Ethics can’t be a side hustle
deardesignstudent.com
deardesignstudent.com
https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to...
Data for Democracy came up with an ethical code for data scientists and is now talking it up asking people to sign on to it. The thing is basically the product a few months of working groups plus a day-long hackathon, and it's already been put out on the market, so to speak. So it's not surprising that they produced something that could, in many ways, actually run counter to their goals. I firmly believe the ethical code as written is itself unethical:
https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about...
What I've found amazing is that the community that built the D4D ethical code has been entirely unwilling to invite criticism of the code, or even engage with those who question it. The fact that willingness to entertain criticism and consider unintended consequences is actually one of the pillars of their ethical code makes it doubly troubling.
Engineering is even more diverse and penetrating, and software is merely a subset.
It ain’t scope.
Roughly 30% of US workers have mandatory occupational licensing before they can do their jobs. Licensed services have roughly 15% higher prices than nonlicensed ones. Most of those workers are not in safety critical jobs - on average an interior designer faces more stringent licensing requirements than an EMT.
Unions and professional associations have consistently been the main lobbyists advocating professional licensing as a way to keep wages high (by keeping supply low) and guarantee a role for the organization. Even in medicine, the number of residency slots is controlled in a way that creates a stable, minor shortage of doctors.
I'm not against all licensing and oversight, obviously. I'd rather have a cap on residencies than untrained doctors, if those are the only two choices. But the history of 'every other endeavor' looks to me like a lesson in how oversight organizations will cause exactly this problem.
Ethical software with less competition seems better than unethical software with more competition, eh?
If you want to take the required measures to not circumvent the gate-keeper, that is strangling the entire sector. Since most developed countries see this sector as the basis for future growth, so doing that seems unlikely. Beyond that, the growth would probably move to less restrictive places.
My worry wouldn't be "they'll cut down on competition to ensure ethical behavior", it would be "they'll block competition and protect their member instead of ensuring ethics."
I think the top-level essay here is extremely cogent: oversight is almost always limited to ensuring competence. In medicine, that gets us 'ethics' when ethics means "providing good care and avoiding bad care". (It hasn't gotten us ethics when the question is anything complicated, like defining mental illness.) Competence in data science and software is largely orthogonal to ethics, so I expect an oversight board would achieve very little in that regard.
The original Hippocratic Oath did a fairly good job of this by stipulating ways that a doctor could prove his competence. Doctors who adhered to the oath weren't better doctors because they had some kind of internal moral compass or external adjudicating body. They were better doctors because only the doctors who had competency to spare were willing to make the sacrifices that adherence to the oath required.
https://hackernoon.com/on-the-difficulty-of-creating-a-data-...
Ethical problems get solved (as much as that type of problem can ever really be "solved") by individual practitioners refusing to work with other individual practitioners who refuse to adhere to some basic best practices. That creates a network of competent and trustworthy individuals, who are still totally fallible, but who put their own practice up toe constant public scrutiny.
Ethical problems are problems of systemic risk. Systemic risk doesn't get solved through organizations.
> The governing body would not just be there to arbitrate, advocate, or negotiate. They would also be there for promoting training and sharing of knowledge.
this reads like duct-tape solutions. it's always the case that a governing body grows and grows and gets in the way. "it's not just there to XYZ, it also BLAHBLAHBLAH".
a governing body is one possible solution to the problem of people not understanding ethics (or how to figure out what ethics are), that I don't think will solve the larger problem.
a governing body will need to be run by practitioners of governance, and enforced by practitioners of enforcement.
ethics needs to be practiced everywhere, all the time. and a governing body won't make that happen.
people need to be learning about why their activities are "good" or "bad" or "questionable".
in my (simplified version) view: we're not lacking incentive to work (money!), we're lacking incentive to not work (people shouting at us for being assholes for doing asshole work [e.g. bombs, baby killing, evil algos]).
we need to cultivate behaviors of ethical culture... instead we're cultivating behaviors that promote short-term-ism (buy your way to happiness, bomb your way to safety, build your dream home on loan!, opportunity cost services saving us from having to cleaning up after ourselves, trash removal services that vanish things away to faraway dumps we never think of)
Software is unique in that it gives us the flexibility to fix bugs after shipping, unlike any other engineering field. Over the last few decades, we seem to have gotten increasingly carried away with emphasis on that feature. Also has to do with the incentive structure encouraged in SV.
https://towardsdatascience.com/data-is-a-stakeholder-31bfdb6...
It's not fool-proof, of course, and I think a change in perspective away from just moving fast and breaking things would be quite healthy for the industry as a whole.
There are lots of opportunities in software to take the ethical high road. Do I help the company try to sneakily get the user’s personal info? Do I help us cheat this benchmark? Do I hide our bugs by silently restarting the app when the user is probably not at his PC? (each of which I was asked to implement at one point in my career) Does what I’m programming sit well with my personal ethics and beliefs? I should be able to explain why I am writing the program i’m writing and be able to live with it. (EDIT)If I am the owner of a company and I’m interviewing someone and they worked at some company notorious for using dark patterns or anything else ethically questionable I think it’s fair game to ask about their involvement.
There's another problem: under certain viewpoints, it's unethical to not send the bastards to a concentration camp, gulag, etc.
I mean, if someone says "No moral viewpoints are more or less true than others; a person acts ethically as long as they think their actions are fully justified" and "People only do things they think are fully justified" then immoral action is impossible.
Honestly, adding disclaimers, hedges and requests for charitable readings in every reply gets old.
(eta: I see in my first reading of the thread parent that I missed a negation, which rather changes the sense of the thing. Prior statement stands, but I no longer feel the need to eye you suspiciously sidewise as I say it.)
I take your point, and I agree that it's worth separating debate over practicalities and small influences from debate over basic humanity. One allows for "but I still think you're well-intentioned" and the other doesn't, so only one can be sustainable within a community.
But... it's also worth remembering how far from universal even our consensus views are. I can think of a half-dozen contexts in the world today where people explicitly reject the proposition "it's wrong to murder people who haven't committed violent crimes". In many of those contexts, they're serious enough to actually go out and do that murder, and be judged favorably for doing so.
I don't disagree with you, I'm not going to knowingly invite those people over to dinner. I just think it's worth remembering how little of morality is certain across times and cultures.
unfortunately the US system combines the worst of both worlds. the few who are executed only die after years of agonizing "will they or won't they" through the various levels of appeal. and after all that we still end up exonerating people posthumously.
Many would argue it's unethical for anyone to make that decision on someone else's behalf. The fact that so many death row convicts appeal their death sentence until the bitter end would imply that they themselves don't agree with your belief.
it doesn't necessarily imply that. at each point in the appeal process, there remains the possibility of having one's case thrown out altogether or reducing the sentence even further than natural life. even if you prefer death to life in prison, it would still be rational to pursue any chance of getting out entirely or getting a substantially reduced sentence.
that said, if I could implement any policy I wanted, I would choose for life to be the most severe sentence but give the inmate the ability to choose death if they prefer.
Things seem less gray for the author's second example- developers at Palantir designing a workflow to help ICE round up immigrants. Of course there is room for counter-points in an argument about how best to handle an immigration crisis in any country (I say "crisis" because I see it as a crisis that we are doing so little to help) but at the end of the day, our individual actions need to be made on the basis of an single ethical black-or-white question, and history and indeed the present will not look favorably upon those who fail to act in the best interest of their fellow humans.
> Haidt and Craig Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality... From their review, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. According to Haidt and Joseph, each of the ethics formed a module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently.
Perhaps these four "building blocks" -- suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity -- are sufficient for an objective basis upon which an intersubjective understanding of morality can be determined.
Then again, even the notion of objectivity is questionable and culturally-dependent...
There's a big logical leap between (for example) observing that many cultures proscribe lying, and saying that one shouldn't lie.
See Arthur Leff's article: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2814/
1. Some philosophers have a descriptive ethic (this is what people do) rather than a prescriptive ethic (this is what people should do). This is certainly interesting, but it isn't what most people mean when they talk about ethics--it doesn't give us any guidance on how to behave ethically.
2. Some philosophers try to work backward to a prescriptive ethical principle from a set of ethical prescriptions which are widely accepted but, importantly, unproven. For example one might start from the prescriptions "murder and lying are wrong, giving and learning are right" and attempt to come up with a prescriptive ethic that unites these prescriptions. But "murder and lying are wrong, giving and learning are right" aren't objective facts even though they're widely accepted, so any prescriptive ethic that comes from these prescriptions can't be objective either. It's not coincidence, for example, that in the west, the atheist/moral realist philosophers mysteriously often start from Judeo-Christian prescriptions.
Even the "Christian Post" will agree he's "partly right": https://www.christianpost.com/news/atheist-sam-harris-right-...
That said, I haven't read the book you mentioned, so there might be something in that book which isn't in his talks which would persuade me.
I think there is such thing as an ethical Ideal, and my own ethics are an attempt to get as close to the ideal as possible. I like to think that they don't exist in a vacuum.
Selective enforcement of the law is actually unethical. If you don’t like it, you need to work to change it. Saying something is unethical just because you don’t like it is not rational. Moritality is personal, ethics are societal. Maybe your morals state open borders should be a thing, but our shared ethics don’t.
In this case, immigration law is messed up in both directions. Why do you feel like you feel like you should judge the side following the rules? Are the people who support the people following the law unethical too?
And Soldiers are legally obliged to not obey illegal orders
How do you feel about a living wage? Is it ethical to take action against people who cause wages to fall below a living wage? Note that wages go up when ICE removes people who are pushing wages down.
How do you feel about unemployment for black Americans? Is it ethical to help them by making more jobs available? ICE does that.
You can also agree with law and find agency tactics bad.
Maybe I find it despicable that I can't scam you out of money if you happen to be dumb enough to let me. There are actually cutlers int he world that are "shame on you if you get scammed"
That is the entire problem when you talk about ethics at all beyond a few truths that 99% of people can agree on.
So one could argue not following any law becomes unethical -- and the only ethical thing to do is follow the law until it is changed, which puts us at a interesting juxtaposition -- that sometimes you have to be unethical to be ethical!
This will always be the hard part of making rules or laws on things that are so subjective such as ethics.
There is wide agreement about many ethical questions through. I also think that ignoring ethics question completely is easy cop out - yes one should do it no matter what job.
I don't think that law and ethics is the same. I think that following law is ethical where law species competition rules (accounting, regulation etc).
I think the more ethical stance would be to advocate for changing the law.
I don't give "ethical pass" for not following law where you merely disagree with law or find it pointless or an obstacle to more money.
There is also difference between "breaking law" and "not joining effort to enforce the law". Again, if I find the law bad it might be unethical to join effort to enforce it, but it might still be fully ethical to follow the law and unethical to break it. For example, unnecessary hygiene food regulation.
Easy to see extreme example of law to break would be anti-jew law or fugitive slave law or something like that. The point is that breaking law is ok not merely when you disagree with law, but when it forces you to break ethics. Not just when you benefit from breaking it.
You could make a similar argument for any crime that results in prison time. Locking up murderers results directly in human misery and torn apart families. This case is far more severe: we don't allow the family to move into the prison to live with the criminal. We even separate nursing babies from their mothers.
I think the Uber example in particular assumes that following laws is itself essential. But opposing immigration laws and enforcement of them undercuts that axiom. I don't see how people resolve the tension there in a philosophically coherent way.
If we're that worried about abuse of power, we need a better conversation than "that guy is bad; vote for our guy". We need to talk about actually reforming systems, laws, and norms.
If you put personal ethics into a code, there are roughly two possibilities. One is that you put in things that were already censured at another level ("we oppose convicted serial killers") and nothing changes. The other is that you put in things which are actually contested ("we oppose all lawbreaking"), and then everyone who disagrees breaks away from the whole code, and probably benefits by working with people who support their stance.
A useful professional code tells you how to define malpractice, not immorality in general. Since professional censure and lost reputation are the consequences for breaking such a code, it had best be limited to actions which impugn the professional merit of the person committing them. That way, enforcing it is natural and self-interested; clients don't want to hire code-breakers, and other professionals don't want to be tainted by association.
I think medicine is instructive. People hold up the field as a successful example of bounding personal morality, but the Hippocratic Oath is very much a professional statement. It happens that professional behavior for doctors produces a very clear good - lives saved - but this is not actually a feature of the code. The Oath demands that the practitioner offer their subjects competence, confidentiality, and fiduciary duty; nothing more. Questions of personal morality in the workplace go unanswered, and so the Oath outlasted massive corrections in what is moral, like ceasing to treat homosexuality as an illness.
Appealing to personal morality in the workplace is fine, but it's not the same as appealing to a professional standard.
We can do ethical work within our current economic framework all day long, but that's not going to solve the most pressing ethical issues.
1. Every link is NOT compensated fairly. Wages have been stagnant for decades; meanwhile, the cost of everything else (especially housing) continues to rise, sometimes astronomically. $7.25 is the federal minimum wage, and it is impossible to live on.
2. Plenty of people are coerced into enduring terrible employment simply because they need to survive. I get it, Walmart needs employees too, but they should be in a union. It shouldn’t be possible to fire something and hire them back to start them back at the lowest pay grade (yes, this is a real thing they actually do).
3. Capitalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; nothing does. The Randian “well, everyone’s trading value for value” falls apart the minute you look at a $10,000 MRI bill, or a $7.25 minimum wage, or an entire city that’s been destroyed because production moved overseas. It doesn’t particularly matter how much stocking shelves “is worth”; if you are alive, you don’t deserve to live in squalor and poverty in the richest country in the world.
If I offer you $1 for your banana, and you agree and then we exchange the $1 and the banana, is that not fair?
> 2. Plenty of people are coerced into enduring terrible employment simply because they need to survive.
Are you arguing that 'providing for yourself' counts as coercion? What actor is doing the coercion?
> I get it, Walmart needs employees too, but they should be in a union. It shouldn’t be possible to fire something and hire them back to start them back at the lowest pay grade (yes, this is a real thing they actually do).
Are they agreeing to be re-hired?
> 3. Capitalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; nothing does. The Randian “well, everyone’s trading value for value” falls apart the minute you look at a $10,000 MRI bill, or a $7.25 minimum wage, or an entire city that’s been destroyed because production moved overseas.
Why? MRIs provide a lot of value! Minimum wage effort provides low value.
> It doesn’t particularly matter how much stocking shelves “is worth”; if you are alive, you don’t deserve to live in squalor and poverty in the richest country in the world.
Why? You're implying that being born in one place or another changes what you 'deserve' as a human being. That's an interesting, but scary line of thought!
Two individual actors agreeing to a price doesn't make the price fair, and it ignores the larger economic/political arena that surrounds them.
Following the MRI example: nobody in this thread is suggesting that those don't provide value.
One poster is suggesting that such expensive operations should be subsidized through other mechanisms that take the larger economic/political arena into account (living, capable workers provide more value than sick/dead ones).
The other poster is suggesting that a low-wage laborer doesn't deserve to have an MRI because they can't individually afford it. The latter is a weak argument intellectually (let's not even _try_ to develop new mechanisms that include more people), morally, and economically (assumes that markets are free, efficient, and devoid of history).
There is an argument to be made that the US' economic system is fair. I disagree with that position, but it isn't completely unreasonable.
But your argument simply "proves too much". Your definition of "agreement", for example, includes a hostage agreeing to pay the ransom. It would also cover child labor, any form of discrimination, selling yourself into slavery, the abolishment of all labor standards including safety laws, shrink-wrap TOCs, non-compete clauses, forced arbitration for all disputes etc. etc.
I'm not.
> There is an argument to be made that the US' economic system is fair.
I myself wouldn't agree that the US economic system is totally fair - there are cheaters/liars/coercion/exploitation everywhere. There are lots of things that are unfair, but choosing to work for minimum wage is not one of those things. An entrepreneur making 10000 more than someone else in the chain is also not one of those things, in my opinion.
> But your argument simply "proves too much". Your definition of "agreement", for example, includes a hostage agreeing to pay the ransom. It would also cover child labor, any form of discrimination, selling yourself into slavery, the abolishment of all labor standards including safety laws, shrink-wrap TOCs, non-compete clauses, forced arbitration for all disputes etc. etc
I'm deliberately excluding situations like this where actors are being coerced, so my examples do not include hostages, child labor, slavery, etc. Those are crimes for a reason and excluded here. See my original comment for where I omitted acts of coercion.
Not an apt comparison. We're in a world where one is forced to take employment in order to try to survive. Thus, people find them in the situation where they are forced to accept any deal or starve. There is no ethical world where you can call that fair.
That's very true. You must do something if you want to survive. Your chances of surviving probably go up if anyone else values that thing that you choose to do.
It seems like this argument has devolved into 'by existing, I should be able to survive at the status quo of the wealthiest nation on earth in human history.' If that's where we are at, I have nothing else to say.
For products that are actually made and sold in the same country that's not far from reality today. It's just that for most things, they are made in Asia, and income/wealth disparity means the US/Europe end of the chain "has to" take much more of the profits to survive. That doesn't mean its fair, or just, or ethical.
That 1000000x is what you get from allowing corporations of unlimited size. Each level of management will earn what the lower level earns times some factor... making it exponential as you climb the corporate ladder.
Huge corporation size also means you get corporations blackmailing congress to get bailouts. The typical huge corporation is also able to engage in monopoly/monopsony behavior.
To make things extra awful, the largest corporations are the ones that are most difficult to split up. They have political power. Enforcing our anti-monopoly laws mostly doesn't happen.
Possible fix: the larger the company, the higher the tax rate, causing companies to want to split themselves.
I think a great proposal is to make it easier to disrupt big corporations. But that's not generally the tone people have when discussing these issues.
Now is that problematic? It feels wrong they earn so much more than the average person. Notably, these people earn so much more; not because they are proportionally better. Instead, it is because people at their level are proportionally rarer (if we believe the article).
The question I have regards the value they add. We need these rare people to head huge companies, but why do we get these huge companies? Is it because they are just better economically (economies of scale), or is there some other force biasing companies to be larger.
That is a fundamentally huge misunderstanding of ethics, confusion between ethos and pathos. Ethics is about doing the right thing even if in opposition to your personal beliefs. There is nothing necessarily ethical about activities in fulfillment of a cause.
This isn't the problem I most prominently see in software with regards to ethics or product quality. I far more frequently see people half-assing product quality in order to make timelines and either keep their jobs or fulfill some qualitative metric that earns a larger annual bonus.
And what if you work at/for such a company, but you're not a programmer, but e.g. a cleaner, are making ends meet, and you're lucky to have a job in the first place?
Also, hypotheticals are fairly unhelpful compared to real cases.
Consider whether you would personally carry out the acts involved - would you defraud middle america for your own benefit? Would you fire on civilians on behalf of a dictator buying your product?
And the author means "angels" as in "people who share my very specific political beliefs".
> You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle.
If I was a US citizen, and had an opportunity to work on software that helped enforcing immigration law, I would feel pretty proud about it.
If you help design or write a portion of a product, you are a crucial part of bringing the system into reality. If you support and believe in the mission and ends of a product, there's no issue there.
The problem occurs when you work on a system that is designed to fulfill an outcome that you don't agree with, or one that you believe is bad for society. The author's thesis is clear: If you choose to contribute to the development of such a system, you cannot divorce yourself from the consequences that will follow when your work product is turned on.
[edit: I'm not arguing for moral relativism; I'm trying to separate the argument from the concrete examples given in the piece.]
The problem with these examples is that doctors and mechanics have a direct relationship with their customers while software developers do not. Not unless the developer is a freelancer.