Comment by liontwist
1 year ago
What I don’t like about this kind of “moral” analysis is you are basically reacting to negative branding. do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? I don’t think you do, it’s just they may not have the same “bad guy” labels.
> do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use?
Yes, absolutely. I think it's very common for people to make ethical decisions in how they make their money and how they spend their money.
That’s not what I said. Do you actually know the impact? Or do you just know what labels they have?
Of course not, we all operate in uncertainty. We can try to make ethical decisions even while quantified ethics are an unsolved problem.
We don't know how many victims there were of the Nazi atrocities, but I feel pretty confident going by what you could call their qualitative, "labels." In fact, I don't think the true casualty numbers are known for most wars and genocides. Utilitarian calculations are limited to situations with controlled conditions and scientific openness, like when charities try to keep track of their cost effectiveness.
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> do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use?
Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.
You’re telling me bad guy labels (bad image for you), not impact. You're personifying on organization.
For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. Your job at the children’s charity could be scamming old ladies.
> For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy.
This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people.
And by simply not working in adtech, I don't need to go through some mental gymnastics to justify what I spend 40 hours a week building. The beauty of being a programmer is there's a bunch of work out there that doesn't involve crappifying the internet.
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On the other hand, if everybody all collectively agreed not to work on adtech, there would be no adtech (or adtech companies). Our decisions don't exist in a vacuum with everyone else's choices being static.
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> basically reacting to negative branding.
I am not. Palantir not only brands themselves as providing data analysis for governments but they also actually sell those tools too.
What is the impact of that relative to the other products and commerce you participate in? What would happen if Palantir didn’t exist?
Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?
> What is the impact of that relative to the other products and commerce you participate in?
The impact is exactly what is pointed out in the article - someone in the local police department could use it against me.
> Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?
No, because that doesn't affect me.
See, you keep clinging to some morality claim, and I am explicitly not. I am saying that there is potentially a direct impact on abuse against me personally.
"Oh, you're taking a stand on one thing? Explain why you don't take a stand on everything!"
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This is such a dodge, whataboutism at its finest. “You have a moral critique of a thing? Well that’s weird because you clearly don’t have a detailed moral analysis of literally everything else you do in life, therefore this critique is just because of negative branding”.
“Moral” in quotes is a tell, too. You’re arguing that morality is illegitimate unless someone has done a full “utilitarian” breakdown of everything they do in their lives. And of course you will only accept that breakdown if you deem it sufficient.
No. I’m arguing that morality is determined by what you do (help or harm), not what industry your employer is in and how the media perceives that market segment.
This shallow label analysis (oil bad, palantir bad, non profit good) is not “morality”, it’s politics.
Most people espouse a utilitarian ethics, but rely on media and social cues rather than harm to determine their choices.
If your job is to pour barrels of oil into the ocean, I think that’s worth evaluating. If your job is to do accounting for the oil company, I’m not sure you’re causing harm relative to other accounting employment.
It’s also valid to decide image is important to you, but don’t tell me it’s because you are a Good Samaritan.