3 ms·
>Unprofessional because we put the government's fault onto an employee's fault. Let's take a secretary. I suggest reading and considering Hannah Arendt's famou
by exarch 13y ago
>Unprofessional because we put the government's fault onto an employee's fault. Let's take a secretary.
I suggest reading and considering Hannah Arendt's famous work, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" for a different perspective on this.
Our typical idea of a perpetrator of evil is this malicious, moustache-twirling, cackling super-villain. The reality of how very evil acts are perpetrated is typically much different, though. It has more in common with what we see with the Milgram experiment: lots of small cogs doing highly compartmentalized, abstract work that simply adds up to something ghastly. Paper-pushers who simply "do their jobs" without bothering to examine or take responsibility for the ethical implications of their work output, preferring instead to shift that ethical responsibility to the superiors/authorities who handed down their orders.
- yeukhon 13y agoI probably will mark that as one of my to-read list. I enjoy works on ethics. But the issue people keep on missing, or not in sync with me, is practically, how do we minimize discrimination, how do we handle future employments? All I am hearing is "they are still morally responsible." If for the sake of discussion, assume yes they are morally responsible, my actual questions are still unresolved. And we just keep saying "yeah it sucks to be them, but what can we do?" That's the exact attitude we always have and won't eager to fix on;y because we dislike what the NSA has done.