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Comment by wly_cdgr | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like an ethics problem more than a regulatory system problem. The long term solution is not reducing the incentive to lie, it's better and more extensive moral education to increase personal reluctance to lie. Why is that the better solution? Because it has profound benefits that extend far beyond this specific scenario / industry.

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Would you withhold your medical information from your employer for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Because that’s what’s happening here. A pilot career can cost more than $100k in training and years of doing work for what basically amounts to minimum wage. At the end of it you end up with a skill set that is very valuable, but not very transferable to other careers.

So let’s reframe it as: should we expect people to tell the truth about things that mostly don’t matter at a personal cost of their entire career, and all training costs?

If you disclose, you are punished severely and may never go to work again with almost no recourse by a system which largely ignores medical science. If you withhold, as almost all pilots are advised by colleagues and the doctors themselves to do, nothing happens. (When I went for an aviation medical, the doctor said: I’m not your family doctor, only answer the question I asked. If I need more information I can ask for it)

When faced by a system so perverse is it really all that unethical.

Yes, we should expect people to tell the truth.

Sounds like it comes from a person who is 16 years old. How old are you?

We should expect government agencies to follow medical science when making medical decisions, yet here we are.

Ethics is not reducible to "learning not to lie." There's also "not using sweeping generalizations to dramatically affect individual's lives" and "using authority the way it was intended instead of shrinking from the responsibility granted by the will of the people" and a whole other host of ethical issues that apply to the various aeronautical administrations.

Brainwashing alone does not an ethical system make. You generally have to act ethically in order to teach other people to do the same.

Exactly (re: your last sentence), which is a very big part of why you should not lie. It is no good to say "well, the system / another person did something bad, so I get to do something bad also". You have to take responsibility and do the right thing anyway. That is the whole heart and essence of ethics. Without people who are willing to do that, everything quickly goes down the drain in a filthy spiral of degradation.

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