Comment by Eliezer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eliezer | Hacker News Reader

Scientology certainly operates in violation of the letter of the law - framing people for murder is illegal, I'm pretty sure - they just avoid conviction by bribing local judges and so on.

I don't see why you can't just tell the patent troll to go away. Are they being punished for telling you what they do? Yes, but if patent trolls have to operate furtively, not telling anyone what they do, on pain of being denied service in many places, the world is a better place. Make the world a better place.

I don't see why you are obligated to lend a helping hand to evil that happens to be legal. I'm not saying to throw a punch at someone doing something legal that you don't like; I'm saying that you are not obligated ethically or morally to do business with them. Or if the law has something to do with ethics in your world, then consider that since it's legal to deny service to patent trolls, it must be all right, right?

And I don't see what's unethical about one adult selling another adult neuroactive pharmaceuticals, but let's leave that aside for now.

Drawing the line around what's "legal" says to me, "We'd rather not think about ethics, so we're going to draw the line somewhere defensible that we don't have to think about." In another world this might make sense, but not in a country that criminalizes marijuana and has, well, patent trolls. To respect that line, and not try to promote good or retard evil any further than that, is just an abdication of ethics.

With that said, I respect Less Annoying CRM for trying to think about the issue at all and post about it, which most companies don't. I mean, they got the wrong answer, but most companies don't even try or think at all, so this blog post actually does rate LACRM in the top 10% of all companies in my book.

I think one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether your primary responsibility to protect the interests of your real users (the non-patent trolls) or to take a stand against people you don't like.

This would be a much easier decision if we sold a discrete product. A grocery store or Amazon.com can deny someone service and then they can go shop somewhere else. No big deal. Our users store their most important business data with us for years. How can our legitimate users trust us if they think they might wake up one day and be banned?

Thanks for the comment, this is definitely an interesting discussion.

By the way, I can tell you that I personally wouldn't have a problem with someone using the software for something illegal but not necessarily unethical (like selling drugs). The problem is that as soon as they tell you they're doing that, you're effectively assisting them in the illegal activity which makes me a criminal. That's the main reason why we have to take action when someone tells us they're using the CRM to do something illegal (not that it's ever happened).

> I think one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether your primary responsibility to protect the interests of your real users (the non-patent trolls) or to take a stand against people you don't like.

Using the phrase "primary responsibility" doesn't change the fact that helping unethical people do unethical things puts evil into the world. It sounds like you (and Less Annoying) are subconsciously reasoning with the goal of never being held responsible for evil. That's different from minimizing evil.

A clearer way to make your case would be to say that taking a stand is too expensive (vs not-my-problem.) Maybe the company's resources are better spent assisting ethical customers. Maybe this assistance yields more revenue, further increasing the ability to assist ethical customers. Now you have an exponential growth rate of net good, so you have a big-O notation argument for not policing evil. (... actually, exponential growth rates of small business revenue are really sigmoidal, not exponential, so it will probably be better to switch back to thinking about ethics when you approach market saturation)

I don't feel like I owe sympathy to people who are concerned with culpability rather than with utility, and I doubt you do either.

Utilitarianism 102: having firm written rules, even subobtimal ones, can often have better consequences than evaluating each action on its merits. I've seen it recommended on this very site to avoid any hosting provider with a "morality clause" in their T&Cs. A service that will host "any legal content", while it will aid a certain proportion of unethical actions, ultimately contributes more benefit to society than one that hosts "any legal content, except that we morally object to".

You know, you're right (about the dangers of morality clauses). Consider my original content 70% retracted or at least flagged for requiring modification.

Maybe you could have a list up-front of who you don't deal with (Scientology, patent trolls, KKK, etc.) and remark that anyone not on this list who signs up will be grandfathered in forever, even if their category is added later - this gives existing customers peace of mind, and tells your browsers exactly what you consider morality?

But if lots of people did this, I'm not sure the world would be a better place, now that I think about it. Pick a previous decade, and gays would've been the ones most often targeted - of course, then I could meta-boycott, but...

This is a deeper issue than my original comment acknowledged, so on further consideration, please consider it entirely retracted until I can give this more thought.

What sort of business policy should one go around advocating on a planet where most people think "morality" is about disapproving of sex acts, and so anything that strengthens the force of what other people believe to be "morality" within economic business, tends to make things that much worse? I don't know.

Fully agree. Since maybe it wasn't clear, I wasn't objecting to the approach of "let's decide what our firmly written rule is" but to the seemingly-implied rationale given in support. "Let's decide our primary responsibility" sounds like it's more concerned with responsibility than utility. Having those priorities is the thing with which I disagree.

As a software company, I would be wary of doing anything, whether legal or otherwise, to support a software patent troll. Having access to your software is clearly in the interest of your real users, and this access is threatened by the practice of patent trolling.

I understand your reluctance, of course, but a company whose business model that abuses the legal system at the expense of companies that produce software seems like a reasonable thing for a software company to avoid dealings with. How can your users trust you if they think they might wake up one day and your product is gone because of spurious patent litigation?

I think Less Annoying was most interested in making an easy rule for themselves to follow, in the expectation that they'd have to make similar decisions in the future. "Is it legal," they decided, is easier to answer than "is it unethical." If they decided in the other direction, they'd have to evaluate the ethics of each of their customers. This, in their opinion, would drain their resources. If they're right, they made a decision that increases their ability to assist their ethical customers in doing good. So the net effect of the decision to draw the line at legality might still be positive from a preference-utility point of view.

It's not clear that this is the thinking they were using, and it's a false dichotomy. There might be any number of easy rules to follow that do a better job of approximating ethical judgement than "is it legal." A possible reason not to try for one of these might be because it's impractical. Less Annoying employees are people, and people tend to have irrationally-strongly-held beliefs about ethics. They are in the habit of not questioning the law or other peoples' religions, but this would step outside those boundaries. You end up with a company full of people who think it's their duty to force the company's ethics to be consistent with their own.

Regarding the ethics of allowing a coke dealer to use the service: it doesn't matter because anyone knowingly facilitating illegal activity can be prosecuted under federal RICO statutes and they'd have the entire business seized under the seizure laws. Operating with the law as a benchmark isn't about ethics, it's about good business. While we can debate the ethics of the law, the law itself must still be followed. That's just responsible business. Discriminating based on one's beliefs is definitely an ethical issue but that can lead down a potentially dangerous slippery slope. Should Amazon (or libraries) refuse access to books to certain people because of their associations? It seems like bad business to have litmus tests beyond illegality. Can a store refuse to sell twinkies to fat people? That would be viewed by some as ethical, although potentially illegal.

The best course would be to ban hate activity on the site, but it would be impossible to know hate activity without violating privacy. And what is hate activity anyway? Who decides? The KKK seems like an obvious group, but what about the Black Panthers, certain religious groups and even so-called Civil Rights groups like La Raza. It's very difficult to determine hate activity in an objective and business-defensible way.

The law is the clearest standard rather than nebulous ethics. Besides free speech should apply to everyone, even if we disagree with the content.

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