What, if not the ends, justifies the means? I understand that, from a deontological perspective, you might believe that certain means can never be justified no matter what the ends, but surely squatting in an office building isn't a means so immoral that no end could ever justify it.
Now, you might think that building an education startup is not an end that requires or warrants trespassing, and you're probably right. However, I hope that you would feel differently about trespassing as a means to protect oneself from a dangerous oncoming storm.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but too often I hear people argue that if a certain means is immoral in one circumstance then it must be immoral in every circumstance. These people have the notion stuck in their heads that "the ends never justify the means." IMHO this viewpoint is far too reductionist to be universally valid.
1. False. Define "great" and "rules" and I or others will happily provide no shortage of examples.
2. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're a reasonable person, and you were merely exaggerating, but I don't even know what you're trying to say. Are you trying to say that in order to do great things, rules generally have to get broken...and therefore it's ok for entrepreneurs to do unethical things?
3. Consider reducing your consumption of entrepreneurship porn.
2) The world is rendered in shades of grey, and not all ethical issues carry equal weight. Some are worth sweating, some aren't. This one isn't, according to a representative of the victimized party itself.
3) Consider having a beer or two and giving the high horse a good night's sleep.
As I said in the topmost parent thread, "you can be sure that this incident will create additional requirements and restrictions for the [honest] entrepreneurs who still remain in the building."
Many successful entrepreneurs engage in social hacking in some way. What the entrepreneur in this case did was both unethical and illegal.
Just because you have a key to someone's house doesn't mean you get to open their front door and sleep on their couch.
The world is rendered in shades of grey, and not all ethical issues carry equal weight. Some are worth sweating, some aren't. This one isn't, according to a representative of the victimized party itself.
The victimized party can choose to spin this any way they want, but it had no bearing on whether it actually did them harm or how they actually feel about it. That's not your decision to make, and 'shades of gray' is a lousy justification for theft of service.
Agreed. Even YC explicitly says they look for the "naughty" factor in entrepreneurs, and this is exactly the type of quality I saw in Eric from reading this article.
"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination." http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
Now, you might think that building an education startup is not an end that requires or warrants trespassing, and you're probably right. However, I hope that you would feel differently about trespassing as a means to protect oneself from a dangerous oncoming storm.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but too often I hear people argue that if a certain means is immoral in one circumstance then it must be immoral in every circumstance. These people have the notion stuck in their heads that "the ends never justify the means." IMHO this viewpoint is far too reductionist to be universally valid.