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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it's necessary to do so. I don't think your inference makes any sense. Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns.

That said, I would certainly like to see them improve in this area. I'm a big fan of Tesla, but they are not without their flaws, and working conditions appear to be one of them. They should do better. Not because it somehow conflicts with their mission, but just because it's the right thing to do.

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> It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it's necessary to do so.

To paraphrase: "The ends justify the means".

I disagree. That road leads to all kinds of evil.

The key part of that, that makes it obviously morally correct is:

> if it's necessary to do so

There is no road in the context. It's either sacrifice the small group, or save the whole - that's the entire proposition. If you remove the necessity part, that changes the equation entirely.

> The key part of that, that makes it obviously morally correct is...

There's nothing obvious about it, look at the debates around assassinating Hitler for a historical example: http://theconversation.com/killing-hitler-when-is-assassinat...

>That road leads to all kinds of evil.

As long as we drive on that road on autopilot, no one will notice.

> It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it's necessary to do so.

Your confidently declared decree of fact here suggests that you have some sort of god view that allows you to see all possible outcomes and interactions in all possible worlds.

It's also possible that sacrificing the people who actually know how to make things in order to facilitate profit and ego will lead to the annihilation of the society.

Indeed. I don't think it's actually necessary here, hence why I think they should fix this.

> Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns.

I think that's contradictory. If you are setting out to save the world, but you can't improve factory conditions for your own workers, how have you shown the capability to save the world?

I'm reminded of having a strong AI agent that's given the condition "save humanity". That condition can be satisfied by having no humans on the planet to save.

>how have you shown the capability

It's irrelevant. Nothing you do for worker satisfaction in one factory demonstrates whether you can or cannot save the world. There is absolutely no contradiction in treating them separately. This doesn't excuse making workers unhappy, but it's really a separate issue.

Let me consider the opposite question: if you are setting out to save the world, and you can improve factory conditions for your own workers, how have you shown the capability to save the world?

It's just not relevant. It's a non sequitur. It's "A is bad, B is good, you're doing A, therefore you can't do B."

It is most certainly not contradictory. For example, one could make the argument that the allied effort against the Nazis in WWII was tantamount to "saving the world", yet the allied forces certainly didn't treat everyone in the most humane way possible -- see Japanese internment in the US, or the presumable "war crimes" that Allied forces committed in WWII. Yet that doesn't mean Allied forces weren't capable of destroying the Axis, which obviously is what happened.

A similar argument could be made about the Cold War and McCarthyism. It is simply nonsensical to mistake the goal of "saving the world" with the goal of "don't ever treat anyone slightly questionably ever again".

> It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole

Why then we don't revert to capturing slaves in poor countries and have them "save the whole" (like, recycle garbage by manual labour) while working 18 hr/day?

We can surely sacrifice their well-being in order to save the world for us, can't we?

From a strictly utilitarian point of view, we could go with "because it's impossible". Enslaving one group would only make things slightly easier for everyone else. In an alternate universe where we actually could solve huge problems by enslaving Belgium for three years then it might be worth it. I might even volunteer to help do the work.

Saving the world by exploiting Tesla factory workers seems equally impossible.

Yes, that's true, it's very unlikely it helps Tesla much in the first place. But if it could be done it would at least be worth having a discussion about the pros and cons.

I think the solution here is Human Rights and also Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative.

You can't use people as slaves unless situation is so that everybody has to become slave. Also, you can't use people as a tool (without their consent).

There's not much to discuss. We've been there already with Hitler's Work Camps and Stalin's GULAG Camps.

> You can't use people as slaves unless situation is so that everybody has to become slave. Also, you can't use people as a tool (without their consent).

> There's not much to discuss.

Since it's just an unrealistic though experiment, I wouldn't dismiss out of hand the idea of "enslaving" everyone for a short time for some kind of amazing outcome.

> We've been there already with Hitler's Work Camps and Stalin's GULAG Camps.

Ha. No. Neither of those gave enormous benefits to the world. And they killed people, not just put them through unpleasant working conditions. Completely noncomparable.

Well, Stalin used GULAG to dig river channels (Moscow channel for example), design planes and rockets. He just replaced HR department with arrest squads.

One can argue he had quite similar result in mind to the proposed electric-vechicle-enabling indentured servitude.

I don't think it would be excusable even if he avoided killing people while defaulting to raping and beating the crap out of them.

This is a very good point.

It's odd to get these extreme responses when I went out of my way to say that this behavior is wrong and they should change it.

I'm not defending Tesla's behavior. I'm just pointing out that it's not inherently contradictory.

Because the post you originally responded to was contrasting Tesla's (alleged) treatment of its employees with its save-the-world ethos in order to question the sincerity of the latter.

By adding the "if necessary" bit you turned it into a trolley problem which misses the point entirely.

It uses an extreme example to illustrate how the two are not contradictory. But you're right, I should have just gone straight for pointing out that they're not connected.

I think it's a little extreme to think one company and its electric cars are going to "save the world"...

I'm taking the hypothetical from the parent comment and running with it, not assuming it must be true.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"

  -- Star Trek II, The Wrath of Kahn.

Whenever I see this argument, I always ask the same question:

Which position would you take in the line of people to be sacrificed? How much sacrifice are you willing to put up with? Not other people, just you.

Your point is extremely well presented. I see that those with no counterargument resort to downvotes, because that is all that people of small minds and reasoning can do, downvote.

If it was necessary? Sure, I'd volunteer.

I don't think it's necessary in this case, as I think my original comment made quite clear. There just isn't an inherent contradiction between these two things.

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