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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

This is something to be extremely proud of. Espionage is how proprietary information gets disseminated and built upon (and eventually made public in some form, or via its descendants).

So many of the technologies we enjoy today are in widespread use because of espionage (industrial or government or both). It's how you even the tables from time to time.

There's nothing immoral about espionage - only what you use the information for (to build systems of repression, or to build systems that improve ourselves).

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If espionage is okay, then we should not be subject to intellectual property laws. The point is that there needs to be consistency between what's right for the country and what's right for its citizens.

That's a naive way of looking at it. There's no "world police". It's the law of the schoolyard when it comes to international relations. You make and break alliances, set up partnerships, break them, gather information to help your allies, and life goes on.

You spy on everyone. That's just how it works (by necessity).

If some country is hoarding the secret to a revolutionary food that would help your starving citizens, you're not going to say "Oh, I'll just let my people starve because spying would be WRONG."

If someone has a game changing weapon that they're threatening the region with, you're not going to say "I'll just let them have this power because spying is WRONG."

If you could spy to get new chip technology that will elevate your country out of 80% poverty, you're not going to say "Oh, we'll just remain poor because spying is WRONG."

> won't do it because spying is WRONG

They aren't going to say that, but spying is wrong. Murder is also wrong and governments still do it.

imoho recognizing the necessity/righteousness of espionage goes hand in hand with disrespecting intellectual property rights.

e.g. "my need to know supersedes your right to privacy"

> imoho recognizing the necessity/righteousness of espionage goes hand in hand with disrespecting intellectual property rights.

What it shows is that life cannot be reduced to a set of rules. Rules are merely built upon a model of reality (and models are by definition incomplete) - reality does not conform to the rules. Much as we'd like to, we cannot achieve justice by rules alone.

So one must come up with a living system that can accommodate reality. That living system is what we live under.

It's not perfect, and cannot achieve perfect justice. But it adapts and does reasonably well - until it doesn't, and then the revolutionaries replace it to start the cycle anew.

> If some country is hoarding the secret to a revolutionary food that would help your starving citizens, you're not going to say "Oh, I'll just let my people starve because spying would be WRONG."

There are things called "moral dilemmas". The situations when you have no options but to go against moral, the only choice you have is which particular moral rule you will break. Your proposed situations are examples of moral dilemmas.

> There's no "world police". It's the law of the schoolyard when it comes to international relations. You make and break alliances, set up partnerships, break them, gather information to help your allies, and life goes on.

If something is lawful it doesn't mean it is moral, and vice versa. Generally laws are written in a way to enforce moral, but laws are limited in what they can do, so they tend to be less restrictive then moral, and politicians writing laws are not exactly saints, so I wouldn't trust blindly to their moral reasoning.

But even if there are no to punish you for a misdeed, it doesn't make the misdeed to be moral.

Morality is not absolute. There are many crossovers between cultures, but there are also many differences. Some facets of one's morality are nothing more than preference, or an accident of how the society happens to live at the time. One country's evil spy who stole their idea is another country's hero of the people who brought wealth and prosperity.

Often, "morality" is merely trying to protect your own advantages over others. But then again, advantage is what drives us. We're all for making things "fair", until it destroys our own perks.

Trying to pin down a universal moral code is a fool's errand.

> Trying to pin down a universal moral code is a fool's errand.

Yeah, it is a complex subject. Philosophers talked about it for thousands of years, and I think they have not came to a definite conclusion yet.

But on the topic of non absolute morality I like to compare it with a language. Lets for example take English. There are billions people who know English. Even I claim I know English, though I'm sure I'll fail any formal exam. Native speakers are better at exams then me, but do they all follow the formal grammar? Or maybe they all follow some informal rules of English? Can we say that all of them will agree about the meaning of any English sentence?

Of course not. Each person has their own understanding of English, each has their own style of using English. There is no such thing as an "absolute English". The most closest attempt to define it is the English grammar, but it doesn't explain all the ways English is used.

We come to an important question: how we can talk about such thing as "English" if there is no living example of English such that anyone will unconditionally agree with their authority?

My answer is the very notion of "English" is an abstraction, that kinda work in some cases, but fails spectacularly in others. People tend to invent such notions just for a convenience, but reality is more complex, the boundaries of languages are fuzzy, and moreover there is no middle ground, no average[1]. You can deal with it somehow, choosing just the right method for your goals, but what to do with it is a different question, the point is the very notion of a language as of something monolithic is contradicts to the reality.

Another example one can find in biology: what is a species? How to define them? Really there are no species, there are just DNA strands, some of them compatible and could be used to create a fertile offspring, and some are not compatible. Biologists define species relying on an assumption that you can split all the different genotypes into classes, so that all genotypes in any class are compatible, and any two genotypes from different classes are not compatible. But it doesn't work in reality. It mostly works, but not in 100% of cases. Should we say "species doesn't exist"?

It is the same with morality. There are no absolute morality, but it doesn't mean that morality doesn't exists, it just means that we cannot grasp the wonderfully complex reality with out inferior brains and therefore we use some simplifying assumptions. One of them is an existence of the absolute morality. And it works in most cases. Some people thinks it is moral to eat their grandfather, but we live in a bubble of "absolute morality" where eating other people is amoral. Is it bad? How often in your life did you faced situations where this assumption was wrong and somehow impeded your thought process. I personally never was in exactly such a situation (with eating grandparents) but I faced some other cultural incompatibilities and I easily dealt with them making ad hoc amendments to "absolute moral" just for that case. I never faced incompatibilities that I couldn't overcome this way, though I think they are not impossible.

So, I totally agree that universal moral code will not work for everyone, but it is not a good enough excuse to reject moral reasoning.

> Often, "morality" is merely trying to protect your own advantages over others. But then again, advantage is what drives us. We're all for making things "fair", until it destroys our own perks.

To make things fair, is a very primitive approach to morality. I personally prefer Kant's categorical imperative[2], but in general I believe fairness is too narrow to be the goal of morality. Moral shapes the society, and it must enable society to thrive. I consciously leave here an uncertainty over what does it mean for a society to thrive, different people could understand it differently. But the surprising thing they all mostly come to the same conclusions, like "do not kill", "do not steal" and so on.

But I came to talk here, because I do not like the attitude of claiming that anything lawful or "good for the motherland" is a moral thing to do. No, sometimes what is good for the motherland is amoral. Sometimes lawful things a amoral. Sometimes bad things for the motherland or unlawful things are highly moral. I would say nothing, if you told that necessities of a country demand industrial spying or if you said that industrial spying is good for long term prospects of the humanity. But you said it is moral, and I do not agree categorically. The world is a difficult place to live and to think about, don't spoil this wonderful complexity by trivialization.

[1] https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/18291/

As I've already said, a model isn't reality; it's just the most useful representation we can use to suit our rules and processes. A model of the English language is by definition flawed, because humans don't actually work that way. A model of species is by definition flawed, because life doesn't evolve so cleanly. A model of morality most definitely doesn't work beyond finding commonalities, finding common ground, and reaching consensus (soft of). And those models fail us. All the time.

But we constantly lose sight of this, and so our rules trundle along as we blindly believe that our rules of how things should work will just magically do that.

America, Germany, and China gained power because of the great waterways (Mississippi, Rhine, Yangtze) that give them a HUGE cost advantage in moving goods (more than 10x) compared to everyone else. It's how they became rich and powerful. And they benefit from leveraging that into even greater advantages through human ingenuity. Meanwhile, countries in shitty geography (prosperity-wise) don't have a hope in hell of gaining anything like that, simply because their people were born in the wrong place. Is that fair? Is it moral to force them to pay what little they have for just a taste? You may say yes, but they'll definitely say no, and steal what they can. Is that fair to the companies that spent money and time developing these things? Can you come up with a model for this that makes everything moral?

The fact is, our Western "morality" is hugely weighted towards property. I own this. I decide who can use it. I control what you can do, not because you lack the capability, but because I have this power of law to prevent you. And of course some level of property is necessary to the functioning of society. But that's pragmatism. We're about finding systems that work, and then justifying them after the fact by any means necessary.

If you want to see morality in action, just watch kids playing at recess. It's a chaotic mess that reaches an equilibrium somewhere. And although there will be commonalities to match how our evolved instinctual behaviors tend to work, it'll never be the same each time.

We dress it all up in fancy language, but somehow the models that we base our morality upon always seem to lack any acknowledgment of the inherent advantages we privileged live under. And then we conveniently declare the "level" playing field to be the one that our privilege is founded upon. And it's not like we're doing it consciously, either. The human mind is a tricky thing, able to deceive itself in so many ways as it tries to reconcile itself as a good person.

It is by the same starving/poor logic that IP laws are not okay for private citizens either. Consistency is paramount.

Somehow people aren't that eager to make the same argument when accusing China of "IP theft".

> There's nothing immoral about espionage - only what you use the information for

Please send me your personal journal, all your browser history too while we're at it, I won't do anything with the information, don't worry.

> There's nothing immoral about espionage

Theft ? Kidnapping ? /s

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