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I agree with you entirely on the trickiness of business ethics, but I'd be very skeptical of anything that is more precise. If it's too long to keep in one's head, it will be easily forgotten. And if it's complex enough to cover everything in some detail, there will be a lot of opportunity for hole-finding, rules-hacking, boundary-arguing, and confusion-sowing.

Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with.

I think that's true generally, but especially so for YC. If they stick with sufficiently broad principles and heuristics, then they can finish up with, "... and if you aren't sure, ask." YC has a lot of high-touch mentorship, and mentoring is one of the best way to deal with ethical questions. They also have a strong interest in making sure YC startups behave reasonably well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path

>Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with.

I think the golden rule is a perfect example of how overly-simplified rules, well, just don't work very well. And yeah, it's easy to "fool yourself" or justify whatever it is you want to do with the golden rule. It offers no more guidance than the content-free "Don't be an asshole." The golden rule involves a lot of assumptions that the other guy is, well, like you, or if you take the "treat them how they want to be treated" interpretation, then it takes a lot of guessing as to what they want.

For me, leadership means taking responsibility for failures, distributing credit for successes, and listening to the right people when it comes time to make a decision, and taking responsibility, again, for the emotionally difficult parts of that decision. Like firing people. You need to listen to the other people on your team; unless you are a very small team, that should be the largest part of the decision. But on an emotional level, those people you are asking, and those people who are getting fired both need to feel like you, the leader, are actually doing the firing.

For most people, though, that's not a leader, that's a wimp. For most people, the primary characteristics of a leader are decisiveness, dominance and charisma, things that I usually regard in a negative light.

I agree with you entirely on leadership.

But I disagree entirely on the golden rule. I hear about people all the time who justify some action with, "Well, it isn't illegal". Because with a legal code as complex as the one in the US, it's easy to lose sight of "it's right". Empathy, though, is a foundation of human moral reasoning, and the golden rule points that out.

You can see this in kids all the time. There's the classic "but I didn't break rule X" defense, wherein the kid hacks the rules. E.g., "You said not to touch him." But "How would you feel in that situation?" and "How do you think they feel?" are much harder to hack. Even if the transgressor is able to self-fool, the flaws are much more obvious to third parties. The apparent lack of content of the golden rule is a benefit; the simplicity leaves less room to hide.

I dono. Every time I've gotten fucked in business... I mean, really fucked, it was by a person who was a really nice person. A really empathetic person.

I don't think "nice" and "empathetic" has as much to do with 'ethical' as you think. From what I've seen? good businesspeople and good salespeople are absolute masters of self-justification, and they really believe it in their hearts.

To me? this is one of the ugliest parts of becoming a business person. Not only are you doing something terrible to another human, but you are going on like you are doing them a favor while you are doing it.

Human emotions are weird things. None of them conform to anything like a logical system.

That strikes me as sociopathy, not actual kindness. Or at the very least, such an education in bullshit that they literally can no longer tell right from wrong.

People like that are rarely constrained by rules, either, because they can justify that just as well.

Also, I believe that ethics is mainly an elaboration of our moral sense, which appears to be biologically rooted. For more, I recommend the work of de Waal, and his TED talk is a great place to start: http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_moral...

>That strikes me as sociopathy, not actual kindness. Or at the very least, such an education in bullshit that they literally can no longer tell right from wrong.

No, it's more subtle than that.

Let's go back to my example of what makes business ethics so difficult. You have two groups with mutually opposing interests; your shareholders and your customers/suppliers. You have some responsibility to both groups, right? If you just gut feel it, well, I mean, that's one way to go about it, sure, and if you are far enough from the line, that's okay. But if you are pushing the line, as pg advocates? Gut feeling it is probably a bad idea.

For example, more than once, I've almost gone out of business. Many years ago I hit serious financial issues. I told all my VPS customers, and went through a lot of effort to find my co-lo customers a new home.

This was absolutely the right thing to do for my customers, but it also destroyed the company, when I could have made it

(I ended up re-launching the company very shortly thereafter, using money from my contracting gigs. In fact, I think I had a few customers stick with me the whole time.)

Now, if I had shareholders at the time, I mean, who were not me? From the perspective of the shareholders, I was not acting in their interest. I should have concealed the possibly impending shutdown, and just worked hard to prevent the impending shutdown from occurring. I am pretty sure that if there was money on the line and there were owners who weren't me, I would have gotten sued for acting in what I think was the most ethical manner.

Do you see what I'm getting at? If we remove the ridiculous cases of stuffing cash into your underpants and running, a reasonable person can argue both sides of most business ethics questions. Your gut can argue both sides, too.

You make it sound like a situation being ambiguous is bad. I disagree. I think that's exactly the time for discussion, negotiation, collaboration, and reflection. All of which are aided by things like the Golden Rule.

Note that I'm not talking about gut feel. What I'm contrasting is using carefully elaborated, hard and fast rules vs applying simpler guidelines, like the Golden Rule. If the hard-and-fast rules you pick are the US legal system, for example, then the answer is simple: fuck the customers. Bankruptcy protects you. You can dodge all of the complexity.

But if you say, "Hey, how would I want to be treated if I were in their situation?" you have to think about the customers and the shareholders. Unlike rules, guidelines, principles, and heuristics all force you to engage with the complexity. Fairly arguing both sides isn't bad; it's exactly what you should be doing.

Two minor points: using retrospective knowledge is a mistake in judging ethical choices. If at the time you thought you were going out of business, then that's the ethical framework. And as far as getting sued by investors, it varies by state, but generally managers have wide latitude to run the business in the fashion they see fit. You have an obligation to keep investors informed, but if they don't like what you're doing, they can replace you.

>You make it sound like a situation being ambiguous is bad. I disagree. I think that's exactly the time for discussion, negotiation, collaboration, and reflection.

The ethical conflicts I've used as examples are "I have information relevant to all parties. If I tell everyone, one party will be damaged. If I tell no one, the other party will be damaged."

Negotiation is... difficult, when you can't reveal what you are negotiating about.

Reflecting on "who do I screw" is incredibly stressful and unpleasant.

The deep problem with successful sociopaths is that they can manipulate others to believe they are being kind. I've seen it a few times. Once you step back it feels obvious and bizarre, but before you can do that you're caught in their web. What code of ethics protects against that?

That's not the job of a code of ethics. Ethics are about your choices and their impact on others.

Ways to protect against sociopaths and narcissists include education (there are good books on both), experience, and adopting standard business practices (e.g., no work without a contract, do due diligence on your business partners, basing trust on successful experience, managing risk exposure).

Then, do you ask for permission, or do you ask for forgiveness?

The ethics of engineering is also hard. If your employer asks you to implement a feature that hurts the users, what do you do? Examples include working on the Sony rootkit, etc. Here's a great post about why it's a difficult problem and why all existing "codes of ethics" (including the IEEE/ACM code) completely fail to address it: http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html.

>The ethics of engineering is also hard. If your employer asks you to implement a feature that hurts the users, what do you do?

While that is true, (and that is a tricky situation) It is almost always okay to tell everyone you work with what you know, especially if the project will harm the users, and especially if you screwed up.

The only times when there is complexity is when management has the intent to harm the users, or when management is willing to cut corners to the point where the product will be unintentionally dangerous to the users even after you point out how it will be unintentionally dangerous.

My point isn't that those aren't complex conflicts... my point is that those are not what you spend your days thinking about. Most of the time, the right thing to do is to solve the problem in the best way you can, and to tell your supervisor about all problems. In fact, I can't think of a single situation where it's not appropriate, as an engineer, to tell the person you are reporting to about a problem with something you are working on.

There's only a conflict if folks further up the chain of command don't do their jobs correctly. And all employees deal with this. "If I have done my job correctly, but the company is doing something harmful to society, what responsibility, if any, do I have to stop the company?" All employees have that conflict.

I like the example of Werner Von Braun. He designed the V2, a terror weapon for use against civilians. But after Germany lost? there was no talk of prosecuting him for that. There was, however, talk of prosecuting him because he knew the Germans were using concentration camp labor to build the V2, he was in a position of moderate authority, and he did nothing to stop it.

Note how history judges him harshly for the actions he took (or did not take) as a middle-management joe (or fritz, I guess) - not for his actions as a brilliant Engineer.

The problem with business ethics is that every decision you make has to balance your responsibility to your shareholders to 'maximize shareholder value' - which involves concealing information from suppliers and customers, with your responsibility to be honest and up front with your suppliers and customers.

The ethical conflict is the normal state for business people, while it is the unusual case for the Engineer or other employee.

This makes business ethics a lot more complex.

Complex, yes, but not nearly as complex as junior founders tend to think they are.

Like as not their definition of a "complex" business ethical comes down to, more or less:

"Say WHA? They're actually reading the contract I downloaded from somewhere (or which some random mentor gave to me) -- and they actually think it means what it says? And they want to negotiate some aspect of it? OMG they're lawyering up on me! Worse, they seem to know more than I do! I'm scared!"

If you are signing big contracts without legal advice, certainly, that's a big problem. I've lost money that way.

I don't think I'd call it an ethical problem, though. It is more of a "I did something stupid because I thought I had capabilities that I do not, in fact, have."