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> Engaging with the question itself is assuming responsibility.

This is a dangerous sentiment as it incentivizes people to not engage with such questions in order to avoid the accompanying duty, which cannot be known before considering the question.

+1

What makes the manager responsible is not the engagement with the question but the power and responsibility that comes with being the shift manager.

What makes the manager responsible is being a human who is aware of danger they might reasonably be able to protect other humans from.

Responsibility comes with power. Especially when managers have the power to put psychological pressure on employees to work faster, and for longer hours and therefore disregard safety procedures.

It is very unfair to hold other employees to the same standard of accountability.

One could read your reply as saying that people want to dodge responsibility, though. It's a double edged sword.

To be clear the question is not “is this morally questionable?” but rather “I know this is morally questionable, is there a way for me to avoid responsibility?”

Otherwise I am having a bit of difficulty actually untangling your comment.

By putting a burden on people who know something is “morally questionable,” you are discouraging people from taking actions which might reveal such knowledge to them. In the hypothetical you posted, the manager is not in a position to avoid this knowledge.

By your logic, an activist that knows about the conditions inside the plant is also responsible for the safety of the workers, and no action other than successfully protecting the workers will satisfy that responsibility. In this framework, it’s better for an outsider to actively avoid learning about the working conditions because it might impose a duty that’s impossible to fulfill.

This is a tortured misreading of what I’m saying - and regardless is addressed by my argument.

> you are discouraging people from taking actions which might reveal such knowledge to them

If you are deliberately and knowingly avoiding that knowledge to escape culpability then that’s morally equivalent to having the knowledge but failing to act. A police sergeant who says “get a confession, and if you rough him up don’t tell me about it” might be protecting themselves from legal responsibility but certainly not moral responsibility.

Again: there isn’t a loophole here. Constructing a loophole is itself immoral.

> By your logic, an activist that knows about the conditions inside the plant is also responsible for the safety of the workers

No - the manager has substantially more capacity to act than the activist. There is some fuzziness - is the activist is deliberately suppressing information about conditions inside the plant then they do share responsibility. But if the activist is merely ineffective then it’s not reasonable to blame them for injuries or fatalities. This is not a question that’s amenable to algorithms or flowcharts, which seems to be giving you some difficulty.

> and no action other than successfully protecting the workers will satisfy that responsibility.

This is not what my logic said at all! It’s such a ridiculous misreading that I wonder if you are arguing in good faith. I didn’t say the manager had to successfully protect the worker, but that they had to try. If machine maintenance is the responsibility of another team then perhaps the manager could do everything right and still have a worker killed. No one human can solve every problem that might come up. But if the manager knew there was a risk and did nothing, not even taking a look, then they share moral responsibility with the team actually responsible for maintaining the equipment. There is a huge difference between “the firefighters failed to stop the fire because it got too dangerous” and “the firefighters failed to stop the fire because they went out drinking,” even if in the latter case the fire was hopeless.

Again - you really can’t lawyer or logic your way out of moral responsibility, even if it works on a legal or social level. And no, there isn’t a foolproof algorithm for determining moral questions like this. But if your approach is “where are the gaps in this moral framework that lets me get away with bad things?” then you are not interested in acting morally.

I think the OP is concerned with the question "how do I create incentive-compatible moral codes", not "how do I behave given a moral code". In economics theres lots of cases when these two questions are very different questions in a pretty counterintuitive way (except with "laws" replacing "moral codes")

I interpreted it that way too.

Ultimately, you can try and build a perfect theoretical moral framework, but if it disagrees too much with how people feel about it in aggregate, it won't take (and you'll do more wrong than good by trying to force-feed it to people). It's e.g. one of the bigger failing of communism - it turned out that the concept of private ownership is close to fundamental to humans[0], so the then-new system failed as soon as people with guns stopped enforcing it.

--

[0] - Don't know why, but my pet hypothesis is that it's fundamental to each of us to be able to think about some things as "it's mine, I control it, I'm responsible for what happens to it". Might have been necessary to survival - if there are things your life depends on, you want to have absolute say about what happens to them, so that they are always there when you need them the most.

If I understand you correctly, moral culpability arises independently of your knowledge (or lack thereof) of the actual situation. Instead, it comes from your ability to effect change; even if unforseen (or unforseeable?), you are responsible for the difference between the actual outcome and the best outcome that could have been had you acted differently.

What I don’t understand is how awareness of potential responsibility or the act of grappling with moral questions factors into this model.

> Engaging with the question itself is assuming responsibility.

I would argue the exact opposite. Let's stay at the factory analogy: If I'm shift manager and never think about the kinds of accidents that could occur under my supervision and something happens then that's criminal negligence. If I consider the risks, put appropriate safeguards in place, and something still happens them I'm innocent. Accidents happen and I did what I could.

Of course if I recognize the risk and choose to do nothing we are getting into manslaughter territory, much worse than negligence; but assuming I'm actually striving to mitigate risks where possible I'm in a much better position by engaging with them.

The same should be true of moral risks. Simply not thinking about them is no solution.

I believe you misread my argument in the same way that kd5bjo did above and you should see my response to them.

In a later response I specifically addressed the difference between knowing there’s a risk and doing nothing vs taking action that proves inadequate.

Somewhat agree, but this gets tricky fast. Everyone only has so much time, so how can you tell how much time is appropriate to spend investigating problems that you're only generally aware of? And what about the opportunity cost of all of the things you didn't do instead? Does it matter if the factory produces things that save other people's lives? How much time should you spend trying to figure out how much time you should spend determining whether the safety problem at the factory is worth pursuing?

(I've faced this problem directly at work before.)

> Engaging with the question itself is assuming responsibility.

This explains why at any major software company looking up for similar patents is actively discouraged.

> Engaging with the question itself is assuming responsibility.

Isn't this commonly referred to as the 'Copenhagen interpretation of ethics' ?

It is, and I think that's where GP went a bit too general in his conclusions, which I otherwise share.

The problem with CIoE is "the other observer" - the other people, that judge you for not sacrificing 100% of your resources to deal with an issue that's far outside your area of responsibility, but that you noticed and dared to help with (or even comment on it). That's no way for a society to work. Completely untangling what's wrong with this view is nontrivial, and touches upon a similar question of why won't you, or me, sell all what we have, give it to the poor, and forever live in poverty (as Jesus would want us to).

In this case, I think GP meant a more complex relationship than the word "aware" in "if you are aware of potential ethical or moral liability" would make you think. I think they meant "aware" as "aware in detail and having power to meaningfully affect the outcome".

I'm aware of a lot of bad things that happen on the other side of the planet, that are not in any way caused by me, and which I have no good way of helping with. So I don't think bad about deprioritizing them in favor of things I can help with, as there are countless other people like me over there, who are both aware and able to help with the problem.

Also what matters is the scale and scope of the problem. A manager at a plant can, by their own action or inaction, cause people to get hurt, or prevent that from happening. In this case, not only ignoring the problem they know about is morally wrong, but also doing steps to avoid ever learning about a hazard is itself doing wrong. But that same manager won't single-handedly solve the housing crisis in their city, so I wouldn't blame them if they decided to stop reading news to preserve their sanity.

WRT. consulting businesses, I'd say the knowledge about how they're screwing up companies (and countries) is known, but not widely enough to blame a random new college hire (you have to contrast that with the marketing these companies do to attract employees - so I'd redirect some of the moral responsibility towards people who know and work to get others involved). Joining despite knowing about these things? That's another thing entirely.