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Comment by ai_what | Hacker News Reader

The irony of his mom being on the Board of Advisors of Stanford University’s Ethics is astounding.

Page 177:

Joseph Bankman, Bankman-Fried’s father, is a tenured Stanford Law School professor who served as an officer, director, manager and/or pro bono counsel to a number of FTX Group entities. Barbara Fried, Bankman-Fried’s mother, is a Professor Emerita of Stanford Law School. She served as a member of the Board of Advisors of Stanford University’s Ethics.

Or this part about this dad on page 183:

And the Debtors allege that Joseph Bankman directed “donations of more than $5.5 million” to Stanford University in an attempt to “curry favor with and enrich his employer at the FTX Group’s expense.”

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FWIW, the least ethical person I've ever known is a girl who's been making her career as an ethicist; philosophy degree, master in ethics and all that.

I was briefly involved with her in a nascent startup (I was leading the engineering side) until she just openly suggested to screw a business partner up, taking up its money and committing fraud, all that without the slightest hint of remorse in her body language. As if I just told you, "oh, it's sunny outside". gg and left that "project" immediately.

Later heard she had to move to Montreal because she had screwed so much people in our hometown that she couldn't find anyone even willing to sit down with her; she was stealing money from everyone she could, pretty much. I wonder what's the endgame for these people or if it's some sort of compulsive disorder, like people who literally can't resist to steal small things from stores.

It's a trait of people with cluster B personality disorders.

Traits like: lack of empathy, lack of remorse, bloated self-image, need for admiration, deceiving others

I've also personally dealt with a couple of people like this, people that ran small charities, and volunteered in community projects.

They are attracted to the perceived moral virtue that these institutions bestow.

Not to disparage that majority of people in these institutions that are trying to do good work.

Once you get close enough to these people to hurt you, you become highly attuned to it.

Someone trained in ethics might also be the best qualified to figure out a justification for whatever they want to do. Especially to themselves.

I wonder if the people drawn to some positions are not for what it entails.

For example, I know several people who work for the government, not so much because they want to help the people, but because it is a stable steady job.

Most positions of power should be assigned to people who do not want the job (yet are competent), rather than to people who want the job and will do anything to get it.

The same reason so many vile people seek other positions of authority: to abuse it.

Power does not corrupt. The corrupt seek power.

Oh no, people who value job security, those scoundrels

I've meant plenty of people who wanted to be a police officer for the power, not to "protect and serve"

> The irony of his mom being on the Board of Advisors of Stanford University’s Ethics is astounding.

Oh it's worse than that. She wrote people should learn to go "beyond blame".

They enriched themselves (the parents), buying properties worth $15m in the Bahamas.

Same as for the "effective altruist" guru of SBF: he got a $15m donation and bought a mansion in the UK for the "effective thieves" movement. Last I checked that guru tweeted that he needed some time to reflect on what happened and, last I checked, he didn't offer to give back the property acquired with stolen money. Thankfully that property may be clawed back at some point: decades (already) after the Enron scam, ill-acquired money is still being clawed back. So there's hope.

To me these people are despicable worms. That's why I cannot get along with people who want to pardon everyone... I'm loyal. I respect the law. But I've got zero compassion for the complete, total and utter scum of this earth.

It's not that ironic. Ethicists are notorious for their horrible behavior.

In practice, ethics usually means "how an organization justifies its monstrous behavior, especially to outsiders." Ethicists are the people who do said justification.

Apply to thee but not to me.

Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't need an ethicist to justify moral behavior or even just to tell you what is moral. If you're high up in a company you should have the life experience to know already.

aye. "justify what we're doing, please mr ethics person"

It seems more like insanity than irony, and out-and-out corruption.

Often people choose to study what they do not grasp well. Thus, it may sound ironic for somebody studying ethics to be a sociopath, but it makes sense.

It’s quite popular to study a subject in order to learn how to circumvent the current enforcement tactics or techniques.

Better call Saul.

Correct. They wonder endlessly how are other people seemingly easily doing what they struggle to do. That’s why they choose to study it

It's actually NOT ironic. You just don't happen to share the ethical framework that SBF and his parents were operating under. It's a framework under which the ends justify the means. If you want to learn more, you can look up "effective altruism."

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-eff...

It's funny that I got downvoted for this comment. Did you think I was supporting EA or something? I'm not. I just wanted to point out what they believe.

> The irony of his mom being on the Board of Advisors of Stanford University’s Ethics is astounding.

Your sentence was cut off? She is a member of the Board of Advisors to the Stanford Ethics in Society Program. That means she helps direct an academic program researching ethics, not that she enforces ethical rules within Stanford.

Professional ethicists and moral philosophers do not, and generally do not claim to, act morally better than others. Their profession is about researching the consistency and implications of moral rules.

Judges are generally held to a higher standard than the general public, so I guess there is irony/hypocrisy when they commit a crime they have convicted others of. But that’s not what Fried was doing.

Indeed. Academic ethics are more theoretical then practical.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

Considering all you said, I still consider it ironic that her son is so unethical

Is it ironic that someone specialized in ethics would have a son so adept in using them to his advantage? Seems like a natural conclusion to me.

Effective altruism seems like a weaponization of morals to support wealth hoarding.

Exactly. A professional ethicist giving a complicated justification for why what they did was OK even though everyone else thinks it was wrong isn’t ironic, it’s apt.

In this article she pushes a navel gazing argument that, essentially, culpability can't exist because people lack free will: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam...

If I assume that she authored the piece sincerely rather than as some navel gazing intellectual and virtue signaling exercise, then it isn't a shock that her child has a defective comprehension of right and wrong (or at least was atypically vulnerable to having one installed by others-- e.g. utilitarian consequentialism and 'effective altruism').

It's also not surprising that such a person would strive to get themselves placed in a position of authority on the subject-- not in spite of a psychopathic, ethically defective, or just overly rationalized worldview but specifically because of it.

>> Professional ethicists and moral philosophers do not, and generally do not claim to, act morally better than others.

That is a little like saying people who teach music don't claim to play an instrument very well. Universities are full of professors who can't do the thing they teach about very well. But I think we should be skeptical of people who study a thing they can't practice.

You didn't understand what he said at all and you are wrong. I ask you this... there are very different ethics and morals around the world, even many differences in ethics and morals between your home and your neighbors, so which ethics or morals should you have to be able to teach ethics and morals? The ones you have? lol

I know music theorists who definitely don't consider themselves strong performers or composers.

OTOH, people who "do the thing well" suck at teaching. At least, most of them. There are exceptions.

Teaching in itself - understanding a complex topic and communicating to newbies - is a skill that is independent of the ability to do the thing.

It’s like saying people who study music theory don’t have to be skilled players of musical instruments. And they don’t.

You can be skeptical all you want of ethics/morality as a field of academic research! I think there are some good reasons to be. That doesn’t mean the researchers are hypocritical when they sometimes act immorally (as all inevitably will on account of being humans), or that it’s ironic or whatever.

People who study ethics are more capable of rationalizing unethical conduct as a product of their study:

If you showed the same obviously unethical act to both a layperson and an ethicist and asked them, purely as a thought exercise, to present a collection of ethical justifications for what they saw the ethicist would almost certainly have an easier time doing so and would produce arguments which were more convincing (at least to ethicists) due to their familiarity with accepted frameworks.

It might be reasonable to guess that as a consequence ethicists overall may have a greater capacity for unethical conduct than arbitrarily selected members of the public (controlling for other factors).

I'm not particularly skeptical of "ethics/morality as a field of academic research". I am skeptical of people who teach in a field without being particularly skilled in it. I mean a person who teaches communication without being an above average writer or speaker. A person who teaches business without experience in commerce. A person who teaches film making or video game making without a professional career. They could be good theorists, I just have had too many personal experiences with professors without much real world experience teaching me things that didn't stand up after I had professional experience.

Again, per the music theory vs instrument playing example, “understanding ethical systems” is just not the same skill as “be a good person”.

Does every musicologist need to shred like Yngwie Malmsteen and play piano like Rachmaninoff?

You're being incredibly pedantic.

> do not claim to, act morally better than others

The bar here is so much lower.

> do not claim to, act morally better than others

They do however claim a better understanding of ethics. So unless she's been saying, "Gosh, I knew it was wrong but did it anyway," then it looks like the contrast between her professional expertise and her behavior would still qualify as ironic. As would her role teaching law and ethics when contrasted with both SBF's behavior and his many, many shady statements.

You could easily make the other argument: As a professor of ethics she studies many different ethical systems, including ones that are not mainstream. This means that she can more easily find some ethical system under which a given action is considered ethical.

The "ethics expert = more ethical" connection has never held up and mainly serves as a gotcha.

It's a good thing I never claimed "ethics expert = more ethical", then. What I'm saying is that I agree there's an irony here.

It's true that, as you say, she could use her knowledge of ethics to be less ethical. But that would just be a different kind of irony for somebody who teaches on law and ethics.

It’s not ironic if a mechanic is a bad race-car driver

She’s saying neither "I knew it was wrong but did it anyway“ nor “I didn’t know it was wrong” but rather “It wasn’t wrong”.

Then that too would be ironic.

Why?

So basically she knew all the ethical loopholes?

If you know a great deal about what is right and wrong, and you choose to do something bad, that feels worse than being bad and not knowing any better.

>If you know a great deal about what is right and wrong, and you choose to do something bad,

The issue is that when you start studying ethics you'll learn pretty quickly that what's right or wrong isn't exactly that obvious. You don't go to a philosophical ethics class and get taught what's good and bad like in church, you get taught how to think about the many ethical systems that exist.

That means you're going to enounter the ethics of Max Stirner, who was so radically Egoist he makes Ayn Rand look like a puppy loving communitarian, and you're going to encounter Jesus Christ. That people who study ethics for a living often have views that seem so unethical to most people isn't really surprising simply because they're exposed to such a broad range of views.

People who have are perceived as ethical are usually the people least exposed to ethics as a field of study, because they're exactly the people most likely to adopt the beliefs of people around them.

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