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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this justification many times, but it's highly questionable. Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis; is this morally justifiable? What if their 'job description' does not include 'murder', but they do indeed have to murder an innocent person each month because of the 'rules and constraints'? What if instead of occasional murder, they just have to subject many innocent people to suffering because of 'the rules and constraints'?

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> Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis;

Several large corporations really are guilty of murdering innocent people on a regular basis. Even still, if you find a low wage worker in that company's mail room and beat the shit out of them to make yourself feel better it's you who are the asshole, and it does nothing to stop the killing.

This isn't a hypothetical, you're just describing social murder. What do people do about it? Usually shower the perpetrators with money and peace prizes.

Following your organization's data security practices is not immoral. To me, refusing to accept a PDF is no different than running a cash only store and refusing to accept credit cards as payment.

And how long would that store stay open with such a policy? That's the problem. The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less. Its hard to believe it is just the bureaucrats. I think the leaders of those parts of the government didn't get their posts from merit. And they have no idea just how bad they are at their jobs. It also is probably a bit of too many cooks in the kitchen too.

> The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less.

The US government manages a more diverse array of problems (critical, life and death problems) than any other US organization (and probably more than any other org in the world). Amazon has only a tiny fraction of the competence of the US government and is not nearly as reliable. Remember the last time a significant portion of the social security system went down? I can't, but I can remember the last time AWS went down.

Wait, I know this one.

They work for United Healthcare!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/unitedhealth...

Murder is one thing, some superior telling you you cannot accept random PDFs sent to you via email for whatever reason and you following that policy is another.

Imagine you run a cash only cafe and one of your baristas starts accepting payment via paypal as a convenience to your customers. Your customers would totally dig it and see it as the morally right thing to do. You however might see some justified problems with it.

If a government office cannot accept pdfs due to policy, the policy is at fault, not the person forced to carry it out. We do not want to live in a world where office clerks make there own rules and ignore policy, based on their subjective morality, with the exception of rejecting or subverting obviously morally wrong extreme policies. Not accepting PDFs is not extreme, it is just bullshit.

That is war.

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