with almost the same effect as “I support what you are doing and will contribute to your cause”.
  • azangru 6y ago
    > is still a political decision When you say "political decision", what do you mean? I suppose it is possible to regard every decision one makes (eating at McDonalds, buying a MacBook, driving a car, riding a bike, doing sports, watching news, going to college, etc.) as political. It's almost certainly not how people prefer to think.
    • whimsicalism 6y ago
      The personal is political.
      • winston_smith 6y ago
        If everything's political, then nothing is
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • runarberg 6y ago
      Exactly. Politics are nuanced. Nothing is clear cut. When you are a business the effect of your decisions grow exponentially with your scale. For you it might be a political decision not to eat meat, or it might be a personal decision because you simply don’t like the taste of meat. A business doesn’t have this luxury if it pervades through many peoples lives. Not everything a business does is political, but when a business chooses to remain apolitical on an issue which effect the lives of other people—especially those who work for the business or who’s lives are affected by the customers or the product of that business—they are making a political decision. And more often then not a rather poor one.
      • free_rms 6y ago
        The scale in this case is typically a minor amount of turnkey commodity business going to ICE. I prefer to test principles by inverting the politics and seeing if I still agree: what about the gay wedding cake guy? Was he justified in refusing a commodity average cake to a gay couple?
        • shadowfox 6y ago
          Whether he was justified or not, I think the point OP was making was that it is still a political decision.
    • cbozeman 6y ago
      This person means everything is a fucking ideological purity test, according to his or her own politics. And you aren't good enough (and never will be). This kind of ignorant, childlike approach to politics is why the Democrats are going to lose so hard in 2022... and God forbid the Republicans stumble onto their version of Barack Obama... 2024 will be a nightmare. When I eat at Chick-fil-A, I'm not making a statement that I want gay people to be eradicated, I just like goddamned pressure fried chicken sandwiches. When I buy something from a company that produces their goods in China, I'm not saying I want Uyghurs to be slaughtered en masse. In fact, in every single one of these instances, I'm not actively giving a shit - or making a statement - about either of those things... I'm doing it because I haven't eaten since 6 a.m., or because I need a USB-C cable, not because I hate gay people and Chinese Muslims.
  • kortilla 6y ago
    Then you have to follow that to it’s logical conclusion. When you pay for a Caltrain boarding pass in the Bay Area you implicitly support Exxon/BP and everything they support because they provided train diesel to the company that you fully support. This is why the did business with == “fully support” equivalence is so dumb.
    • presentation 6y ago
      I don’t agree with that assessment - I evaluate decisions based on what your alternatives are. Riding Caltrain is a much lower fuel intensive act than riding a Hummer, and since you had the choice to do either it reflects on your values.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • cgriswald 6y ago
        You can’t possibly have the information that would be required to weigh his decision-making that way. First, there aren’t two alternatives, there are countless alternatives and all you’ve said with your example of the Hummer is that it’s better than a really bad one on a single metric. Second, you don’t know the reasoning behind the decision. Maybe someone else drives because they were assaulted on a train less than a year ago and can’t even stand on a train platform. You don’t know, but you’re judging their “values” as if you do. Third, none of us have perfect information on which to base every single decision of our lives. How many of us act or don’t act in ways that don’t reflect our values simply because of our own ignorance? You’re likely surrounded by thousands of individual artifacts with scant idea of how, where, and by whom they were sourced and manufactured. Are you vouching for every single one of those artifacts as a reflection of your values? Not likely.
      • kortilla 6y ago
        Ah, the minimum effort approach to patting yourself on the back. Note that the least fuel intensive act is to not ride the train or the Hummer, but that would actually be disruptive. The correct answer was to use an electric car powered by solar (because the current zeitgeist doesn’t care about manufacturing). Thanks for playing though, you’ve been cancelled.
• slg 6y ago
  It depends on the severity of "your cause". I don't think you will get many complaints if your cause is lower taxes or increase minimum wage. If your cause is to to take away rights of a coworker, you can't really stay neutral. I wouldn't accept my employer being neutral on gay marriage for example if I was a gay person. As the culture war has become a bigger part of politics, like the grandfather comment suggest, more of these issues fall into that second bucket in which it is tough to accept neutrality.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • rayiner 6y ago
    What is it about “culture issues” that makes it particularly “tough to accept neutrality?” Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the the Iraq War—is that sufficiently weighty to warrant people demanding employers to take a position?
    • slg 6y ago
      Something like the Iraq War is a much more complicated and nuanced issue in which people can reasonably disagree. Many people aren't going to be willing to debate or compromise on issues like civil rights. You are either on their side or not.
      • SamReidHughes 6y ago
        Gay marriage is a question of, among other things, mundane issues like taxation, upon which people can very reasonably disagree. Should Alan Turing have been able to put himself in a lower tax bracket by filing jointly with his 19-year-old roommate? It is a nuanced question; your answer might depend on what regime of divorce laws you're operating under (e.g. are you in a community property state or not).
        • slg 6y ago
          >Should Alan Turing have been able to put himself in a lower tax bracket by filing jointly with his 19-year-old roommate? If he could do that with a female roommate why shouldn't he be allowed do that with his male roommate? It isn't reasonable to object to gay marriage on a technicality like that while also being fine with the laws regarding straight marriage.
• HaloZero 6y ago
  If you go the pure capitalistic approach (I am only interested in money) it seems like a bad moral play for society in general. Why can't a corporation have a moral imperative that says "I will not participate in acts of cruelty"? Corporations have a lot of power in our society and it seems having a moral guideline here would be beneficial to society as whole. Yes I know this can but both toward liberal and conservative ideals but overall I think it's a better position to have.
  • brigandish 6y ago
    Isn't the point (or at least on of the most important points) of law and the justice system to protect from harm (and handle those who violate laws)? Thus, if it's legal then the company is doing nothing wrong. If they're harming someone then laws should change - which is what the democratic/legislative arm is for - and law suits should be filed. I'm not against a company having a moral stance but to implicate all those that don't as bad moral actors when they system is set up the way it is seems a tad invidious.
    • presentation 6y ago
      The whole point of politics is that the law does not and cannot fully capture what’s right and wrong. Just because something is legal, it doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong, and I don’t like the idea that companies ought to act as though that’s the case.
      • brigandish 6y ago
        > The whole point of politics is that the law does not and cannot fully capture what’s right and wrong. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Legislators work to try and capture what is right for now and the future, and in common law jurisdictions a claimant may (sometimes) sue and not have to wait for legislation. As I wrote, I'm not against anyone taking a positive moral stance but since there's no way to know or even agree on what is moral, to say that it's immoral to take no stance other than to work within the law (which is a already a very extensive moral code) would seem invidious.
• farias0 6y ago
  I don't think we want to foster a sense that we're okay with companies being completely amoral just because everyone's tired of politics. We need to draw lines on basis of basic decency, i.e not supporting slavery, child trafficking and such. Then the discussion comes back to "but where is the line" and bam, we're back into politics. The American family separation thing the person above you mentioned, for instance, falls into the line of unacceptable for me, but for some people it's an acceptable response to illegal immigration. This is, indeed, very, very hard.
  • azangru 6y ago
    Can't this be achieved through legal or properly political means? If child trafficking is outlawed then a company cannot engage in child trafficking. If petrol cars are outlawed, then a company cannot manufacture petrol cars.
    • runarberg 6y ago
      I wish, but that is not the world we live in. Child separation is probably illegal under the universal deceleration of human rights (which the USA has ratified). Article 16 (3): > The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. When a government sanctioned agency engages in something that is probably illegal (and definitely immoral) and you still think they are worthy of your business, you are complicit in their actions.
      • AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
        You moved the benchmark from "child trafficking" to "child separation." Many would argue, correctly or not, that the policies of not having children housed with whatever adult they cross the border with is in service of avoiding child trafficking.
        • runarberg 6y ago
          Sorry about that, it is just that ICE were probably breaking the law when they engaged in child separation. The parent is asking if it couldn’t simply be the case that evil things would rather be illegal then up to a company. Unfortunately we demonstrably live in a world where evil things that are probably illegal are still done by a government sanction agencies. Child separation is the thing that they do which demonstrates this. That is why I moved the benchmark.
• srinivgp 6y ago
  It's not about your feelings. If you facilitate their efforts, no matter how much you wish to disclaim responsibility, you have still facilitated their efforts. Thus the binary. "Can't we just choose to ignore it" does not magically mean that when they trade their resources for yours in a deal that they like, you are somehow not helping them achieve their goals.
  • tomp 6y ago
    It’s really not so black and white. By paying taxes you’re technically facilitating their efforts, so approximately everyone is complicit. This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott
    • bradlys 6y ago
      > This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott Yet, big companies have had boycotts internally and that lead to the company changing its course. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-controversial-pentagon-contract.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-cont... And, yeah, sometimes the efforts only work for a short period but they still had an effect. Voting is nice but - most often - you don't get a real choice with voting. You choose one corrupt politician for another because more money == more speech. The uninformed masses who are more concerned with their own daily lives (divorce, family deaths, their children, etc.) are what are making large decisions for the rest of the informed. The cycle perpetuates.
      • AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
        The question isn't if you can actually cause Google or another big tech company to refuse to provide services, the question is if you can actually change the results with it. Project Maven continues, now run by Palantir. Google's refusal to continue the project did nothing but slow down the project by a few months. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-wins-new-pentagon-deal-with-111-million-from-the-army https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-... In fact, considering the goals of Project Maven (roughly making sure you're blowing up what and who you intend and avoiding collateral damage), if you consider Google a leader in AI, you could make the perverse argument that you're actually killing people by reducing the effectiveness and delaying the timeline of the program. I'm not saying I've researched this enough to say that this is a correct or even plausible argument, merely that it is possible.
• Spivak 6y ago
  The thing that’s hard to resolve is that in your ternary there is no practical difference between 1 and 2 since your motivation only exists in your head while the real world effects are the same. It’s an extremely common philosophy that if your actions aren’t politically motivated then you’re being apolitical but I don’t think that works in the real world because those actions have real political effects/consequences regardless of whether you considered them or not.
  • eschaton 6y ago
    Exactly. Only those unaffected by a decision have the luxury of considering it entirely apolitical.
  • useragent86 6y ago
    > there is no practical difference between 1 and 2 since your motivation only exists in your head while the real world effects are the same. Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to join your cause and your coercing someone to join your cause? Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to remain uninvolved and someone choosing to join the opponents of your cause?
    • flamble 6y ago
      > Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to join your cause and your coercing someone to join your cause? Yes, in that one involves coercion, which in itself has a moral weight. > Is there a practical difference between someone choosing to remain uninvolved and someone choosing to join the opponents of your cause? Yes, in that those are different actions and as such will produce different outcomes. I assume that those two hypotheticals were intended as counterexamples to the principle that being involved in activity that produces or contributes to harm is wrong even if you don't specifically intend the harm. It's not as if e.g. buying a kidney on the black market is morally equivalent to kidnapping a person and surgically removing it from them (presuming that that is how the vendor acquired it). But it's more absurd to pretend that you can engage in that transaction, proclaim "I didn't intend and don't condone any harm ensuing from the acquisition of this organ" and thus absolve yourself of any guilt.
• 3131s 6y ago
  > I find the binary exceedingly demanding and almost insane. Classic HN... "Can't you just let me rake in all this cash without the guilt trip over all the bad things I'm doing?"