Hacker News Reader

Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

That also deflects moral responsibility away from Palantir: they have and had every choice to question the purpose of their contracts. The essence of Palantir is specifically pursuing government surveillance contracts as a lucrative, never ending source of profit.

No doubt Deloitte or any other contractor shop would be able to do the same thing - but they don’t choose to.

View on HN

Analogy: It's true that TNT is, on its own, just a tool, and vastly useful for mining and demolition.

But if the major vendor and purveyor happens to be Blow Thine Enemies To Tiny Bits Incorporated, developing faster fuses and embedded shrapnel, then people are right to be concerned about "The TNT stuff".

I am curious if you think that the payment processing companies refusing to serve legal yet undesirable businesses to be in a similar situation as this Palantir situation here?

> No doubt Deloitte or any other contractor shop would be able to do the same thing - but they don’t choose to.

I'm sorry but I absolutely disagree that the reason say Deloitte is leaving a few hundred billion dollars on the table is the presence of a moral compass.

It might be. Deloitte dont specifically select for employees who dont have one.

If a selection mechanism is orthogonal to a property, it seems weird to argue that the selected subset is distributed differently along that axis than the broader population.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.

What you think is ethical is different from what I think is ethical.

The power shouldn't be solidified in a few hands period.

Ethics, in simple terms, is how we treat each other. If you claim it’s intrinsically attached to something like decentralized power, it’s at the least a misunderstanding and possibly a misapplied dogma.

I think you're conflating ethics with morality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com