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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

An awkward situation, for sure. However, after a lady in my community killed herself (she was on some prescribed drug), a friend of mine in the industry explained his view.

Apparently, these drugs can cause some people to kill themselves. But they also cause some users to recover, meaning they're less likely to commit suicide. It wasn't clear how exactly this balance was measured, but the net effect can be positive.

Still raises some hard questions along the lines of the trolley experiment. Who gets to live, and who gets to die? And what about the fact that we don't even know who it is that will get better or worse?

Regarding coding, the coder is only really able to quit because the market is good. Plenty of people along the same economic chain that led to this are in more precarious job circumstances.

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I think the real ethical issue from the author's perspective is not whether or not the drug should be allowed to exist and be prescribed even though it causes some deaths, but rather the loss of informed consent (a quiz that purports to make a personalized recommendation but actually just always recommends the drug) and the skirting of legal regulations (the country forbids marketing drugs to consumers but this supposed "general information" site is actually stealth marketing).

Similar thought: should you have a moral quandry about doing work for a car company, given that 1.25 million people per year are killed in road traffic incidents.

Yes

This takes you down a never-ending and unproductive rabbit hole. We really aren't equipped to encompass the totality of the effects of any particular action we take, which will invariably, at some point in the chain of consequences, have adverse impacts on someone, somewhere.

I'd focus on the difference you're making. Are you making drivers, passengers and bystanders more or less safe than they'd be if someone less skilled was doing your job? Given that new cars tend to be substantially safer all round than older cars, I'd say most of the industry is in the clear. OTOH anyone encouraging people to buy heavier cars than they need should probably think things through pretty carefully.

It depends. If the people are dying because the cars we make have break pads that haven't been certified as safe, and the reason they aren't certified is my boss said to not do it coz certification raises our costs by $1000 per car, yeah, I'd be bothered. Big as they come moral quandary.

> It wasn't clear how exactly this balance was measured, but the net effect can be positive.

That can certainly be the case; of course, once we develop websites with the purpose of having as many people as possible take those drugs, their likelihood of being harmed grows and their likelihood of recover go down.

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