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Comment by Nbox9 | Hacker News Reader

People sometimes do bad things, and aren’t held accountable.

Sometimes, these unaccountable things are secret. Some secrets will remain secrets. The secretes that will become public knowledge are my worrisome.

It’s common to do bad things and be unaccountable for them — from your own actions or the actions you take on behalf of the group. Society is best when people think about how their worst actions effect other people. If we all try to help each other, surely we can find a way.

This is my dummy translation, and it doesn’t hold a flame to the remorse, regret, and hope of the original.

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> Society is best when people think about how their worst actions effect other people.

In our day to day lives, I use this as a basic character test of both individuals and societies. People fail this inductive-thinking test - "If everyone did what I am about to do, would I like to live in the society that would result?" - all the time. Signs of failure range from lack of civic sense (litter, rash driving etc) all the way to climate change and social collapse.

If everyone went into software engineering, we would all starve to death. There are very few things that society could survive “everyone” doing - a diversity and balance of complementary behaviors are important.

It makes more sense as a rule applied to moral judgements c.f. Immanuel Kant's Universalisability.

Sure, but there are plenty that apply. Driving sensibly, not littering and behaving properly in a queue are such basic examples that going as far as "everyone becoming a software engineer" seems a little disingenuous.

Or as the bible so aptly put it:

> Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

> "If everyone did what I am about to do, would I like to live in the society that would result?"

I think about it differently. I look at things and think "is this system set up so that it is easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing?" I think it is easy to look at problems and point out individual "moral failings" as the cause, but data doesn't really support that in the big picture in most cases. There is a reason you don’t see trash on the ground at Disneyland. They put trash cans everywhere because they want it to be easier to throw your garbage away than litter. Driving safety has improved due to system changes, not individual actions. Regulations on safety devices, enforcement of road laws, research into road/signal/signage design to promote safety and discourage poor driving, etc. Climate change is far and away an industrial problem where producing greenhouse gases are almost a complete externality for corporations. It isn’t people taking long showers or using straws, it is corporate byproducts that they have no incentive to reduce because they have no profit motivation because those things do not cost them anything.

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