“Ethics” and Ethics
ia.net
ia.net
Given a certain situation where a company is acting in what you perceive as being a non ethical way there is absolutely zero chance of you finding out the causes, never mind solutions. Even for a "small" 400 people company there are so many variables, interconnections, processes, etc, that a human mind cannot create a reasonable working model and then debug it even if all the cards are on the table facing up. Which they are not.
Instead what I think works is looking at the big picture: do you agree with the end result? Is the service/product of decent quality, are customers happy, are they being taken advantage of, are workers ok, etc. If not, the same beast will eat you too and any thought of changing it is pure fantasy.
This way of thinking too has obvious problems. If you apply it to government departments for example you would quickly leave only the cynics there making it worse. In some cases you have to work from within. But in many cases draining the brains from a tech company will kill it fast enough.
But an even deeper problem seems to me that modern people are quire amoral. They keep buying/using service/product or work for a company if it benefits them financially while complaining in small talk discussions.
“You’re an asshole.”
“No, I’m right, I earn more than you.”
I’m not a Facebook employee, but: I doubt it? The vast majority of people have no problem with Facebook or what it does. People with a big focus on privacy don’t like it, but the existence of Facebook as a profitable enterprise is proof that there are plenty of people outside this set.
I think the big issue that is often swept under the rug here are that different people have different morals, especially at the margins. Sure, almost everyone agrees on murder. But there are legitimate disagreements in the privacy space, especially when no concrete harm has been demonstrated.
For example, my personal moral stance on privacy is that, if someone is voluntarily using a platform, and that platform had terms that include some items which would tend to reduce the person’s privacy, that’s fine. As long as there is responsible disclosure, adults should be free to use or not use services as they see fit.
Most people don't have enough knowledge to make an ethical judgement about it. So we do what's convenient and assume it's ok.
That's why I prefer to have proficient regulatory bodies with domain expertise to set rules, rather than expect for market forces ("vote with your dollar") to select for ethical options. Consumers can't be expected to make those choices, not at scale.
So I'm not convinced that "privacy" is really so controversial, even if people keep using Facebook. They don't know how facebook works, or in which ways its business practices "innovated" beyond the status quo that preceded it. Also, most people aren't interested in taking part in a futile boycott of something, even if they'd prefer for it to be restricted/banned for everyone.
I can’t say I agree. People are more than sufficiently knowledgeable to form broad strokes viewpoints about the morality of Facebook. Of course, the details would need to be fleshed out if it were determined that FB were operating outside the popular moral framework. That’s what regulatory bodies are for.
The formation of a regulatory body should be contingent on the presence of a widely held moral viewpoint. If such a viewpoint is not widely held, then the regulatory body does not reflect the will of the people, and its mandate is suspect.
1) Organizations are built of individuals, and while the individuals can hold strong moral standpoints, it is difficult for an organization as a whole to do so. It is also difficult for individuals to promote taking a moral standpoint as an organization, or in many cases to even notice the incongruity between their personal morals and the morals of their organization.
(This points reminds me of the banality of evil. And I think it is a valid point, and something we should be on guard about if we want our personal values to match the values of the products we create.)
2) It is easy to dismiss moral concerns in business as being something that the market will figure out for you. That is not necessarily the case.
(I have found throughout my own career that many companies are willing to appeal to a morality that is somewhere along the lines of "whatever we can get away with is our moral boundary." Measuring the morality of a decision by public approval of/success in sales as a result of that decision. That is far removed from actual moral judgment, particularly when public approval is so easily swayed by factors that are separate from whether the subject in question is helpful or even actively harming them. See cigarette lobbying until their false claims were finally debunked and their lobbying efforts exposed in the 90's. [As a side note, I'm curious who would argue that the efforts the cigarette industry made throughout the last century to spread misinformation should be considered "free speech" and their ability to do so a preservation of "personal liberty"? Let's see what pops up in the comments.])
3) We have a duty to think more actively about whether our morals align with the morals of our company, and to make that known if we would like to see that change.
There are other points that might be more interesting to those with a design-oriented focus toward the bottom of the article, but these three were the points that I took home from it.
The moral crisis is people trying to reign in those values, not in the construction of platforms that enable them.
Calls to further regulate content on the internet are immoral to many.
But none of that really comes into play with liberty and freedom of speech in a way that I can mesh. That much is a tangential subject. I'd be more concerned on that end if the article's conclusion was that the government should tell us what is moral, but it is asking us to think more about what we consider to be moral.
If your morals tell you that the way your company makes money is okay, then your morals are in alignment and the article doesn't really apply in your situation.
Yep, this is the point I was making. I think a lot of people are in this situation. It’s not that they’re cogs in an amoral machine, it’s that they are actually morally aligned with their company and striving to make the world a better place (in their vision).