[tmotwu]

> Non-academics get fired for doing unethical things entirely unrelated to their jobs all the time, just to avoid bad publicity.

Yes, only if it's unrelated to their jobs. People get hired, not fired, to do unethical research in industry labs. Ethics is breached all the time in industry - rarely even considered. Google tried to make amends, but decided caring too much about ethics was a roadblock to their goals. Tesla markets their "FSD" at the risk of other drivers in the road. The only difference here is that companies have a bigger, better legal and PR team. Comparing the moral compass between academia and industry is absolutely ridiculous.

[shkkmo]

I wasn't comparing morality of academia and industry, I was making an argument about what are considered a reasonable grounds to calling for someone's firing.

If you are trying to argue that publicly funded research institutions don't think ethics are a core part of research, that seems like something that needs to be addressed.

[tmotwu]

I still do not get your initial point. You argue that firing would be justifiable in industry, e.g. non-academics, yet we don't hear Google or Facebook [1] scientists getting fired for controversially unethical experiments with poor publicity. The research they did was what they were funded by the government to do. So no, your standards for employment doesn't exist anywhere, industry or academia.

And to be more precise, ethics IS a core part of research. There's an entire subfield dedicated to it in academic labs. Graduate research is very specialized, and researchers do not have the intuition for a difficult topic outside of their expertise. Then there are IRBs, who are most qualified, and yet we see it remains a problem for computing ethics because it's a completely different environment.

We can continue to blame this lab, fine. I agree, huge ethical blunder. But don't forget that this passed IRB, a responsibility of the university, and several phases of anonymous peer review for a major security conference. The security conference that most definitely has reviewers from industry. Was there a lapse of judgement on ALL the scientists and engineers, all with immense experience in their respective fields, who touched this paper and participated through the entire process? Do you seriously believe that? Should they all be fired? Is it really hard to believe that computing ethics is actually not as clear, communicated, and well understood to MANY? There are so many caveats, and not much policies of conduct exist for the breadth of situations.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...