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Comment by baalimago | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Peter Handke's recent Nobel prize in literature, where the committee were/are heavily criticized for judging only by literature, and not by Handke's political viewpoints.

Maybe politics doesn't need to be involved in every single part of society, only the political aspects of it.

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What are the bounds of the “political aspects” of society though and how are they negotiable? If we’re to preclude “politics” from the workplace, we would have to have also explain how most of the rights we enjoy as workers are the direct byproducts of labor struggle and its “politicization” of the economy and business practices.

I tend to think of everything in life as political in some way. After all, politics is the fundamental question of how power is distributed in the world. However, even if you don't subscribe to this view, I would argue that work and the workplace are one of the more political spaces.

I agree that it isn't easy to be political in the workplace, and it is often better to keep your head down. But think about all the posts here on HN about workplace issues: compensation, toxic bosses, dubious or unethical product and design choices...and so on. All of these things are political because they involve people exercising their power on others, and other people organizing to take that power back.

If a workplace is political space.. Can it discriminate based on political stance?

Politics is very important to many people, and conflicts may arise because, when confronted on something that they value, people tend to get emotional.

These conflicts are rarely pretty, and I'd like my workplace to avoid them as much as possible.

Yes politics is about all of us. Trying to limit speech in the office to the football game last night is like saying we prefer our employees to avoid intellectual subjects in their discussions.

Politics is about what is WRONG and what is RIGHT. It is about ETHICS. Saying you can not discuss politics is saying you can not talk about what is wrong and what is right.

The logo of Gitlab should now be the 3 monkeys; See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak (about) no Evil.

Can you expound upon which aspects of society are political and which are nonpolitical? The Supreme Court is currently considering whether or not companies can discriminate on sexual orientation, just as it had done for race and religion. What do you say to such people whose identities are inherently political?

I think his point is that any aspect of a person not directly related to the question at hand should be off-limits. In his example, that would mean that the literature should be judged on its own merits, without any reference to the character or activities of its author.

Which seems to me like a reasonable and consistent ethical position. However, it does have some consequences that might be hard to stomach. Such as, that selling computers to the Nazis would be an acceptable activity, even knowing what they intended to use them for.

I don’t understand how exactly a person can consider themselves ethical when they knowingly assist in performing actions they find unethical - it seems like a contradiction that people find bearable as long as they themselves aren’t directly impacted by that decision. It sounds more like dressing up amorality than it does a principled morality.

I suppose the viewpoint is best viewed from a system design perspective. Do we want each cog responsible for producing widgets to be making independent ethical evaluations of those up and down stream from them in the process? Or do we want to have our cogs be amoral, and have a "morality" module somewhere else that deals with those kinds of questions?

To be clear, i'm not sure if I subscribe to this perspective. But I can see its appeal.

If you’re amoral and don’t care where your revenue comes from as long as you follow the law you should say so. But you definitely shouldn’t champion yourself as having values above and beyond the letter of the law if those value don’t inform your actions. But it sounds like GitLab is trying to hide it’s amorality and market itself to perspective customers and employees that it does have some kind of moral code.

I don't think it's amorality per se. I would characterize it more as having the humility to defer to the structures society has in place for addressing those sorts of things.

But society doesn't have a "morality module" "in place" that people can just outsource their moral judgement to.

Well, I think that's arguable. At least in the US, we live in a democracy. That democracy sets up the structures to regulate business. One could argue that if our democracy has not decided collectively that we should not do a certain thing, it is not the place of corporations to regulate that thing by refusing to do business with it.

Is it ethical for a doctor to provide medical help to someone they find unethical? Would it be moral if it refused to help someone because of different political stance?

If your ethical framework would approve of selling computers to the Nazis knowing they’ll use them to commit genocide… maybe find a new ethical framework?

Did IBM actually know that the Nazis were committing / going to commit genocide when they sold the computers?

It's a diametrically opposite situation.

Handke was hand-picked by a panel to receive some special benefit.

Gitlab offers a mass service which essentially anyone can use; any denial of the service would require searching out individuals to penalize from among the masses.

Giving someone public recognition also gives recognition to anything that person might say. If they are known for believing that killing certain groups of people is okay, then giving them recognition is inherently political.

> Maybe politics doesn't need to be involved in every single part of society, only the political aspects of it.

Sure, but when the "political aspect" involves denying a known genocide that's something that many of us aren't willing to ignore.

And I say that as someone who has enjoyed Handke's work.

Sorry, but he shouldn't get a pass for what he said in the 90's. He, of all people, should have known better.

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