In case you care, what you're doing is called causal impotence https://philpapers.org/rec/NORTIO-18. Then you can also search why it does matter.
You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression?
You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something??
How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?
EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.
I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression."
It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction...
Want to answer the actual question?
At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.
Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.
Not exactly...
> devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc.
Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff...
So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not?
Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are??
Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?
Meta’s business is enabled by (practically) everyone who works for them, otherwise they wouldn’t pay them to work there. The storage compression algorithms are enabled by and contribute to the mission of the company.
If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society, and that your work makes that destruction a little more efficient, that’s fine. Storage algorithms are pretty low on the spectrum, and at least they may have some other uses if open sourced. For me, I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want to contribute even in a small way to what Meta does. But others obviously can and do feel differently.
It's so easy to reduce things!
I'm still trying to figure out if my cousin who decorates offices for FAANG is destroying society or not.
But if you fundamentally disagree with a system, trying to avoid contributing to it in any way makes sense! Whether it’s making the algorithm or addictive more farming out moderation to underpaid contractors or building a cool open source library for frontend coding or whatever, you can choose not to do it.
Or you can say, my contribution is not meaningful enough to the broader organization for me to worry about my place in it. Or you can say, I will siphon money out of the beast and use it for good. You are still contributing to it, but how you feel about it is up to you.
The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible.
It's interesting how easy it is to define exactly how evil Facebook is and categorize each worker on an evil spectrum based on job title alone.
Who would have thought life was that simple!
Thanks for sharing the paper. Going to read it tonight, the abstract is very interesting.
If you worked as an accountant for Epstein after 2006, then yeah you may not be exactly a pedophile but you have shown you're okay with not only working with pedophiles but having a pedophile actively enrich you.
Very few people on this planet are willing to actually do this. Those are Meta are willing to do exactly this.
Also solidarity is a two way street and acting as if the literal 1% of earners in the nation will suddenly develop empathy is foolish. I have solidarity for actual workers trying to better society; not for those that exacerbate the climate crisis, help minorities get cancer through data center expansions, personally profit off of scamming seniors, are okay with allowing a genocide on their watch, do nothing to help prevent the erosion of democracy, and have directly caused many suicides/self harm/deaths of despair.
They have to commit to a lifetime of repenting and self-flagellation isn't going to cut it. It's not the middle ages.