“Just responding to incentives” truly is the new “just following orders”.
I don’t care if they made money, it’s still immoral.
Edit: thank god I recycled some cans today.
I don’t care if they made money, it’s still immoral.
Edit: thank god I recycled some cans today.
I definitely see it as being used to excuse bad behavior, which is a step up from resignation IMO
> "People will follow incentives" might as well be a law of physics, and not accepting it is like not accepting the inverse-square law for gravitation.
This seems to deny any moral agency to "people". If someone were to offer $100 million to whomever kills the CEO of Lufthansa, anyone taking them up on that offer would be morally culpable. Hopefully we don't just resign ourselves to say "yeah, I'd have killed the CEO too, people follow incentives"
Similarly, saying that Lufthansa is evil for destroying the environment is some shade of true but also useless. If incentives dictate large organizations to destroy the world, they will do so, and the fact that they are evil is moot. This does not excuse the evil, indeed the most immediate corollary would be that we should change the incentives, say, by punishing the airline and more importantly rewriting the rules to punish future infractions, which is better than changing the rules after the fact.
I'm pretty sure we agree about concrete issues (what happened was bad, we should make it stop) so my beef is perhaps philosophical, but people get so hung up on discussion about how this corporation is evil and that politician is corrupt and so on, and this line of thought where you try to classify the world into actors of various shades of morality is useless! Saying that someone was evil is useless without a workable plan to replace them with a reliably good person, but such plans (and people) almost never exist! People will follow incentives, and the only thing that ever works at scale is setting things up so that "evil" actors will do the right thing out of self-interest! /end rant
People are fucking weird.
I'm not sure how to phrase it properly, but there is a strong selection for people with lax morals here for the simple reason that it's a competitive advantage. A founder with lax morals will generally outcompete someone with stronger morals, as such few people at the top of organizations of any size have strong morals
I ask because I'm a former infantryman and I personally know a handful of people who have. Of those people, most were quite sure they wouldn't have a problem with it, but guess what ...
People have been killed for a lot less than $100M though.
When people say "they're just responding to incentives", what they often imply is that we should be changing the incentives, or going after the people who made those incentives. I think that's true on both a practical and moral level.
On a practical level, we are not going to get a corporation to make less money, for the most part, by appeals to morality. It just doesn't work. Changing the incentives absolutely does work. Both of these have been proven time and again.
On a moral level, I really don't think it's the fault of companies when they respond to incentives. We have a society in which people elect representatives to pass laws and regulations. If they pass bad laws and regulations and people follow them, then it's the regulators' fault, not the people they regulate. You can't have every person in the system enacting their own idea of morality - partially because they don't have the complete picture, partially because they don't have the same morality, partially because any company that decides to change how it behaves without the regulations themselves changing will just be outcompeted in most cases.
The one big caveat to that is that companies have a pretty massive amount of influence on the regulators themselves, and they can definitely use that influence in moral or immoral ways.
I often see this on HN in form of "working on X thing is immoral and everyone should just quit and not accept that work" and it makes the commenter feel superior to all the immoral people who work on immoral projects all the while forgetting that people just want to put food on the table.
In case it is not painfully obvious to you by now: YOU would have also been following orders had you been there.
I'm also entirely sure that the people who made this decision weren't thinking of food security, but just regular old securities.
Is it really immoral to follow orders that were issued by an entity that has a monopoly on violence?
I have to think again just wow. Your example is such an extreme stretch with almost no relation to reality.
What are you arguing here, that if you're not "disenfranchised", you're morally responsible for actions that you're compelled to do?
>There’s no NATO nation remotely holding a gun to any big companies head. In any sense of the word.
The airlines are also not pulling a trigger on a gun.
Honestly, wtf.
In utilitarian ethics it depends on how people value life. If everyone is equal it doesn't matter, because you trade one life for another. If we allow the system to be higher order and allow for a symmetry split in "self vs other" then self-preservation becomes the moral thing.
It consequentalist ethics the previous details can be formalized differently, but it helpfully points out that if you are coerced then someone is coercing you, hence your moral agency is pretty much diminished. Yet if the consequence of your actions is that someone dies and without your actions they wouldn't have died, then sure, it's morally wrong. But that's hard to know when you have to make such a decision.
In virtue ethics you can simplify this to simply say that protecting the life of others' is a virtue and shooting people in the head is a vice, so let's do the virtuous thing! (Of course protecting your own life is a virtue too!)
(And AI Alignment folks spend pages upon pages discussing these problems of how to even began thinking about a formal ethics that is sort of computable. Should the agent predict the consequences of their possible actions and then compute the utilitarian value of them and thus choose the action that has the most utility? Should the agent factor in the possible actions of the coercer? Should the agent factor in time? If the agent is terminated it cannot maximize future utility. If the agent can live forever by default, then future utility can be much much much more than the utility of "one life". Should then one human life be valued at "infinite + 1"? Are we on a tangent to transfinite ordinals? Yes, yes we are! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3A50BB9C34AB36B3 )
So yes, it is inmoral.
Did they prosecute every single soldier of nazi germany for war crimes? For good measure did they also prosecute every single civil servant of nazi germany, because they helped the regime operate?
The EU, which is where this regulation comes from, has no "monopoly on violence", it doesn't have any army or police jurisdiction. Maybe there are some security forces that physically guard the various EU buildings and officials? Huge monopoly there!
That's like saying the legislature doesn't have a monopoly on violence because they don't have a police force or army. The EU laws are enforced through its member states. If they refuse they're kicked out, which usually provides enough incentive.
Absolute bullshit. Member states cannot be forced out of the EU. Laws are proposed by the EC and voted by the EU Parliament, both of which are representative of the EU member states.
So what happens if EU enacts some sort of legislation, and a member state refuses to implement it?
>both of which are representative of the EU member states.
How is this relevant? Does having representation mean you don't have a monopoly on violence? That's like saying the US government doesn't have a monopoly on violence, because congress votes on laws and is representative of its citizens.
At the end, deep down, whenever you pass a law or regulation or whatever, you're essentially forcing people to do something at the threat of violence. That is how laws are enforced - either with fines, which turn into violence if you refuse to pay them, or with actual violence.
It's not an empty idea to remember that that is what is actually being proposed, even if it's sometimes painted in nicer language. (And less relevant to our immediate discussion, but this same concept is relevant in the fact that some minor offense can sometimes literally turn into police ending up killing people, e.g. the various horrible cases in the US that sparked BLM protests.)
In free societies, the monopoly on violence is granted by the people in order to create a more just society than would exist in the alternative (power granted through popular or mob violence.) It only considers violence as encoded in law to be justified to that end, not all forms of violence committed by any person representing the state. So police arresting and detaining people is an example of the state exercising its monopoly on violence, but police brutality isn't.
You should not receive order that are inhumane. And you should not have regulation set up in a way that bad behavior makes you money.