Ethical entanglement: if you try to make a problem slightly better, then by not fixing it entirely you are now to blame. Happens all the time: http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
"You must be a profiteer."
'Sure, I guess I count as one. How'd you know?'
"Well, you learned about the immense, tragic problem of homelessness, and apparently your first thought was, wow, awesome, a cheap labor force I can use to cut costs!"
'Hm, okay, fair enough. You must be a philosopher then.'
"Yes! You're right! How'd you know?"
'Well, because homelessness has been around for ages, and appears to be intractable, and you've been unable to make any real progress on it, and yet when I offer homeless people an alternative to their current state, and some of them take it, somehow, the whole problem is all my fault."
Perhaps there are other reasons?
Despite their earning statements, Amazon is only a 'non-profit' on paper.
I can think of logical reasons to justify distinguishing them, but I rarely see such reasons made explicit. (One reason might be that there's a greater incentive to cut corners on worker treatment when you're for profit rather then just doing it out of the goodness of your heart, but that would justify at most tighter oversight, not moral condemnation of doing the thing at all, as we normally see.)
There is none. The ends don't justify the means (Kantian ethics).
There are network effects of a giant for-profit organization exploiting the jobless, vs a non-profit that is regulated to be aligned with the jobless.
If you're using rational beings as a means to your ends, they need to be part of the ends, which is why Amazon is being criticized.
You're committing the fallacy described by the "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics". http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
First, why do you describe offering someone a job as exploitation? It's totally not. Giving someone an option they didn't have before makes them strictly better off. They can choose between it and their other options. Working a job when you didn't have one before tends to make a person better off - either way it's up to them, and either way, it's one more option they didn't have before.
Second, just by interacting with the situation, you don't become responsible for it. The homeless' situation is not a potential employer's responsibility any more than it is yours personally or any other person's on the world. What are you doing about the homeless problem? Employers who go out of their way to offer homeless jobs, and to indicate that they won't discriminate based on that background, are actually giving them the opportunity to improve their lives. By comparison, most people involved in the thread will have done nothing at all to help homeless or give them opportunities, despite criticizing employers who do.
(Please read the link above; it offers a useful discussion of the issues.)
Is this always true? Imagine a third world country where children die from lack of food, clean water, and medical care. Now imagine a group that goes in and offers to exploit the children (I'll leave how up to your imagination) in exchange for meeting all their basic needs. Is this group making the children better off... and conversely, are anyone fighting for laws to ban the actions of this group working to make the children worse off? Almost every single person I've brought this up to will say yes for at least some forms of exploitation. If you go with child labor, you'll get a decent number on either side, but if you go with other forms of exploitation the rate who say that offering the choice is harmful jumps to basically 100%. (This is one of those questions that, if I ever make it rich, I would fund official research into, but until then I will admit this is based off of my person anecdotes.)
All that being said, I agree that you shouldn't be responsible for the underlying situation. Even if you are wrong for offering a given bad choice, you are not at fault for the underlying situation.
Which fallacy is Kant committing exactly?
Yes it is true that if a company helps but does not entirely solve a problem, they are not obligated to stick it out. But in this case it may be that they are not helping by offering homeless people seasonal jobs. The fallacy here is that homeless people have a choice: if I were in a desperate situation, then I would take any job on offer. I.e. by being given the option the decision has essentially been made for for me, and whilst I may be better off in the immediate future, that doesn't mean it will last (and it could even be worse in the long term), and whilst I could decline the offer, and wait for something more stable, my circumstances are sufficient motivation for me not to do that.
A cynical person might even posit that by explicitly not doing enough to bring people out of homelessness, Amazon succeeds in maintaining a pool of willing and cheap seasonal labour.
There's 'basically' and then there's 'basically'. In the article, it suggests that Amazon misled the potential employees with "temporary-to-permanent" when they were actually "seasonal" jobs. The article's main interviewee then talks about how that made things worse for the people she knew.
A for-profit has a lot of motive for misleading people or withholding information. A non-profit has much less motive - if the point of the non-profit is to help demographic X, then lying to demographic X (or engaging in other activity to screw them, intentionally or unintentionally) is much less likely to happen.
The effect on the world is a lot more complex than "X people got N jobs at $rate".
Did you read my second paragraph?
"Well, I would condemn them screwing their employees, but since there's no official entity to watch them, we can't make a moral judgement"?
I see it as very different. The Copenhagen issue is that if you try to help fix a problem, you are now responsible for the parts you didn't fix. Imagine if you fix a bad code base to remove half of the significant defects, and are now blamed for the other half that already existed because your upgrade didn't fix them.
What is happening in this particular case is different. It is judging entities based not only on their actions or effects, but also their intents. This is quite common, for example intent can be the difference between murder and self defense.
Sign up to a call center, and they'll say "we'll answer your calls and bill you per call. If you want to do it yourself you can, but in order to cover the peaks you'll have to hire so many people that most are idle during the troughs... we know how to plan this and scale and things and more things, and you don't so why don't you just let us do it?"
Getting around irritating minimum wages and other laws is a fringe benefit. Scaling the headcount is the big one.
Not to mention wage theft, not paying overtime, pretending your workers are not employees, etc.
BTW, when I started working minimum wage was under $4/hr. Within four years I was making over 6 times that much. Two years later, over twelve times. Another four years had me at 25 times minimum wage.
The secret? I worked and studied hard. I took nothing for granted and $4 per hour was not enough to be comfortable.
There is a reason there are more homeless people in San Francisco than all of England.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_san-francisco-homeless...
It's not at all intractable. Giving jobs to the jobless and homes to the homeless is exactly as straightforward as it looks.
The homeless and jobless serve a function, though - to keep wages and agitation down for the precariously employed and the precariously housed. They're like this mainly for the benefit of corporations like Amazon which farm cheap labor.
Effectively the homeless serve as a form of 'public good' for the owners of capital.
That's why proposals to house or give homeless jobs with government money are met with sheer disgust by the same media that happily endorses spending billions of dollars dropping bombs on brown children.
The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them. The state may need to step in with a minimum wage (or basic income), but otherwise the system should work fine.
Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.
>The notion that the owners of capital would want to have homeless people is absurd. The "capitalists" would like everyone to be working, as higher production means more profits for them.
More unemployed + homeless
=> More afraid workers
=> Workers who are willing to take a lower wage
=> Higher profits
The notion that higher production automatically leads to higher profits is pretty comical.
>Unsurprisingly unemployment and homelessness and being told that it's all your fault causes mental illness, especially when combined with attempts to self medicate with drugs or alcohol.
Achievement unlocked: Trivialized mental illness.
Being homeless is certainly stressful on the psyche, but not every crazy homeless person started as a sane homeless person. Some people just cannot function as independent adults. One person I know managed to score Section 8 housing, and she trashed the apartment and threatened the landlord and ended up on the street. Until her condition deteriorated enough for the police to call a 5150 on her.
But she doesn't consider herself crazy. Just stressed out. Modern liberation theory means the institutions consider her to be an adult, so if she says she doesn't want to stay in an asylum, then there's no way for us non-super-rich people to stop her from leaving psychiatric care and ruining her life.
There is no firm boundary between crazy and sane, and even being delusional doesn't prevent one from being a productive member of society. We just don't have enough appropriate services for all the crazy people in this country.
Most of them started out not being able to hold down a job, however.
Taking away a low-skilled worker's best bargaining chip (the willingness to work for less money), is generally not a good way to support their ability to gain employment. It does really help middle class teenagers though.
We've seen the tech giants collude to suppress wages, imagine what fast food companies would do if they realized there was no floor to wages.
Finally, I flatly refuse to accept that people are undeserving of a minimal standard of comfort. Just because somebody doesn't know how to code, or hold other marketable skills does not mean we should not value them and the quality of their existence.
No matter what your feelings on the matter, sweeping a floor only has a value up to some hourly rate that depends on a particular business' circumstances. Beyond this point, sweeping will be substituted with technology or simply forgone.
Also, there isn't much empirical evidence to support your claim about a race to the bottom (note: almost all jobs already pay over federal minimum and yet there is no "race to the bottom"). It's also funny you would cite tech workers--some of the highest paid people in the world--as your example of a "race to the bottom". Yes collusion can happen between companies--no one thinks markets are perfect--but markets punish this type of behavior over longer time frames. If Google and Apple are colluding and pushing down wages, some other entrepreneur has an opportunity to pay their workers more and steal their talent. This is slightly complicated by the fact that competition is often constrained in other ways (occupational licensing, regulations, intellectual property, etc.), but these are artificial barriers (i.e., government) to market competition.
I don't think it was Amazon's intent to reach out to individuals whose present condition included serious untreated mental illnesses.
Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society, and not merely businesses which survive via trade.
Some but not all. This one certainly doesn't fall apart.
>Saying things like the homeless 'serve a function' for corporations to 'keep down wages and agitation' only makes a lick of sense if you see 'corporations' as one giant agent which rules society
Cohesive power blocs often come together to act as as a unified political agent when they have shared interests.
Two good institutional examples of corporate power blocs in the US are Cato and the AEI. Many of their members compete for market share, but they joined forces to gain political representation together to have their interests as a whole represented.
Can I live in your simple universe?
Speaking as someone who was homeless for ~5 years, I could have told Amazon exactly how this would play out. The vast majority of the homeless are drunks, addicts, mentally ill, and fantastically stupid (who think they're geniuses). What do you think is going to happen when you hire such people?
Not an expert but it makes perfect sense that seasonal jobs are not well suited for homeless people, for the reasons the article mentions - they don't have schedule flexibility (when they can get a bed!) others have, not to mention that they really need permanent jobs. Even more so than another type of seasonal worker - the high school or college student living at home.
Good for Amazon if they're doing it for the right reasons, but you still need to do it right. There's more at stake than the typical corporate pet project. These people are (sadly) incredibly vulnerable. Taking swipes at it and failing can have serious consequences.
Everyone seems to have a laptop that "won't boot" or something...I've had to stop cleaning them for this very reason.
doctors, lawyers, accountants, plumbers, electricians, mechanics have figured this out, i have faith that we can too. it's really not difficult.
please stop doing free tech work for people. there is something in the human condition which will cause them to be
1. ungrateful and upset with the results of your help
2. ironically, ask for more free work
3. blame you for their own fuckups
4. have set expectations that you'll do more of it on demand.
worst of all, you cheapen the entire concept of technology work. be the change you want to see in the world.
Maybe it reminds me of myself and the help I've received after people gave up on me.
But like I said, the fallout of it often reminds me of the parent post.
Feature creep is even more of an issue when the value of your time is not quantified in some way for the client.
I have had wealthy individuals act like they are doing me a favor because I need to find the virus/malware one of their clones dowloaded from some porn site. I always give them a quote. They send me home, and then the wife calls after hubby gets to the permently blue screen, or the wheel never stops spinning.
This applies to pretty much everything - friends help friends with stuff. But there's a pretty clear tit-for-tat exchange going on. If I have a problem, I expect you to give me advice, too. So, in this way, I treat tech knowledge as being exactly the same as electrician knowledge, mechanical knowledge, and medical knowledge. If you want access to my knowledge, you have to give me access to your knowledge (and to your own network if you don't have any).
The issue of mutually beneficial exploitation is a big problem in ethics[1]. People who say it's OK, subscribe to what's known as the "non-worseness claim", but many don't. That post you linked to is a shallow, uneducated piece that completely ignores the vast discussion on the topic in ethics literature[2].
Another thing is that even with the most generous interpretation, and even if you do subscribe to the non-worseness claim and find it ethically positive, in most such mutually-beneficial exploitation cases, no one is really trying to solve the problem, just to make the best of a bad situation. That is not bad per se, but let's not pretend Amazon is "trying to solve" the problem of homelessness.
[1]: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#4
[2]: And that is a charitable description. It reads like an article about the motion of celestial bodies written today by someone who is completely unaware that physics has been an active discipline for centuries, and may have a thing or two to say about the subject. I don't expect everyone to be an expert on everything, and it's great that non-experts write about matters they've only recently been introduced to (as this can help others), but I find it hair-pullingly frustrating when people write about something by trying to deduce from first-principles without so much as googling to see if perhaps there has been some serious treatment of the subject before. It is doubly frustrating when it is those ignorant (though perhaps well-intentioned) articles are the ones that get referenced and discussed. It's like those texts actively erase knowledge.
All you do is say that the poster is uneducated, but have made zero attempt in educating him, other readers or advancing any argument against what was posted.
so tell me, if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?
You mean like people who believe they can solve any problem by just deducing the solution from first-principles without even trying to find some prior art (I know the author of that post didn't, because it took me all of five minutes of googling to find plenty of it)? Or people who believe there are easy answers because they are just unaware of the the complexities of the world and so maintain a simple, solvable, model of it in their minds? Or worse, people who justify their views with the naturalistic fallacy and say, "well, this is how the world works; we can't change it so we might as well make the best of a shitty situation"? (as long as they don't get the short end of the stick, of course)
And you need to understand that people who write articles like that are being dismissive towards real people who have actually dedicated their lives to studying social problems (or debating questions of ethics).
> but have made zero attempt in educating him
Because the issue is very, very complex. I have provided a link that points to where to get started when approaching this difficult topic.
> if i was in a desert and somebody is really thirsty, why is it unethical for me to sell him some water?
The reason you're bringing this up is because you think that the analogy is apt, but I'm not so sure. There are some ways to approach this (which are far from comprehensive).
First, you need to explain the situation. How much water do you have? Let's suppose you have a supply for a million people. I would say that in that situation it may be ethical for you to sell that man some water, but if you do (rather than just give him the water), you now have a certain obligation towards him. For example, to make sure that he has enough water. Another question is why is that man in the desert in the first place? Could you have possibly contributed to his being there, or did not do enough to stop him? Suppose that the reason he is there is because he got lost, and he got lost because the map of the area is wrong. And it's not just him, but many people get lost because of that map, and that is precisely why you've decided to get a water tanker and set up shop in the desert. Now, it may not have been in your power to change the map, but if you had made the same effort into getting the map fixed as into setting up your water stand, there may have been a good chance that it would have been fixed. So now this puts you in a different role: you're not trying to help solve the desert problem, but you're benefiting from it not being fixed, and while you may not have been able to fix it yourself, you could have helped but you didn't. If that is the case, I think that you have quite a strong moral responsibility towards those poor souls. You are not to blame for their problem, you certainly didn't make the desert or the wrong map, but you're not really trying to fix the cause and you are benefiting from it. In that case, I would say that at the very least you have the moral responsibility to sell the water at a very decent price, and to make sure all your lost customers make it out alive.
My point is that mutually-beneficial exploitation has been known to be a very hard problem for a long time, and so we try to approach it on a case-by-case basis, and make sure we try to understand the full ethical picture. Simplified analogies don't help -- they remove nuance from a very nuanced question.
At the end of the day, if it's 'mutually beneficial', how could it possibly be 'exploitation'?
It's other people's job to make sure their map is good. If they had failed in doing so, i'm pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.
No, by "nuanced" I mean that in a system with such strong interaction between the components (anything can affect anything) there are always what you may consider "external" factors. People cloud the problem by artificially simplifying it when they don't consider the whole picture (usually just to make their decision easier).
> At the end of the day, if it's 'mutually beneficial', how could it possibly be 'exploitation'?
Wonderful question. Good thing that philosophers have debated it for many years, now. Read the link I provided for an intro to the discussion.
> It's other people's job to make sure their map is good.
That is one possible ethical position, but if you explore how it was constructed, you would see it is far from trivial. To help you along, consider the axioms that have led you to the conclusion and how you came up with them.
But consider a simple example: suppose that you notice some oil-spill on the sidewalk that you manage avoid stepping into. Do you have zero responsibility to warn others? If so why? If not, why not?
> i'm pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.
Sure, but that alone is not sufficient to absolve the dude from any moral obligation. Consider the case where the dude shoots your leg off and then offers to sell you a tourniquet. You would rather buy it than die, but that doesn't make him ethically right. This is a completely different question from that of mutually-beneficial exploitation, but it just shows why offering you a better choice is not enough. It also hints to why many consider mutually beneficial exploitation to be wrong (or at least to impose added moral responsibility on the exploiter): sometimes to consider ethics, it's not enough to consider two choices: sell you the tourniquet or not, but also other choices, such as not shooting you in the first place.
In my example of the man in the desert, the two choices are not just selling you water or not, but quite a few: helping ensure that the map is right (say, by writing a letter to the mapmaker), giving you the water for free, selling you the water for a low price, selling you the water for a fair price (for some definition of fair), selling you the water for a high price. Each of these many choices has their own ethical value (things don't have to be binary). But understand this: the claim isn't that because you can always choose an even more ethical choice then a less-ethical one is "wrong", but that if you benefit by making a particular choice rather than a "better" one, that benefit may impose added moral responsibility on you.
But as I said, it's a very complicated topic.