Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

> 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?

>> 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?

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.

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.

You're being incredibly pedantic.

> do not claim to, act morally better than others

The bar here is so much lower.

So basically she knew all the ethical loopholes?

Indeed. Academic ethics are more theoretical then practical.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com