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> I would argue that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to say no when your manager asks you to do something illegal, even if it does cost you your job.

When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions. Most parents will risk whatever legal ramifications to care for their kids and that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally.

> The law is the law, and there is no excuse for breaking it.

This is an infantile view. The law is a framework and there are lots of circumstances where breaking it is not only excusable, it's the only moral action.

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> When your access to food, housing, heating and healthcare for your family are dependent on your income, you may find yourself facing very difficult decisions

This is the time when your ethics are tested. Anyone can do the right thing when they're getting paid for it.

Nah. I’ve been in the exact situation you describe and it’s pretty obvious tbh. Loss of a job is a temporary setback. Being locked up in a jail is a permanent one.

There's a nice Jordan Peterson quote:

> There was a lesson to learn from the holocaust. We're always reminded that: "Never forget, we've learned our lesson." "What was the lesson?" That's the question. The lesson is, "You're the Nazi". No-one wants to learn that; If you were there, that would have been you. You might think "Well, I'd be Oskar Schindler and I'd be rescuing the Jews." It's like, no, afraid not. You'd at least not be saying anything. And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it.

Hindsight theoretical morality is very different from experience on the ground, where peer pressure, stress, uncertainty, exploding situations and fog of war come into the mix.

Seems like a better lesson would be "don't be the Nazi."

It's not like it's impossible. The Nazis arrested 800,000 Germans for active resistance activities, and several hundred thousand Germans deserted the military, many of those defecting to the Allies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism

It wasn't a huge percentage, but we don't know how many actively resisted without getting caught, or resisted in more passive ways. And that was resistance against the Nazis, who had no qualms about killing resistors. Risking or quitting your job to not only do what's right, but avoid getting in trouble with your government, isn't in the same ballpark.

The figure of German soldiers deaths has an estimation of 50% suicides.

I thought the lesson was to not base your morality and what you are willing to do on the laws, because they can change at a whim. And for the democratic politicians, don't play with fire and take problems seriously.

You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to think you’re the Nazi. What change is he trying to effect in our culture, and how does that belief support his desire? Rhetoric always aims to effect some change in the attitude of the listener, and never without some benefit of the speaker.

> You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to think ...

What's your take on that?

Not that person but the my take on their take is that Peterson is greasing you up to accept more authoritarian control since he puts you in the in-group of the oppressors to ease the societal drift.

I don't necessarily agree. I think he is pointing out that people morally grandstand and the majority will not act out how they say they would.

Note that in the quote, he is, himself, moral grandstanding.

> You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to think you’re the Nazi. What change is he trying to effect in our culture, and how does that belief support his desire? Rhetoric always aims to effect some change in the attitude of the listener, and never without some benefit of the speaker.

What benefit do you think he's trying to get from it? I'm honestly trying to figure out the nefarious angle and coming up blank.

It seems to me like a very similar sentiment to that great "are we the baddies?" sketch from Mitchell and Webb. [1] I see both as an exercise in moral humility.

See the Milgram experiment, or the Asch experiment. Most people do cave to pressure from authorities and the group. Everybody believes they're they exception. Statistically, most of them are wrong.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

We're not talking about living in a totalitarian state and breaking the law by aiding the resistance here. The cases in the article is like committing financial fraud or faking customer data. And then, yeah, I do think there is no excuse for going along with it, you have a duty as a member of society not to do such things, even if it costs your your job. It's not easy, and as I said I have enormous sympathy for a person in this position, but there is a clear right thing to do, and you have an obligation to act accordingly.

At least in the case of engineers, we're talking about highly compensated people. You should have a solid emergency fund put together within a few months of starting your career. From there, it's on you to not put yourself into an economically precarious position. People who are making multiples of the median household don't have food/shelter as an excuse.

Not that it's much of an excuse for everyone else either, but with people in the professional-managerial class it's absurd.

Globally, most software developers are not highly paid and certainly not enough to be above financial pressure.

Becoming a whistleblower or refusing unethical demands can also lead to being blacklisted, as in most industries, loyalty is valued more highly than ethics.

And the more people that buy into that, the worse it gets. That’s why this has to be fought tooth and nail from day one.

If you want to fight corruption and unethical behaviour, start with a just society that doesn't tie a person's value and well-being directly to their income. Otherwise you're fighting incentives and will never win.

You don’t get to a just society by not fighting corruption. Ask yourself not what “engineers globally” can do, but what you can do. Historically, pressure from the educated middle class has made huge impacts on culture and society.

Corruption is both a systemic and moral problem. You can’t build a just society without confronting corruption and you can’t sustain anti-corruption without reducing inequality.

To get rich at your software startup is not one of the situations where you have a moral obligation to break the law. None of these people were stealing bread from the rich to feed their children.

As a parent, I would risk destitution over going to prison every single time. I don’t even have to think about it.

Yeah, but you have to factor in the probability of the orange jumpsuit.

You're not going to be of much use to your family in jail.

It's still a difficult decision, but it's not just your job vs your morality. It's your job vs morality+potential jail.

We dish out criminal sentences precisely in order to affect the equation like this, because we know people don't always act on morality alone.

Right, saying outright that Thoreau was wrong and also that pretty much every famous person who took him to heart was wrong too is a rather strong position to take and likely very, very hard to defend.

Or, for a more obscure example, that Antigone should just have said 'yes daddy' and left it at that with the play ending somewhere in the initial conversation with Ismene.

> […] that's inherent moral and ethical, even if the downstream outcome is not. That is because it is the socioeconomic system rather than the individual who is acting immorally.

Wow. This is incredibly dangerous way of thinking. Are any “downstream outcomes” justified as moral in such a case? How about outcomes involving people dying eg due to safety or quality rules broken? People may do things like that “to feed their kids” but that does not make it ethical, especially when we actually talk about preservation of certain social status rather than real survival.

It is not moral to break the law in the furtherance of fraud. That’s the point.

But if the fraud secures the livelyhood of $bignum children and they would starve without their parents committing that fraud?

I think my son would rather have me in his life than have me in jail.

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