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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

It is also unethical to abide by a NDA if the company is doing something unethical. It might or might not also be legal to talk though, ask a lawyer. Of course NDAs might not even be legal in the first place. If the company is doing something illegal, then the NDA doesn't have any meaning for sure.

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That highly depends. You need to sign an NDA to do any classified work, and if you find illegal activity, you still can't just disclose classified information to uncleared individuals. If you want to be a whistleblower, you're supposed to either go the agency's ethics office, the IG, or possibly straight to whatever Senate subcommittee has oversight and clearance, but not just release to Wikileaks or Glenn Greenwald unless you want to spend the rest of your life in prison or permanent exile.

There's no indication that company was doing anything illegal though.

ethics and legality are different things of course. You need to figure out how to handle things when they are opposed. There are no easy answers.

There is an easy answer. If you feel that there are circumstances under which you cannot abide by the terms of the NDA, then don't sign the NDA.

The problem is most NDAs are for things I can abide by, and I won't know until after signing that this is an exception.

In fact in this case I wouldn't have expected the things the NDA is stopping me from talking about were even things.

How would that work? Normally you don't get to hear much until after you sign the NDA.

Perhaps not illegal, but by definition, unethical, otherwise the NDA on the actual intended role would not be needed.

You've confused ethics and morals. The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience) is usually to follow the legal agreement you've signed (barring something that supersedes the NDA like being legally required to report something to regulators).

So no, it isn't unethical for the author to abide by his NDA, arguably the exact opposite is true, though exposing these shenanigans at a personal risk could be argued to be the better moral decision.

It is you who is confused - ethics and morals are basically the same thing, and both are about processes to figure what is ethical and what isn't according to some set of ideas; neither is about prescribing anything, and there certainly isn't anything like The Set of Ethical Things and The Set of Unethical Things. "X is ethical" is always a short-hand for "within the framework I and/or my surroundings or audience subscribes to X can be argued to be ethical".

"Is this a moral situation or an ethical situation?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBgM_Kw6PSM&t=93s

Has he confused them? The only code of professional ethics in this industry I've ever been asked to consider is the ACM one. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

By my reading of it, I'd feel obligated to publicly address this, and I don't consider it a breach of any sort of ethics I'd believe in, besides.

From the code you linked:

> Computing professionals should protect confidentiality except in cases where it is evidence of the violation of law, of organizational regulations, or of the Code. In these cases, the nature or contents of that information should not be disclosed except to appropriate authorities.

This code of ethics, like all others, has limitations. Here, it has failed to consider all cases, namely the case where the entity whose confidentiality is being protected doesn't exist anymore. That doesn't necessarily mean your quote isn't relevant, just that it shouldn't be given the final say until we've balanced it out with the rest of the document and looked at the tradeoffs involved.

Not breaking the NDA is an issue w/r/t:

  - 1.2 "Well-intended actions, including those that accomplish assigned duties, may lead to harm. When that harm is unintended, those responsible are obliged to undo or mitigate the harm as much as possible."

  - 2.2 Maintain high standards of professional competence, conduct, and ethical practice.

  - 2.7 "As appropriate to the context and one's abilities, computing professionals should share technical knowledge with the public"

  - 2.7 again "a computing professional should respectfully address inaccurate or misleading information related to computing."

Lastly, since the company's actions were clearly in violation of the Code and potentially causing harm, I could simply argue that the public is the ultimate appropriate authority (since none seem to be more appropriate in this case) and that not breaking the NDA would have been unethical by the very passage you chose to quote.

>You've confused ethics and morals

Ethics and moral philosophy are synonymous. I don't think they're confused, but you can consult a dictionary if you like.

>The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience)

No, as somebody who has studied moral philosophy academically, this is your own unique definition and not normal. Any amount of research from a credible source like plato.standord.edu or even wikipedia will support this.

The dictionary defines ethics as the field of knowledge dealing with moral principles, sure, and that's not at all what I'm talking about here. Perhaps I erred in using the word too generally and should have been specific in talking about ethics in the professional sense.

The ethical codes that are associated with a profession are different from moral principles that may usually guide us. The first example they gave when I studied this in engineering was that of a defense attorney: trying to help a guilty person get away with a serious crime violates most people's moral standards, but the code of ethics for attorneys demands that they defend guilty people anyway, because our law system is set up with that expectation.

To my original point, someone may claim a moral imperative to tell the world about the company in this article, but the fact of the matter is just about every professional ethics committee or handbook would tell you to uphold your NDA in the situation here. Wasting people's time under false pretenses may be bad, and it isn't ethical to do it yourself, but it isn't so bad that you can just drop your own obligations and blog about it.

And yes I admit some handwaving here since programming doesn't have widely adopted ethical codes yet, but I can guarantee that when they do exist, they won't tell you to violate a contract for something that won't injure anyone and doesn't break any laws.

I think the defense attorney example seems to be a bit of an exception. Even in that scenario, the law also requires a prosecutor. The partiality of each opposing side is required for the system itself to be impartial, and if the defense attorney has a sense of ethics, they will only participate if they know that someone else is arguing the prosecution's side as well (or if they're about to run out of food and have no other alternatives, but that's a different story).

Re moral imperatives and tradeoffs: even these guys had a code of ethics https://www.bullmarketgifts.com/Framed-Enron-Code-of-Ethics-... The "ethical thing to do" does not always come from a book or a committee, instead it's dictated by the moral principle most specific to the situation at hand and taking into consideration the widest breadth of weighted personal interests and needs. In any case, I'm not sure I agree with this statement "just about every professional ethics committee or handbook would tell you to uphold your NDA". Nor do I believe that I can speak for just about every committee without consulting them beforehand, so I can't know what they would come up with in this situation.

In the end, I just fail to see why ethics in the professional world should receive special treatment. Different domain, same principles and rules.

To the extent there is a difference, I'd say that "ethics" is what you say you would do, and "morals" is what you actually end up doing when placed in a specific situation.

But, it's been well over two decades I was pursuing a degree in philosophy.

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