[avazhi]

My ethics are that certain people will die in certain circumstances and I’m okay with that. I also have no issues working on something that may result in a person’s death at a later stage. One example might be that if I worked on an automobile assembly line it might occur to me that the car I’m working on would at some point crash and the occupants be killed. But why would I care? There’s a chain of causation that you can surely understand, one that in this case would be broken many times before then (assuming I wasn’t negligent in assembling the car).

But again, your condescending tone proves my point. You and I don’t have the same values. That’s okay. But keep yours to yourself and I’ll keep mine to myself, right? That’s my point.

[saagarjha]

Ethics is making the chain of causation as long as possible.

[avazhi]

You're confusing ethics with your own personal views. Ethics is a subject concerning right or wrong. It's neither subjective nor objective - it's just a particular subject encompassing particular issues. Your personal opinion on a particular issue might go some way toward describing what YOU think is ethical behaviour. That's subjective. It describes a factual state (viz., your opinion about something). My opinion may be very different from yours. My opinion is also subjective.

If you think never harming any person is the highest human aspiration, then great! I wish you well on that journey. I disagree though, and personally - as a matter of my own morality and philosophy about the world - I think the earth would be a much better place with maybe 1/2 the current population (assuming we could cull the right people). Avoiding causing harm to others isn't really something I care about, and I think there are more important and more interesting things to worry about. I also think killing is absolutely justified under certain conditions and I also think the world would be objectively better off if certain people didn't exist. We disagree about this, but that doesn't mean we aren't both acting ethically. We just have very different ideas about what is good and bad and right and wrong.

Both of us can act ethically despite holding those contrary positions and stay within our own logical frameworks. I hope that makes sense to you.

Now, once again the main point was that doing work for the police or hacking shit for governments is a legitimate occupation and is legal, even if it leads to somebody being executed or arrested or deported (in fact, those are also legitimate things that plenty of people have no problems with). Laws generally reflect society's overall views on some subject matter. Feel free to Google social facts and Durkheim and Hart and the rule of law and theory of laws. Stating such is to state objective facts. If you dislike those occupations, that's cool - some people dislike prostitution, but it's a legitimate and legalised occupation in many places. But your opinion on the matter doesn't delegitimise it, and frankly nobody wants to hear your casting judgment on others based on your own personal opinions. This is the issue with protestors today - nobody else cares, man. Leave people alone lol.

[saagarjha]

That’s not what I said, I just aim to reduce harm and my culpability for it. I had assumed this was a fairly noncontroversial formulation of ethics but I guess if your goal is to explicitly bring about harm to specific people it is reasonable that we would not be able to have a discussion on this topic.

[avazhi]

What you said was a fait accompli wherein you assumed that we both share the same moral position on certain issues and you suggested that such agreement must exist for us to both be ‘ethical’.

I agree any discussion about the morality of this is unlikely to be productive, but I could have told you that at the start. Maybe don’t bring ‘ought’ statements into a discussion that’s really about the ‘how’ - how this zero-day was exploited and/or patched is, after all, the point of the submission, not some moral discussion about whether white hats ought to be doing this sort of shit in the first place.

G’day.