[0xbadcafebee]

Ethically speaking, you owe your employer the labor you promised for the wages agreed on. If they ask you to care about a data policy, and they're paying you to care, and you took the money, then you should care.

Morally speaking, you can decide that the employer doesn't have loyalty to you, so you won't have loyalty to the employer. But if that's your morality, then there is no rationale for being either loyal or disloyal, because you'll just mirror what someone else does. This makes the decision less meaningful than tossing a coin; it's a morality of randomness, which is dysfunctional and anti-social. It's better to live your own principles (such as loyalty) regardless of whether someone gives you the same back.

Practically speaking, doing your job the way your job wants you to do it (caring about data privacy) helps you in your career and improves the business, and improving the business keeps you in a job and again helps your career.

It's also a quarter of your life. Don't you want to do your job as well as you can, so that all that time wasn't a waste?

[blagie]

Your employer is a corporation, not a human. Corporations are an abstraction. There are two ethical perspectives one can take:

1) Mutual loyalty. This changed in the eighties, as jobs became transactional. Typical SWE tenure is three years today, and human resources are treated as just that, resources.

2) Improving the world. Would you rather individuals act in the interests of Shell Oil, Phillip Morris, Microsoft, Lockheed-Martin, or in the interests of society as a whole? Why do you care that a particular corporation survives or dies, rather than everyone being better off? If Google is replaced by DuckDuckGo or Bing, and customers / investors / employees switch over, what's the moral value of that?

It makes rational sense to do your job as well as you can, but "as well as you can" isn't defined the same as "to the benefit of maximizing shareholder value."

Most people I know switch viewpoints after a decade or two in industry. It takes an event or understanding the internals of corporations well enough.

As a footnote, "doing your job the way your job wants you to do it" doesn't even make sense. A corporation doesn't want anything. It's a collection of individuals. Your boss might want something, the CEO might want something different, yet a different thing might be in the interests of shareholder value, something completely different in the interests of customers, and a policy document stored on the intranet might dictate something yet different.

[0xbadcafebee]

Loyalty doesn't solely mean staying at one job forever. You can be loyal to the terms of your employment and the expectations therein and still change jobs when it's in your best interest. You can also show loyalty later by refusing to share sensitive details about your past employer to a competitor, or referring people looking for a job.

Acting in the interests of a corporate entity and the interests of society aren't mutually exclusive. It's extremely beneficial to society for ethical people to work at large corporations to ensure the corporation does not harm society.

Well clearly a corporation does want things, as a corporation is a capitalist entity. It wants to increase its profits and maximize shareholder value. The rules, regulations and bylaws of that corporation are what it wants executed by its employees (and which you are contractually obligated to comply with).

Doing one's job as well as one can means weighing many different competing forces and making the best choice you can. The same happens in your own personal life. Do you eat an entire pizza every night because it's tasty, or do you moderate how much pizza you eat to stay healthy? These are two competing interests (your tastebuds vs your health) that you have to juggle and make the best decision you can.

[blagie]

This argument is nonsense in that a corporation does not "wants to increase its profits and maximize shareholder value" or want anything "executed by its employees." A corporation is a signed document usually in Delware, and a collective belief in it's existence by society-at-large. It doesn't want anything anymore than my computer, my car, or a my fence wants anything.

I do maintain my car so it continues to work for me, but it doesn't "want" oil or gas. I want it to work for me.

The same is true for corporations. Corporations are a useful construct for keeping society free and productive (relative to, say, command economies or feudalism). I want the retirees who invested in the corporation to be able to retire, customers to be happy, and employees to have a healthy work environment. The extent to which that aligns to what you think a piece of paper in Delaware wants varies. It sometimes aligns and sometimes doesn't.

Beyond that, there is no fundamental moral imperative for helping your employer grow anymore than there is for oiling a car.

There is a moral imperative to doing what you agree to do (which includes contracts), the strength of which varies by context and culture. I can go into that in much more depth.

[0xbadcafebee]

I never said there was a moral obligation to helping your employer, I said there was an ethical obligation, which there is (even more so depending on your occupation).

Morally you have an obligation to yourself and other people, and following moral principles in relation to a company should be considered the same as moral principles applied to people. Like you point out, companies are made of people, your actions impact people in and through the company, hence your morals apply to the company.

You don't have any moral obligation to your car. But if you don't eventually change the oil, someone is going to be impacted by it; the people stuck behind you in traffic, the tow truck driver, the mechanic, your kids stuck at after-school practice, etc. And even further, you impact yourself by not maintaining this machinery, by failing to live a principle of hard work, responsibility, caring for others impacted by your actions, the environment. You also fail to treat yourself well through the maintenance of the vehicle you own and use, losing a valuable asset. Pick your philosophical poison, there's not a lot of moral justification for these things. But you're right, you don't do them because you owe it to the car.

[blagie]

Please define your terms. Most communities use "morally" and "ethically" interchangeably, and where there are distinction, they vary by field.

https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...

That's web link #1. Further links showed a few more distinctions, but none which matched what you wrote. It sounds like it's an important point, but I don't know what it is.

In terms of obligations to car (or corporation) versus human beings, it's not a "pick your philosophical poison." I'll give distinctions:

- If I have a friend who in need of help, and a car which would be damaged if driven without maintenance, the ethical behavior is to kill my car and help my friend. If, on the other hand, my spouse is sick, and helping my friend involves neglecting bringing my spouse to a hospital, I should probably "maintain" my spouse's health.

In corporations, a few examples:

- Pricing. I can set pricing to maximize profits / growth or to maximize customer benefit (which involves the company surviving, but not necessarily growing).

- Legal anticompetitive behavior. I can focus on harming my competitors (which may be best for shareholder value but contributes negatively to the world) or on building value

- Spyware / privacy. Profits may be maximized, but customers are harmed.

- Sales, litigation, etc. are all activities which mostly take away value from the world. It's good if people know about what solutions exist, but the profit-maximizing investment goes many times beyond that.

.... and so on.

In many cases, "good of the world" and "good of employer" align. If I'm working on a word processor, it's best for everyone if it works well, doesn't crash, etc. The distinctions come in when there's a misalignment. If all people pick "good of the world" over "good of employer," individual companies will be less competitive, but the ecosystem will be more efficient overall, and the world will work better.