[Townley]

> All of us must navigate the trade-off between “me” and “we.” A famous Talmudic quote states: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others, including the public good... To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco surely does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco. The question, thus, is whether Big Tech is supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it.

The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so. I personally don't cast aspersions on anyone working in tobacco farms or in a gas station selling cigarettes; they're just trying to get by. But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.

I'll also say: there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code. Show your local sandwich shop how to set their hours online, or maybe even build them a cookie cutter Squarespace site. Donate a small fraction of your salary (eg 0.5% local, 0.5% global) to causes you believe in, and scale up over the years.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that aligned with my personal morals. The pay was substantially less than what I could have made at less-circumspect outfits, and there was a nonzero amount of really annoying overhead, but I don't regret it, at all. I slept well at night, made good friends, never wrote any software that I regretted, learned heaps of stuff, and helped to develop and launch the careers of a few others.

Mentioning that here, elicits scorn.

[robertlagrant]

> Mentioning that here, elicits scorn.

No it doesn't. "Woe is ethical me" comments like this might.

[phil21]

From a casual observer who (used to) mostly lurk, it absolutely does.

Maybe the tide has been turning the past few years but it was endemic from my point of view a decade ago when I first started reading HN.

Folks who didn’t chase career maximization were typically treated like naive children at best. Working for a third of the wages in some flyover state at a boring company vs some adtech company with an options package was panned on the regular.

It was always part of the zeitgeist you switch jobs early and often to maximize your career progression vs. chill with the same company for most of your life.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure it was so much of an ethical statement as you should be switching jobs every couple years to maximize your paycheck.

Of course, now, it's more about being happy to have a well-paying job as opposed to working a "full-time" job with two or three paychecks from different companies.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Seriously?

I've not really mentioned ethics, before.

The scorn is for working for one employer for that amount of time.

[kstrauser]

Not from me, it doesn't. That's enviable and I'm glad to hear you were able to have that.

[sourcepluck]

Geez, where do I sign up?

Sounds great. Don't listen to the pseudo-realists who chase dreams of grandeur rather than doing something (at least semi-) useful or good with their lives.

[dgfitz]

I imagine the scorn would occur if you planted a flag about how the company morals aligned with your own.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Actually, this is the first time I've done that.

I pretty much enjoy the world I live in. That upsets some folks.

[obscurette]

Almost same here, but I also understand that it's a luxury. At this point in my life I can afford it, but I've also seen times when I could do anything to get food on table for my family. Luckily for me those times didn't last.

[titanomachy]

Have a dose of anti-scorn from me. What qualifies any one of us to tell another that they're living their life wrong?

[globalnode]

My opinion after reading HN for quite a while is that your average HN poster is well educated and knows a lot of theory but struggles with ethics. Perhaps even seeing a debate against ethics as a game to be won.

[throwaway2037]

Why do you think well educated non-HNers are any different? Hint: They aren't. Why do people think HN people are special or different? <repeat same hint here>

[talldayo]

I don't think people are scornful of your work. It makes me happy to hear that people still find meaningful employment within their means of living. It's increasingly rare that someone is paid to do something impactful these days. You should feel happy.

The part that will attract scorn is pretending that everyone can do that. In the same way that religion spread by preying on the poor and lecherous portions of society, so too does the tech industry offer the downtrodden and mistreated a better life in exchange for moral leniency. It's not even the "revenge of the nerd" stuff past a certain point - if a $60,000/year software engineer in America turns up their nose to a contract, you can simply send it to a development firm in Pakistan for pennies on the dollar and get roughly equivalent results. There is no moral bartering with at-will employment. It's an illusion.

As individuals, you and I are both powerless to stop the proliferation and success of harmful businesses. America's number one lesson from the past 4 centuries of economic planning is that laissez-faire policy does not course-correct without government intervention. Collective bargaining only works when you're bargaining on a market you control - boycotting certain employers is entirely ineffective when you compare it to legislative reform.

So, with that being said, saving your dignity is not enough to save society. You have every right to take comfort in working a job that you respected - but nobody here owes you any more respect than their dairy farmers or the guy in Thailand that made their $55 Izod sweatshirt. If you come around expecting the hero treatment, then you're bound to feel shortchanged. Sorry.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

And you think I posted that, expecting "hero treatment"?

That's the problem, right there, I guess. We can't even mention things that should not elicit anything much more than "That's nice," without someone thinking that it's tubthumping. I wasn't inviting criticism of my decision. Sorry.

Sometimes (most times, actually), I post stuff, just to say "Me too," or "Here's my experience with that. Maybe it might help." I'd like to think that it helps others to maybe feel less alone, in their world.

People mention that they do stuff, all the time, here, with the direct expectation of being lauded and cheered. In many cases, I'm really happy to laud them, and cheer them on. There's some cool stuff that goes down, here.

I'm not really into that kind of thing, for myself. I'm retired, and follow my own muse. I've made some big impacts, but not really ones that most folks here would care about. What people here, think of me, doesn't really matter that much. I'm just not that important, and most folks here, aren't as important as they might think they are. We're all just Bozos on this bus. I have a fairly rich social life, and have a lot of people that like me (and, also, dislike me), because they actually know me.

People also post some stuff that reveals some fairly warped and mutated personal worldviews. Most times, I just ignore that. I don't think attacking someone in public does much to help the world; especially in a professional context like HN.

We live in a strange society.

[drewcoo]

> And you think I posted that, expecting "hero treatment"?

Seemed more masochistic to me. Different strokes for different folks.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

:)

> "Treat me like da pig dat I am."

- Andrew Dice Clay

[talldayo]

> And you think I posted that, expecting "hero treatment"?

I mean, yeah. This is absolutely something that should make you feel wonderful as an individual, being able to help people that are aligned with your moral understanding. But it's also something you can't exactly share - you'll never communicate the happiness other people felt from your assistance, and you're almost certainly not going to find people that universally respect your own moral compass. On the flip side, there are people with extremely perverse senses of justice that consider murder and automated attacks on civilian populations to be an unparalleled moral imperative - I've seen them right here on HN.

It's your life, I can't tell you how to live it. My point is to tell you why people everywhere will bristle at that type of rhetoric, the holier-than-thou "this is how we transcend suffering" memoir written by hands that spent more time touching a smartphone than doing manual labor to feed a family. If you are in a position where you are emotionally, financially and politically secure enough to sponsor a life that you are satisfied with living, then your satisfaction begins and ends with you. It's like announcing your valiant donation to charity on a public soapbox - to whom does it serve? Will you be donating the soapbox to charity too?

Look out on the world as it is today, and you'll see a society of people that reject causal opportunity and change. We don't boycott companies when they send death squads to kill dissident plantation workers because their products taste too good. We can't boycott our tech companies when they drive margins low enough to install suicide nets and sell user data for profit, because the immediate access to porn and Facebook is too enthralling.

You're a little guy, a cog in that great big machine. If you know that playing your part had great impact on the world, then it should bring you a profound sense of personal justice. The part that makes people scornful is when you zoom out and look at the machine, then conclude "we should all be cogs, imagine how much more efficient the whole thing would run!" Many of us aren't made of steel, and have too few spokes to fill the same role that you do.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> holier-than-thou

All I said, was that I worked for a company for a long time, was basically happy, the work environment was not perfect, I found their ethics attractive, and don't have any regrets.

We live in a really sick world, if that can be interpreted as "holier-than-thou." I know dozens of people, personally, that can say exactly the same thing. They don't consider themselves "special," and I don't really care that much. Almost none are in the tech industry, though, so maybe that's the difference.

I also know a lot of folks that work at jobs they hate; often, for big money. I don't waste time judging them, and am just happy to have them in my life.

I tend to avoid folks that are actively trying to be unethical, but I'm not on a mission to convert them. If they ever want to do things differently, I might have something they could use.

It's sad to think that someone, saying what I did, is somehow "wrong." It's really not a big deal.

[ncr100]

This is likely a misinterpretation.

It's not "pretending" or seeking "moral leniency" for individuals to use their agency to identify the potential for meaningful work, even within constraints. Recognizing the impact of work, and making conscious choices about how one contributes is more the point.

There exist systemic exploitations of labor certainly.

On being the change ...

It is not heroic idol-seeking to share one's experience, nor to ask others to consider the values dimensions of their work.

Even on a small scale, change can be made. It's worthy to highlight it, and moreover celebrating good can motivate values based thinking in others.

[wizzwizz4]

> if a $60,000/year software engineer in America turns up their nose to a contract, you can simply send it to a development firm in Pakistan for pennies on the dollar and get roughly equivalent results.

People who live in Pakistan are also capable of making moral decisions, you know. Your argument only holds if there are infinitely-many people in some kind of idealised labour market, but in the real world there are less than a million people capable of that kind of work.

If you plan to take an immoral job and then work-to-rule while sabotaging the evil schemes, charismatically deflecting all blame to those who were trying to make it succeed (or, better still, keeping the organisation as a whole from understanding that their plan has been sabotaged), then that's a different question, and I'd wish you the best of luck. (Not that such a person would be bragging about it here, anyway.)

[BurningFrog]

Given how easy it is to recruit contract killers all over the world, I think any unethical software with money behind it will be built. Maybe with paying some premium for the worst stuff.

[wizzwizz4]

It's easy to recruit a hitman, but hard to recruit a competent hitman. (See: the subcontracting hitmen in 2019.) And killing people is, in general, much easier than writing software.

[Nasrudith]

By definition the best hitmen aren't for public sale, they are held by the local holder of the monopoly on violence. Because if they weren't then they wouldn't have said monopoly in the first place.

[problemsolver12]

Can confirm.

[camgunz]

I have friends who work(ed) at various FAANG companies, and maybe even more shamefully at "silly" places like d2c mattress companies and whatever (I worked on the civil side of a defense contractor, I'm not... ugh, innocent either). They're all pretty self-aware about all this, and I'm the first to say I'll never criticize you for how you make your money. Life in the US is oddly unstable; everything gets exponentially better the more money and status you have; that's the game. There's no sense cosplaying some kind of ethics here.

But, that's a different argument than the collective action problem argument you're making here. This isn't a collective action problem. Tech workers can spurn unethical work, just like doctors, lawyers, chemical engineers, etc. Very few of us would work on ransomware, right? Now we're just talking about degrees.

I just think we're starting to realize the "money firehoses" that are either ad tech companies or VCs laundering government ZIRP stimulus are at best unhelpful and at worst eating away at our mental health, our democracy, and our society. The problem is that these are truly behemoth companies, if you don't work for one the company you do work for probably wouldn't be viable without them (do you... have anything in the cloud?) As noted in TFA, there is a real Upton Sinclair problem here. Tech is unimaginable without Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

In the absence of legislation, I think tech workers should unionize and demand the following:

- ethical, highly regulated supply chains with penalties that make violations economically non-viable

- fundamental privacy protections: companies cannot share or sell data about you without your consent (basically a data HIPPA), and they're liable for security breaches (looking at you Microsoft)

- slowly phase out advertising. This is a hot take I know, but it's super bad for humans, its critics were right the whole time, and it enables business models (e.g. social media companies) that are somehow even worse.

- ethical treatment of workers: no more union-busting Amazon workers

Maybe it'll take 100 years, yeah, but hopefully humans are still around by then.

[avmich]

> The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so.

I think this implies that we all should aim to have for everybody those abilities. That is, if somebody is unable, in this sense, to be ethical because he's just trying to get by, it's actually our problem - e.g. he sells cigarettes and that harms us. So we need to some extent work on the goal of everybody having abilities to live ethically.

[amelius]

Yes, we could tax higher incomes until we've reached that goal.

[mmooss]

Tangentially, the solution would not be higher 'income tax', but higher capital gains tax.

The confusion largely is that 'income tax' is really 'wage tax'. Income common wealthy people with lots of capital is return on their capital investment, which is exluded from that tax.

[songqin]

I can fill in the blanks in my head, but I doubt they are what you're thinking. Would you mind elaborating on the cause/effect you have in mind? It is difficult for me to imagine this in and of itself being successful. We would also need to solve the allocation of those collected funds, as in many countries it would likely go to welfare, defense, corruption, etc.

[asdf6969]

Income tax is class warfare. No thank you

[plagiarist]

There's a lot of beneficial things that might happen if we, as a society, worked at helping the Invisible Hand manifest. Especially if we also ceased putting so much effort into fighting it.

One of the basic tenets of capitalism is that the exchanges are all voluntary. In practice they are quite clearly not.

[int_19h]

That's a basic tenet of the free market, not of capitalism. The two are not the same.

[zugi]

Most people want to judge others and rationalize their own behavior, while piling on to whatever views happen to be popular at the time.

What's worse, working for Big Tobacco, or working for Big Tech, or working for the DEA and spending your days forcefully "civil forfeituring" innocent people's money without charges? The former are at least taking money from people who voluntarily surrender it in exchange for some service, with fairly good knowledge of what they're getting themselves into. While the latter are basically highway robbers. Yet society has chosen to popularize the first one as immoral, and is now working on villifying the second, with only scant mention of the third.

I'm sure I'm guilty of selective outrage myself. If we're going to quote religious references, how about Christ admonishing those who point out the spec in their neighbor's eye, while ignoring the log in their own.

More focus on one's own morality, and less on judging others, just might make the world a slightly better place.

[andrepd]

Highly highly disagree. It seems to me the opposite!

People (incl. here) want to rationalise their behaviour by giving excuses — such as the very popular "but X is even worse and people don't complain about it" that you yourself are doing — for the fact that they work on in-ethical stuff, because the honest answer is simply "this pays cartloads of money, fuck you got mine", which is unpalatable to their own self-perception.

[zugi]

Sure, yet you're exemplifying the "judge others" stuff by calling what others do unethical, and judging without evidence that they only do it because of the money, and not because their moral world-view differs from yours.

I guess we're all guilty.

[kstrauser]

It's at least plausible that someone at the DEA genuinely wants to make a nicer, safer world for themselves and their neighbors. Yes, the agency does the terrible things you mention, but it also gets some horrific stuff off the streets. (Think fentanyl and meth, not weed. I couldn't care less about that.)

No one working for Big Tobacco thinks they're making the world better unless they're an idiot.

[zugi]

True, and I'm sure many, even most, folks working for Big Tech want to make the world a better place.

We likely disagree about the merits of the DEA's War To Destroy the Lives of American Meth Users. That's a topic for another post perhaps, but the point is people have wildly different moral frameworks.

I'm sure there are people working for Big Tobacco who think they're making the world better by helping people enjoy themselves. Heck, some people who work in online gambling, or sports betting, or run state lotteries, or make ice cream, might even believe that!

[riehwvfbk]

Some people who preach an ascetic and parsimonious way of life and judge the choices of others probably also think they are making the world a better place, one all-work-and-no-play comment at a time ;)

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

> Yes, the agency does the terrible things you mention, but it also gets some horrific stuff off the streets. (Think fentanyl and meth, not weed. I couldn't care less about that.)

Do they, though? Some of it, sure, but enough to make a positive impact? Probably not. Indeed, efforts to get drug X off the street often lead to a proliferation of more dangerous drug Y. There's plenty of reason to believe the DEA is only making things worse and causing more deaths.

[Nasrudith]

Phrased differently prohibition is an act of pure insanity from an economic point of view. Every dollar spent on enforcement is a dollar spent subsidizing the value of drugs. All the while thinking that this will somehow "defeat" drugs.

It also brings up another truism: if you are fighting inanimate objects or god forbid abstract concepts you are going to lose just like a drunk boxing with a lamppost.

[abyssin]

I made the choice to change my occupation for a more moral one. One issue is, you lose a lot of social credit doing so. It’s seen as a personal failure rather than a choice. It might also be that implicitly challenging their choices makes people uncomfortable.

How do you meet people who take responsibility for their life design?

[guerrilla]

> One issue is, you lose a lot of social credit doing so. It’s seen as a personal failure rather than a choice.

Hmmm, why?

[aziaziazi]

When someone share it's choice, listeners naturally relate and compare to their own choices. If someone is putting moral or ethic before money (a very common first criterion), the listeners that didn't will feel judged even if the orator didn't say anything about them. It's a natural but uncomfortable behavior triggering defensive mode, that can translate in judging back the one that try to do a good think.

Vegans experience this often.

Edit: the "ethical choicers" can reduce such behavior with a carefully controlled communication (if someone has more tips please share!):

- Don't say "ethic" but "my ethics"

- Keep concise, don't give details if not ask

- Change subject as soon as you feel the listener is uncomfortable

- Say ASAP that you're not trying to convince or change anyone

[guerrilla]

This doesn't seem at all to be what the GP was refering to in the part I quoted. How is it seen as a personal failure on their part?

[aziaziazi]

My bad, I missed the 'personal' part of 'personal failure'. I think my comment is pertinent regarding the first phrase you quoted.

[analog31]

My counter argument is that the US is already the most charitable country in the world in terms of private contributions, yet there are maybe 10-20 countries where the common people are better off than we are (note the large error bar there). I speculate that private charity versus private anti-charity is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.

[CharlieDigital]

    > there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code.

This simplistic view of the world does not scale -- especially so in today's global economy. Imagine we never had public education and instead relied on the good nature of individuals to teach their neighborhood kids. Imagine competing at a global level without a coordinated educational system with baseline standards. Instead, what we need is to teach every kid how to code (many may not end up coding as a profession, but that's fine; every kid that has the affinity and talent and and wants to do it should have the chance).

That's nominally why we have government of the people, by the people, for the people. That's why we have taxes. These scale when the interests are aligned. We've seen them scale.

The problem arises when (as Mitt Romney famously expressed) we think of corporations as people, too, and assign them rights associated with personhood.

They are of "some" people, by "some" people, for "some" people.

This is the crisis I think the US is having now. This is what it think was punctuated with COVID; there is no longer the spirit of "we" and the US is in the era of "me".

[CobrastanJorji]

Yes. However, just like someone considering dinner might falsely convince themselves 'I will eat this broccoli and this cheesecake and it will balance out to mostly healthy,' teaching some neighborhood kids to code won't ethically offset evil professional work, nor will donating a trivial fraction of your share of the ill-gotten proceeds.

[hereonout2]

> knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.

I don't understand what you're weighing this against? A job that is literally saving lives maybe, or really leading in a field of science or technology?

Most of us don't have that though, even here on hacker news. Most of us are part of a larger effort that will progress just as well without us, our personal impact is marginal at best.

I've worked in tech for two decades for a company I deem "moral" and I feel I've had impact. But I could have fitted kitchens or made wedding cakes for that time and had just as positive an impact on the world and people I serve professionally. Hell, if I was a carpenter my work could probably outlast anything I've done in tech.

[BurningFrog]

This is a point too rarely made.

Most work that produces something people are willing to pay for does make the world a better place!

Not enormously so for the vast majority of us, but what one person out of 8 billion can do.

[hereonout2]

There's an aspect of longevity to our impact I love to contemplate.

For most of us, our tech work will be long forgotten and obsolete 20 years from now. At best it will have provided some small intangible advance - hopefully for the better.

But the people that built my house died before I was born, yet their work has a tangible ongoing impact to this day.

The people who built some European cathedrals lived over 800 years ago, yet that padstone laid by some nameless apprentice still holds an entire functional building in place.

[bumby]

I’m not sure I buy the premise as it reads as a Libertarian pipe dream. There are just too many examples of people willing to pay for something immoral or unethical to think that transactions can be broadly painted as a net good.

Capitalist transactions are a reflection of value systems and our own shortcomings/biases. To the extent that humans are flawed, many of those transactions are going to be ethically flawed as well.

[BurningFrog]

The immediate transaction normally benefits both parties, or it wouldn't happen.

So as long as it doesn't hurt any third party, it does make the world better!

It's really that's simple!

[bumby]

Economies are incredibly complex. We should be also be concerned with long-term and second-order effects. Humans tend toward short term bias, meaning we’ll lose out on better long term outcomes. Forgive me, but I tend to give relatively little weight to overly simplified models that try to explain complex phenomena.

[BurningFrog]

This is the typical model economists use to reason about utility. It has a good track record for explaining real world phenomenons.

Your model of "things are very complicated and you can never really know" is very common, but note that it doesn't even attempt to explain anything. This leaves adherents free to assume their gut feel as fact.

[hackable_sand]

You are in agreement with the comment you're responding to.

[bumby]

Being generous, I’m maybe in agreement if the word “most” gets some clarification or nuance.

[hackable_sand]

Fair enough. Easy to paint w broad strokes here.

[equestria]

That last part makes me a bit nervous. It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.

I don't think that's the point you're making, but it's good to be careful with that. You can do good after hours, but it doesn't absolve you from what you're doing 9-to-5.

As to your first point: yes, but it's all relative. Most tech workers are "trying to get by" in their minds. Just look at the SFBA rents and the PG&E bills! And wait until you hear about their college loans... most people in the top 1% don't think about themselves as the top 1%.

In the end, making good decisions often requires sacrifice, pretty much no matter how much you make. And we often find ways to rationalize why it's not the right time for that.

[ajkjk]

What confuses me is how many people are evidently in the job of "ruthless exec" and then they do it amorally. I can't think of any time in my life that I've seen an exec say: no, we could do that, but we shouldn't because it's wrong. No doubt because anyone who acts that way gets naturally-selected out of the job.

But also there seems to be a pervasive belief, which if anything feels way strong than it was when I was younger (maybe because the moral-majority christian-nation vibes have fully disappeared, in the US at least? sure, it was always fairly hollow, but at least it was a thing at all), that a business leader is not supposed to do moral things, because it's not their job description; their job truly is "increase shareholder value on a 6-12 month timescale", and if they try to do something different they are judged negatively!

So maybe there is in theory good to be done by being an exec and being more moral than average (maybe not a tobacco exec, but, say, in tech?). But the system is basically designed to prevent you from doing it? It almost seems as though modern model of shareholder capitalism is almost designed to keep things this way: to eliminate the idea at any point that a person should feel bad if they just do the "efficient", shareholder-value-maximizing thing. Nobody has any agency in the big machine, which means no one is accountable for what it does. Perfect, just how we like it? Whereas at least a private enterprise which is beholden to the principles of its leader could in principle do something besides the most cynical possible play at every turn.

[Earw0rm]

Financial companies figured out how to do this in the run-up to the GFC, and everyone else learned it from them in the immediate aftermath.

"They did all that, and literally none of them went to jail? We got to get us some..."

Post-2008 tech companies were built that way from the get-go.

[ajkjk]

I think it's useless to believe that the explanation behind everything is "greed". It's so easy to blame greed; it's amorphous and meaningless; it gives you nothing you can do; it's the logic of a people who are sure nothing can change, that the way things are is inherent: the rich are greedy, the bad things in the world are powerful people taking advantage of us for benefit, sad for us.

It seems pretty clear that the forces at work are designed to incentivize, reward, and rationalize "greed", and so if one just does their job, so to speak, they will end up doing the greedy thing at every turn. And really we are fine with it! -- what we value more than anything is value creation (on paper). No matter if the actual world is getting worse as long as it appears to be getting better: the economy/investment accounts/stock grants are going up.

[Earw0rm]

There is immorality, there is amorality, and then there is architecting systems intentionally so that none of the actors within the system are constrained by their personal mortality.

"We were only obeying orders" all the way up. And even when you get to the top, they're only obeying the orders of the market.

At least, that's what they'll tell you, and that's what they tell themselves.

[staunton]

The two paragraphs seem contradictory to me...

The fist paragraph seems to say: "greed is not a good explanation", while the second seems to claim: "greed explains everything and we are all OK with it".

[ajkjk]

No, I'm saying: greed is not a good explanation; what looks like greed is essentially required by the world we've built; blaming it on greed alone is an attitude of hopelessness. The problem is our ambient value system, which demands corporations act greedy.

[navane]

There seems to be a new system in place which takes these amoral CEOs and does make them accountable.

[hackable_sand]

It's the truth, and we've had these systems since the dawn of civilization. Idk why people are acting surprised now when we've been doing this for thousands of years.

If people in power don't provide and protect a democratic process to removing poor leadership then they do not get to complain when people make those decisions on their own.

[Earw0rm]

Exec., meet exec.?

[int_19h]

I think the cause and effect here are reversed. Thing is, in a society like ours, you pretty much have to be a shitty human being to become a CEO of anything even remotely big. It inevitably requires walking on heads and abusing people to the extent that no moral person would be comfortable with.

So we have a system that puts selection pressure on economic elites to be sociopathic. And then those same people write the books on "how to be a good CEO" etc, so of course they are going to say that you're not supposed to do things that they themselves don't do.

[jefftk]

> It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.

That's not an EA belief. While EAs have made arguments somewhat in this direction, being a tobacco exec is just incredibly harmful and no one should do it: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/just-how-bad-is-being-a-ceo-i...

(80000 Hours is the primary EA career advising organization)

[wat10000]

The obvious answer is to be a tobacco exec, sabotage the organization from within, and donate to charity.

[light_hue_1]

Yeah, it's definitely an EA belief! If you look at the end of the article they show you a link to a response on the EA forum.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4N5BsDkcWjr5MRSQy/...

EA is one of the most evil ideologies out there.

[jefftk]

The post you're linking to is not arguing that you should become a tobacco exec, it's arguing that 80k has not sufficiently made the case that a tobacco exec who donated all their income thoughtfully would still be causing net harm.

Reading both articles, I think it depends a lot what strategy the exec employs. If they optimize for getting people to become addicted to smoking or increase how much they smoke (growing the market) then I think it's really unlikely they could donate enough to make up for that enormous harm. On the other hand, if they optimize for increasing profitability by increasing prices and advocating for regulation that acts as barriers to new entrants, and especially if the person who would otherwise have the role would be optimizing for growing the market, then it's likely their work is positive on it's own, regardless of donating.

[int_19h]

So, you're saying that from a EA perspective, it can in fact be okay to be a tobacco executive. QED.

[jefftk]

What matters is the difference between how the world would be with your actions and how it would be otherwise.

Would you also say "so you're saying it's ok to be a member of the Nazi party who runs a munitions factory [1], QED"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler

[Avicebron]

> But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that <b>the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears</b> and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.

To highlight this part of the original in support of this comment. This comes of as somewhat arrogant and is a pretty big red flag...

[dvdkon]

If you've changed your career to support some goal, here the public good, isn't it natural to be strongly convinced that your work is advancing that goal?

[gruez]

>It's dangerously close to the EA belief that it's actually OK to be a ruthless exec for a tobacco company, because you can do good things with your money that you wouldn't be able to do if you quit the job.

You're saying this as if it's a given, but why wouldn't this work?

[Hasu]

For the same reason people don't think it's OK to rob a bank and donate the money to charity.

[gruez]

That analogy fails because robbing a bank is straightforwardly illegal and norm-breaking (by the majority of the population), whereas being a tobacco executive isn't.

[layer8]

Unethical behavior not being treated as norm-breaking unless its illegal is part of what’s being criticized here, I think.

[ClumsyPilot]

Not if you ask the younger generation

[worik]

> For the same reason people don't think it's OK to rob a bank and donate the money to charity.

I have a problem with violence...

[CobrastanJorji]

Because enabling evil on a large scale to pay for doing good on a small scale doesn't achieve net good.

[jefftk]

It wouldn't work because being a tobacco exec is just really harmful: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/just-how-bad-is-being-a-ceo-i...

Anyone who could do that job has many far better ways they could apply their career.

[Avicebron]

Because it's sociopathic at its core, I don't have time to pull up the HN back and forth where it was debated during the FTX stuff

but basically it comes across as, "I am willing to sacrifice others (but not myself) to achieve my goals because I know better."

[gruez]

>but basically it comes across as, "I am willing to sacrifice others (but not myself) to achieve my goals because I know better."

Since money is fungible but finite, basically any sort of donation decision involves sacrificing someone. Donating to fund malaria nets when you'd otherwise have funded your local little league team means you're in effect, sacrificing the local little league team. Moreover, by donating their own money, they're by definition "sacrificing myself".

[int_19h]

This line of thinking (and EA in general) taken to its logical conclusion results in stuff like LW's famous "moral dilemma" about torturing someone for 50 years being justifiable if it prevents sufficiently many people from the discomfort of having a speck in their eye.

[adamtaylor_13]

But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.

So I actually agree with the notion that being the big tabacco exec and doing good things with your money, plus helping steer things from the inside is a better proposition than becoming a baker and letting someone who has NO moral qualms with tabacco run the ship.

It’s rarely as effective to push change from the outside as it is the inside.

[moolcool]

> But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.

In the public discourse, you'll often see CEOs and founders lauded as incredibly brilliant and rare. As soon as you start to talk about ethics though, they're suddenly fungible. "Someone else would run the orphan crushing factory if not for me"

[WD-42]

I think the idea is that if all good people refuse to become a tobacco exec the pool of people willing to take the job will be small and full of bad people, eventually they will run the business into the ground and the problem solves itself. How well this works in practice is debatable.

[Ar-Curunir]

“If I don’t work with the Nazis, someone else will, so I should be a good Nazi”

[lotsofpulp]

Unless you are suggesting selling tobacco is as unethical as torturing and murdering people of different tribes for the sake of them being in different tribes, I do not see what your point could be.

Should people simply never be able to sell or consume tobacco? Even if one’s consumption of tobacco does not negatively affect anyone else?

[davidgay]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris

[marky1991]

What would be the alternative in this hypothetical be? I'm not clear what the argument here really is.

[kelseyfrog]

Are there any social norms that allows immoral CEOs to exist? What incubates an immoral CEO?

[labster]

Honestly a better question would be if there are any social norms that allow for a moral CEO to exist? Pretty much all of our norms are tilted towards producing immoral executives.

[adamtaylor_13]

“If I don’t work for the Nazi’s they will kill my family, so I will work for the Nazi’s”

There, I fixed your uninspired and incorrect anecdote.

Big tobacco execs are quite literally killing absolutely no one. Last I checked they aren’t sticking cigarettes in anyone’s mouth. Personal responsibility for your own actions is unfortunately lacking in many discussions surrounding things like this.

[saagarjha]

That's because we have a society have generally decided that personal responsibility is not actually the appropriate lens with which to judge the sale of addictive products.

[rNULLED]

Nazis were political leaders. So yes, you should try to be a good political leader to prevent the growth in power of bad ones.

[WalterBright]

Trying to stop people from growing and selling marijuana didn't work out so well.

[quotemstr]

> The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so.

Humans respond to incentives. We seek rewards that may be monetary, social, or intellectual: we optimize our behavior for them all the same. Trying to improve the world by scolding people for acting according to their incentives will not work. It's not a serious position. "If everyone would just..." --- no, everyone is not going to just, and if they were, they'd have already done it. Your exhortation will make no difference.

If you want to change the world, change the incentive structure. Don't expect people to act against their personal interests because you say so. At best, they'll ignore you. At worst, they'll maliciously comply and cause even more harm.

[layer8]

One’s conscience is part of one’s incentives. And talking to people can actually affect their conscience. Public discourse like the one taking place here is part of the factors that can cause cultural shifts.

[calf]

I think Moshe is right but chose a really poor analogy in Big Tobacco, I want to say because working in tech is not at all like a farmer working laboriously in a physical field which is a lot less ideological and more driven by being in a poor 3rd world country, etc.

[gsf_emergency]

"And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticipations, from silly notions - from all the symptoms of you."

"Isn't tasting me?"

...

"I'd say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism.

And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what's happening. And that's the point of our chewing-grace - to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to."

--Aldous Huxley, Island

[femiagbabiaka]

Morality is completely subjective. Prior to certain events in the last year I would’ve said that there were some objective standards like minimizing harm to children, but that’s out the window now, with most of Big Tech implicated.

As a moderately less contentious example, Alex Karp argues fervently that it is immoral to not produce weapons of war for western countries and the U.S. in particular. Many people agree with him. Ultimately people justify their method of making a living in whichever way they choose, and tech workers are no different. History is the log of the winners and losers of the war between the adherents of different moral codes.

[devjab]

Morality is not completely subjective. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/701478

[femiagbabiaka]

From the abstract this is a very interesting paper. I’ll spend this afternoon digging in. But I see a problem already: reality trumps academic exercise or humanity’s aggregated, self-description of its morality.

“Morality-as-cooperation draws on the theory of non-zero-sum games to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior—including helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession—will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures.”

Who is kin? Who are one’s superiors? What is prior possession? These are all questions of ideology and power. The only universal code all humanity agrees on is might makes right.

[labster]

Everyone loves helping kin except when helping kin on the public dime. Morals are funny that way.

[jwarden]

> The only universal code all humanity agrees on is might makes right.

This is a cynical and unjustifiable claim.

Obviously some people disagree. In fact in my experience people almost universally agrees might does not make right.

[femiagbabiaka]

Cynical? Maybe, I think you're right on that point. Unjustifiable? Look at the current and historical state of humanity and our global institutions.

[BlueTemplar]

Isn't 'kin' an easy one here ? Genetic closeness first and foremost.

[femiagbabiaka]

To deconstruct/interrogate your statement: What does "genetic closeness" mean? Humans are all "genetically close." So then maybe you mean "phenotypical closeness"? But then of course people who are "phenotypically close" kill and oppress each other in droves all the time. Or maybe you mean family? I live in probably the most atomized society in the world, familial bonds are extremely thin here in the U.S. -- it's 100% expected that you'll leave family forever as a coming of age as early as possible.

[BlueTemplar]

> it's 100% expected that you'll leave family forever as a coming of age as early as possible

I don't believe you.

[the_af]

> "It is immoral to not produce weapons of war for western countries and the US in particular"

I cannot imagine that a substantial "many" people believe this. How does it work exactly? If you have any expertise even adjacent to weapons building (e.g. being a programmer) and you are not building weapons for the US due to a lack of effort (as opposed to failing the interview) you're doing something immoral?

I don't think many would agree with this. I suppose his stance is somehow more nuanced? (I wouldn't agree with it either, but at least it would be slightly more reasonable).

[femiagbabiaka]

https://youtu.be/EZLr6EGGTPE?si=5ome3QBCQk20hpJD

This describes it fairly well, although I was thinking of a CNBC interview in particular. He does so many that it’s hard to catalogue.

The argument is roughly that “the west” and “western morality” are critical institutions to be protected, and refusing to protect them is immoral.

And yes, a lot of people support his ideals. Major chunks of the tech investment class, thousands of workers at Palantir, the U.S. State Department, the Acela corridor, etc. It is probably a minority viewpoint amongst normal Americans, but we’re talking about tech workers here. :)

[the_af]

Well, ok, people in the defense industry would agree it's not immoral to make weapons, and the more extremist may even call it immoral not to make weapons (though I doubt many would, this is an extreme view. I also wonder if it's truly heartfelt or simply convenient while they hold defense industry jobs, and forgotten when they start working elsewhere).

It doesn't follow at all that the best way to defend Western institutions is to build weapons.

(Yes, I realize these aren't your views and that you're merely describing them. But this Alex Karp guy isn't here to debate directly with him...)

[femiagbabiaka]

I think Karp would say that events like 9/11 or 10/7 represent attacks on the west by vicious enemies who can’t be negotiated with, and that the only way to defend ourselves is to build weapons and surveillance systems that outstrip their capacity to harm.

To your point about his beliefs not being mine, I think he has a fundamental misunderstanding of how both of those events happened, which is ironic, because the prelude and aftermath of both attacks are revisions on the same theme.

[the_af]

I just googled who Alex Karp is and... well, he has a vested interest in DoD applications. Of course he'd say this. A businessman telling us his business model is a moral imperative...

[wazoox]

> The argument is roughly that “the west” and “western morality” are critical institutions to be protected, and refusing to protect them is immoral.

"The West" as a collective lost all of the moral high ground it was supposed to have during the past few decades and particularly last year.

https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-moral-bankruptcy-of-t...

[metabagel]

The moral high ground was lost when the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq on a pretext.

[BlueTemplar]

That's one that I use as an example too, but maybe only out of ignorance ? (Wasn't the Vietnam War pretty bad too ?)

Though I guess that things were quite different during the Cold War...

[femiagbabiaka]

Agreed.

[worik]

I did development work for casino bosses.

Clearly immoral. IMO more so than weapons.

I realy needed the job

[gruez]

>Prior to certain events in the last year I would’ve said that there were some objective standards like minimizing harm to children, but that’s out the window now, with most of Big Tech implicated.

You're saying as if it's indisputable that "Big Tech" was harming children, but we're nowhere close to that. At best, the current literature shows a very weak negative correlational relationship between social media use and mental health. That's certainly not enough to lambast "Big Tech" for failing to abide by "objective standards like minimizing harm to children".

Moreover I question whether "objective standards like minimizing harm to children" existed to begin with, or we're just looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. During the industrial revolution kids worked in factories and mines. In the 20th century they were exposed to lead and particulate pollution. Even if you grant that "Big Tech" was harming kids in some way, I doubt they're doing it in some unprecedented way like you implied.

[femiagbabiaka]

I’m certainly going to get downvoted for this, but I’m referring to the use of computing resources for AI surveillance systems used in target selection in Gaza. That alongside the fact that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, NVIDIA etc. all vie for contracts with militaries domestic and global, implicates a large chunk of all tech workers in global strife.