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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

I see the same issue with the other debate raging on HN: Stallman and Free Speech.

The issue is that people -- not sure whether it was OP, or you -- conflate what is moral with what is legal.

One person starts off with a moral premise: people should have free speech, or people should have the right to say what the government is doing.

Someone else responds with what is legal: the law applies to government curtailment of free speech, or there was a contract in place.

Laws should reflect values, not vice-versa. What is legal should not be confused with what is right.

Note: I am not taking a moral position myself here. I just wish the legal position would not short-circuit the debate about what the correct moral position ought to be.

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> ... conflate what is moral with what is legal.

We're not dealing with an authoritarian state. Laws by democratic governments are supposed to be mutable.

It's possible say, that the laws haven't caught up to what we (as americans) consider moral. Or it's possible the laws themselves were driven by immoral actors. Or it's possible the law's were passed with good intentions but had side effects that were unforeseeable. Or it's just one big gray area -- which seems to be the case here.

People argue that Snowden's act was moral in the most absolute sense to inform the nation and expose the Government's secrets.

James Comey, someone I think to be of high moral standards, knew about the program [1] yet didn't release the information to the public. He refused to reauthorize the post 9/11 surveillance program -- going to extraordinary lengths to do so.

So what are we to do? Is it more moral to work within the system to change the laws, or to break them entirely?

[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-mueller-comey-ash...

Edited for clarity and succinctness.

> So what are we to do? Is it more moral to work within the system to change the laws, or to break them entirely?

The United States would not even exist without the latter. Imagine if the founding fathers had tried to "worked within the system" of British rule instead of carrying out what the latter would have considered an extraordinary act of treason.

Previous whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Bill Binney tried to work within the system, and that didn't exactly go very well. Snowden learnt from their experiences that the only way to achieve any meaningful outcome was to break the law. I imagine if there had been a viable means for him to bring the issues to public attention legally he might have done so.

> Imagine if the founding fathers had tried to "worked within the system" of British rule.

Technically they couldn't since the colonies were without representation in the British Parliament, so they really couldn't, could they?

> Previous whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Bill Binney tried to work within the system...

Sure but the Obama administration still looks bad for their handling of those whistleblowers. Binney and Drake still look like heros. No one said that whistleblowing was for the faint of heart. Nor were there any guarantees about your livelihood if you report on your employer or customers.

The only whistleblower statute I've known to be effective has been around medicare fraud -- first because medicare fraud is in the tens of billions, and second the reportee get's a cut of any future settlement or judgement.

It's unclear what Snowden's legacy will be. Sure, he informed us that the government might have been doing illegal things under the cloak of secrecy. But he released a lot of information and he didn't even try to go through the legal whistleblower channels first.

If he had gone through whistleblower channels I think it would have been harder for the US to use the word "traitor" to describe him.

> conflate what is moral with what is legal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

I don't think this is the "is ought" problem. Most people recognize the existence of ought, and ought is explicitly recognized as a pre-condition for legal authority.

That is to say that we all expect, whether it is justified or not from a philosophical perspective, that ought both exists and that it should be related to legality.

In a free country established by the principle of self government they are more closely related than anywhere else.

I agree with your observation and statement, but also want to add there is a moral argument that if one objects to a law or a contract, one should remove oneself from under it (leave the country/company) rather than break it, even if the law itself is immoral.

Not that I'm arguing one way or another how that applies in this situation, though.

There the concept of civil disobedience. You don't simply leave a country because you disagree with it, you change it. Refer to the King and the civil rights movement for more. Go further back to the other Martin Luther for even more.

There is also the option of ignoring it (piracy vs IP laws) and subverting it (many communities refuse to work with cops and handle justice themselves).

These are as illegal as civil disobedience (refusing to work with cops might be more legal in some countries). As to if they are more or less moral... what moral framework are we using to judge?

We all have our own moral compass.

I'm pretty sure the Declaration of Independence (1776) was also unlawful as well...

This leaves us at a problem. Legality seems far too poor a standard to judge actions upon outside of court (and sometimes even in court), yet any moral standard is quite subjective to each person. So how do we determine right or wrong? There is a reason this has been an open problem for all of recorded history.

>You don't simply leave a country because you disagree with it

Some do. See: secessionists or separatists. For historical examples, the English religious separatists who moved to Holland. Or the Confederates in the American Civil War.

To be clear, I'm not defending their position or arguing whether or not this is better than civil disobedience, but clearly there is a separatist/secessionist school of moral thought.

For many changing it might be more practical than leaving it. For some like many refugees the choice was leave or die.

Isn't the concept of political refugees contrary to what you are saying?

The way I see it, we acknowledge that sometimes a government can act outside of it's own boundaries in a repressive manner. That is why we help those who are fleeing persecution based on political activity.

Saying you can't push for change and run away when repression comes would mean that a lot of people I admire, including the Dalai Lama, are bad people. I disagree.

There's a difference between saying it's OK to flee repression, which I don't think anyone is disputing, and saying that given the option to flee, it's immoral to instead stay and practice civil disobedience, which was the claim made up thread.

Thanks for clarifying. It seems I was wrong in my understanding.

Bystanders may be interested in Kohlberg's stages of moral development, which provides a descriptive (not prescriptive) framework for classifying moral arguments like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_...

The parent comment is a textbook example of stage 4, "law and order". The moral framework behind civil disobedience is stage 5, "social contract".

Snowden did leave both the company and the country, though.

> I agree with your observation and statement, but also want to add there is a moral argument that if one objects to a law or a contract, one should remove oneself from under it (leave the country/company) rather than break it, even if the law itself is immoral.

There may exist a moral argument, but it's pretty easy to disprove that argument: In Nazi Germany, this principle would leave one to just leave Nazi Germany, otherwise cooperating with the Nazis.

The principle you're proposing would have led to the demise of many more Jews during WW2.

> would have led to the demise of many more Jews during WW2

That maybe has some implicit assumptions. If the entire populace of German adopted what you call the "principle", Germany would have fallen much faster and with less bloodshed.

Regardless...moral choices are usually pitted against other moral choices and that's part of what shapes our moral "fiber", for lack of better vocabulary. To do something or do nothing, both have risk analysis. Mostly, we do our best with what we have learned...which also greatly influences what we imagine for the future.

> That maybe has some implicit assumptions. If the entire populace of German adopted what you call the "principle", Germany would have fallen much faster and with less bloodshed.

I suppose you're right, but I don't think the assumption that there won't be a mass exodus is a very unreasonable assumption. Many reasonable ethical principles would have prevented the Nazis from even coming into power if everyone in the country applied it. I think if you were in Nazi Germany and as the Third Reich came to power it would be unreasonable to choose an ethical strategy that only works if everyone applies it, since in the moment, everyone was clearly not applying an ethical strategy.

We do have the benefit of hindsight here, though.

> To do something or do nothing, both have risk analysis. Mostly, we do our best with what we have learned...which also greatly influences what we imagine for the future.

Agreed, ethics is very situational, which is why trying to find widely-applicable rules is often a wild goose chase.

Sticking to your principles works on an individual level, you can't generalize to what the effect of that would be on the whole population. There were plenty of 'good' Germans who refused to become part of the madness. Plenty of them ended up just as dead as the victims on the other side of the conflict.

And in the end it did not matter much. But one thing is for sure: they kept their conscience clean and that counts for something as well.

> And in the end it did not matter much.

I'd have to disagree with you there.

I spent time in Israel and in Brooklyn, and I've personally met at least 3 Jews who were alive when I met them because of good Germans/Austrians who broke Nazi law to help them escape.

I think HN often concerns itself with whole populations because a lot of what we're talking about is public policy, and policies at large corporations, which do affect large populations. But the fact is that for most people, the ethical choices we get to make only touch a few people at a time.

Fair enough. In the aggregate the effect must have been substantial for you to know three people like that.

Does that mean every government agent that broke the law and spied on American citizens should be deported?

"leaving a country" in terms of being subject to its laws is rather a lot easier said than done.

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