Comment by Thorrez
1 year ago
I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
Also, legality isn't the only difference in the VW case. With VW, they had a "good emissions" mode. They enabled the good emissions mode during the test, but disabled it during regular driving. It would have worked during regular driving, but they disabled it during regular driving. With compilers, there's no "good performance" mode that would work during regular usage that they're disabling during regular usage.
> I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
It sounds like a mismatch of definition, but I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical. Law is the codification and enforcement of a social contract, not the creation of it.
But following the law is itself a load bearing aspect of the social contract. Violating building codes, for example, might not cause immediate harm if it's competent but unusual, yet it's important that people follow it just because you don't want arbitrariness in matters of safety. The objective ruleset itself is a value beyond the rules themselves, if the rules are sensible and in accordance with deeper values, which of course they sometimes aren't, in which case we value civil disobedience and activism.
Also, while laws ideally are inspired by an ethical social contract, the codification proces is long, complex and far from perfect. And then for rules concerning permissible behavior even in the best of cases, it's enforced extremely sparingly simply because it's not possible nor desirable to detect and deal with all infractions. Nor is it applied blindly and equally. As actually applied, a law is definitely not even close to some ethical ideal; sometimes it's outright opposed to it, even.
Law and ethics are barely related, in practice.
For example in the vehicle emissions context, it's worth noting that even well before VW was caught the actions of likely all carmakers affected by the regulations (not necessarily to the same extent) were clearly unethical. The rules had been subject to intense clearly unethical lobbying for years, and so even the legal lab results bore little resemblance to practical on-the-road results though systematic (yet legal) abuse. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even what was measured intentionally diverged from what is harmfully in a profitable way. It's a good thing VW was made an example of - but clearly it's not like that resolved the general problem of harmful vehicle emissions. Optimistically, it might have signaled to the rest of the industry and VW in particular to stretch the rules less in the future.
>I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical.
There are many cases where I think that. Examples:
* Underage drinking. If it's legal for someone to drink, I think it's in general ethical. If it's illegal, I think it's in general unethical.
* Tax avoidance strategies. If the IRS says a strategy is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the IRS says a strategy is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
* Right on red. If the government says right on red is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the government (e.g. NYC) says right on red is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
The VW case was emissions regulations. I think they have an ethical obligation to obey emissions regulations. In the absence of regulations, it's not an obvious ethical problem to prioritize fuel efficiency instead of emissions (that's I believe what VW was doing).
Drinking and right turns are unethical if they’re negligent. They’re not unethical if they’re not negligent. The government is trying to reduce negligence by enacting preventative measures to stop ALL right turns and ALL drinking in certain contexts that are more likely to yield negligence, or where the negligence world be particularly harmful, but that doesn’t change whether or not the behavior itself is negligent.
You might consider disregarding the government’s preventative measures unethical, and doing those things might be the way someone disregards the governments protective guidelines, but that doesn’t make those actions unethical any more than governments explicitly legalizing something makes it ethical.
To use a clearer example, the ethicality of abortion— regardless of what you think of it— is not changed by its legal status. You might consider violating the law unethical, so breaking abortion laws would constitute the same ethical violation as underage drinking, but those laws don’t change the ethics of abortion itself. People who consider it unethical still consider it unethical where it’s legal, and those that consider it ethical still consider it ethical where it’s not legal.
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Outsourcing your morality to politicians past and present is not a particularly useful framework.
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Lawful good. Or perhaps even lawful neutral?
What if I make sure to have a drink once a week for the summer with my 18 year old before they go to college because I want them to understand what it's like before they go binge with friends? Is that not ethical?
Speeding to the hospital in an emergency? Lying to Nazis to save a Jew?
Law and ethics are more correlated than some are saying here, but the map is not the territory, and it never will be.
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unless following an unethical law would in itself be unethical, then breaking the unethical law would be the only ethical choice. In this case cheating emissions, which I see as unethical, but also advantageous for the consumer, should have been done openly if VW saw following the law as unethical. Ethics and morality are subjective to understanding, and law only a crude approximation of divinity. Though I would argue that each person on the earth through a shared common experience has a rough and general idea of right from wrong...though I'm not always certain they pay attention to it.
Overfitting on test data absolutely does mean that the model would perform better in benchmarks than it would in real life use cases.
I think you're talking about something different from what sigmoid10 was talking about. sigmoid10 said "manipulate behaviour during those benchmarks". I interpreted that to mean the compiler detects if a benchmark is going on and alters its behavior only then. So this wouldn't impact real life use cases.
ethics should inform law, not the reverse
I agree that ethics should inform law. But I live in a society, and have an ethical duty to respect other members of society. And part of that duty is following the laws of society.