Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

I took a computer ethics philosophy course in college because I am into computers/programming as a hobby and I am also very much into philosophy.

I was the only English major/Philosophy minor in the class. Every other student was a computer science or IT systems major.

I was pretty shocked how lenient of an innate moral compass most possessed, I don't expect folks to be Kantian justicars by default, but C'mon. The vast majority seemed to align with the sort of base, selfish utilitarianism pervasive in America that eventually leads to "if it isn't breaking some law or as long as there's a loophole its good if it makes me money/benefits me or if it benefits a sheer greater quantity of people regardless of how horrendous the consequences are for those it doesn't benefit"

Nonetheless it was a fun class as we primarily looked at real life cases. As with other industries, some of the shit people pull is baffling--guess that's the result of years of delegating any ethics education whatsoever to the home/parental responsibility or to religion. Another reason I think a foundational education in philosophy should be mandatory in high schools across the US, if not junior high, just as some foundational education in computer science should also be mandatory these days.

I agree somewhat but I think it's a wider social problem - the society in general not really looking down on this kind of behavior. Especially from Americans, you often hear stuff like:

- the company has a duty to make the most money possible legally for its shareholders, so we shouldn't criticize them for doing something shitty as long as it doesn't break the law

- the employee can't be expected to lose their job over ethics, so no matter how shitty what they did was, they get a pass

So when a company does something shitty, nobody did anything wrong, as long as it was legal! The employees have to feed their children, the higher-ups have to do what's best for shareholders, and the shareholders are too detached from the company to blame.

Consider how sad it is that a massive amount of people literally holds the view that a financial incentive makes otherwise unethical behavior OK. Nobody will say that the fact that cheating on your wife is legal means it's ethical. But as long as you are getting paid for doing something shitty, it's not seen as unethical as long as it's perfectly legal by a lot of people.

When people who are not even benefiting from them are defending shitty actions, you can't expect better from the people who are benefiting, as they have an additional incentive to be unethical.

The idea that an economic incentive is an excuse to do something shitty needs to go away.

Good point. I find this sort of attitude is really hard to root out too once it's ingrained. I have one friend who I argue with all the time because, coming from a family of small business owners himself, he is always rushing to the defense of businesses and their less than venerable actions even when, as you said, he himself doesn't directly benefit from said seediness. No matter how many times I've tried to get him to see things from a more humanistic/humanitarian side, that "best for business" bug in him seems impossible to eradicate. It's like he's been indoctrinated to the point where it's become as fundamental and ineradicable as a biological survival instinct.

People come to take certain values as constitutive of living a 'meaningful' life and sleep on ever questioning them until it's far too late to really challenge them any more, then pass them off, unquestioned and unanalyzed, to their kids, and the rat race continues...

>"selfish utilitarianism"

I get it, you're a Kant stan but come on, that phrase is literally oxymoronic.

Hehe fair enough.

There is an argument latent here drawing upon Horkheimer's observations that the collective, under the increased technologization and automation of society, has become a proxy for the individual, or perhaps more accurately replaced the romantic/enlightenment notion of individual, which would indeed cause a sort of paradox in which utilitarianism, the collective being by proxy identified with or being an extension of the self, would be selfish.

All that aside, I was not being precise in my terminology--I was simply trying to express that most of the students were utilitarian so long as a few conditions held: (a.) they were either in the group that benefited or persons they know/social groups they interact with benefited and (b.) they were not in the minority that suffered negative effects form the utilitarian decision to simply benefit the majority. (c.) They could somewhat offload responsibility for the moral choice by claiming they were simply making a more 'objective' decision by working based on quantities and benefiting the majority (in reality as per (a.) often really just working off a sublimation of their own interests)

Now, sophisticated utilitarians who actually know what they are talking about don't fall prey to this sort of stuff--I'm talking about the average American who is utilitarian to the extent he heard the term summarily defined once and now considers the benefit to the majority the de facto best choice in every situation and does so with little reflection--as stated prior, his utilitarian bent often suddenly disappears when he suffers as the minority in the decision or when he isn't a member of the benefited majority (in which case he simply doesn't take a stance and considers the decision to not concern him).

Similar charges could probably be leveled against Kantians, but I think Kant's theory enjoys a bit more immunity from these sorts of adherents as it has not been popularized like utilitarianism--chances are you'll come across the term 'utilitarian' in everyday life at some point whereas you're not likely to hear anything about Kantian morality outside of an academic, or perhaps in a rare case judicial, context.

I am a dual CS/Philosophy major, and this is my take as well (with respect to the general moral attitudes of my CS peers).

I've been agitating for an ethics class in my own department for about a year now, to little effect. Reactions to my proposal have ranged from sheer disinterest ("ethics? who cares?") to snark ("not until the next big scandal") to outright (admittedly plausible) dismissal ("we'd have to remove something else from the syllabus"). It's been disheartening, to say the very least.

This is giving entirely too much credit to coursework. When the ethos of the entire culture is "f-you, I've got mine", adding a philosophy course in high school is going to be like pissing in the ocean.

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