[Silhouette]

> I think judging him as a evil exploiter with weak ethics is a little harsh.

Why? Doing something bad doesn't become OK just because you got paid a lot of money to do it. Indeed, a reasonable definition of ethical behaviour would be doing the right thing even when faced with significant incentives not to.

[philwelch]

I have never been forced to choose between becoming a billionaire and holding onto my ethical convictions, and I suspect you haven't either. I'm not comfortable with either of us standing in judgment of someone who has.

[kingkilr]

I've also never been faced with the decision to torture someone or not, that doesn't stop me from making moral judgement about those actions either. The point of an ethical system is to help you make judgements about decisions, if your answer to every ethical question is, "I've never had to make that decision" your ethical system is useless.

[foldr]

There's a difference between saying "what John did is wrong" and "John is a bad person." I think the OP was saying we should be cautious in making judgments of the second sort.

[Silhouette]

> There's a difference between saying "what John did is wrong" and "John is a bad person."

I disagree. As the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. If John repeatedly does bad things, then John is a bad person. How are we to judge a person fairly, if not by how they conduct themselves?

[kareemm]

we tend to judge people by their actions, not their intent, but ourselves by our intent, not our actions.

that is to say that you sit in harsh judgement of mark zuckerberg only seeing his actions without truly understanding his intentions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[foldr]

Surely it has to be possible for a good person to do bad things (at least occasionally). I think it would be going a bit far to eliminate the distinction entirely.

>How are we to judge a person fairly, if not by how they conduct themselves?

That is kind of the point. Arguably, you just can't judge people fairly, because you never know what's going on inside. That doesn't mean that you can't criticize people's actions, just that you should be cautious about making more fundamental judgments about their character.

[Silhouette]

I find myself acknowledging that we all make mistakes for the second time in as many posts...

Sure, someone's moral character isn't a black-and-white question. People aren't really "good" or "bad" in absolute terms, so in a sense calling anyone a "good person" or a "bad person" can only ever be a generalisation based on the balance of what they do.

In this case, however, if someone repeatedly does very bad things, they'd better also be doing even more very good things to make up for it, or I think it's fair to apply the "bad person" label.

[Silhouette]

I'm perfectly comfortable condemning someone who acts against the ethical principles I and many others believe in, however much they were paid to do so. That's why they're called "principles". It doesn't matter whether it's a schoolboy violating them for a chocolate bar or a multi-gazillionaire CEO doing it for his bonus.

[philwelch]

This kind of attitude inevitably leads someone to cynicism and misanthropy: the Milgram experiment suggests that nearly every human being is worthy of moral condemnation under your reasoning, or would be if given nothing more than explicit instructions from an obvious authority figure to do something wrong.

[Silhouette]

Do we all make mistakes? Of course we do.

Should we be critical of mistakes? Sure, that's how we learn, and constructive criticism helps us to improve.

This doesn't mean we can't also understand that nobody's perfect, and that while to err is human, sometimes so is to forgive. I doubt we would want to live in a world without this counter-balance.

However, intent matters. Doing something wrong by accident is still wrong, but I don't see how it is unethical if there was no understanding or ill will. On the other hand, betraying the trust of millions of people by deliberately taking actions that break earlier promises and violate their privacy over an extended period... Well, I'm sorry, but I don't see how that is an accident, and I will condemn it accordingly.