> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.
(spoiler alert)
Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
"Half" is obviously an exaggeration but apart from time-sharing operating systems, the Internet, what is now CSAIL and (partially) GPS, they sponsored a ton of open source projects. They used to maintain a catalog[0]. The Web Archive version[1] contains a partial list (e.g. OpenBSD was sponsored only for a few years and is not included there).
The bigger issue with your perspective is that you do not realize that the underlying purpose of the things you do not attribute to the military or equate as bad, is still groundwork or “capacity building” deliberately for militaristic purposes and objectives, usually very intentionally so that you don’t realize it. You would likely not support things if you were overly told what the underlying objective was.
Let me put it this way, if you wanted a populace that will willingly enter the military to serve your purposes of world domination through constant warfare, would you promote TV and movies, rather than reading classical literature and philosophy; and fund and press movie houses to make films that put joining the military to go to war and templating being a “warrior” as a positive thing instead of a negative, murderous thing?
I don't have any perspective, just state a fact - DARPA did contribute to things we find useful.
The core issue itself is terribly complex because in an ideal world we would never need military at all, and at least in Europe we had this hope that humanity is evolving in this direction, and that eventually even the wars in the Middle East and Africa will calm down. 2014 and 2022 were rude awakenings - there are crazy people out there, and they became nation leaders, and will start a war for one reason or another. That's why I don't have a unified opinion on that, especially that some military tech like interceptors are saving people's lives.
The name of that Department was chosen to be aspirational, to encourage it to try to keep within its Constitutional guardrails, to keep it focused on the right mission.
Sure, it often didn't live up to its aspirations and a lot of the fence posts of those Constitutional guardrails got moved, but wearing those aspirations on its sleeve left some room for people to challenge it and openly criticize it by reminding the Department of its guardrails and its mission.
The name change is disrespectful to the Constitution, if not terrifying for other reasons.
The late 90s were full of media that questioned reality and authority - like X-Files, The Matrix, Dark City, all sorts of websites about conspiracy theories and UFOs, etc. The zeitgeist was full of speculation about hidden truths. The cultural mood was defiant and sardonic. There was rap, rap-rock, Beavis and Butthead, Fight Club, Office Space... One of the most popular pro wrestlers in the world played a character who beat up his boss and gave him the middle finger. Then after 9/11 it kinda seemed like suddenly the TV shows were all about cops and soldiers. Admittedly, my memories might be somewhat deceiving me. But I do feel that the mood suddenly shifted, much more than the actual damage done to America by the attack should have justified.
Gen-X was making the popular new art at the time. It was a strong reflection of the feelings of our generation. We were (maybe still are?) known for not liking authority.
> Gen-X was making the popular new art at the time. It was a strong reflection of the feelings of our generation.
I posted this in a thread about the 90's film 'Hackers'.....
In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like Hackers).
BTW: Remember the 'product scene' in the film Waynes World?
Post 2000s there has been a pretty fundamental change in the US economy. Things like rent and food were far cheaper. There was also a lot of potential income to be made by individuals by connecting buyers and sellers. Typically if you wanted to sell something like a car, you either went to a dealer that screwed you, or you put and ad in the local paper. If you watched around you could quickly buy cheap cars and turn them quickly for more than enough profit to make it worth while.
The internet quickly flattened this. First by pulling all the buyers and sellers on one advertising site it quickly turned into the fastest with the most capital won. Then the sites themselves figured out they should be the middle man keeping buying up the stock and selling it.
There has also been a huge consolidation to just a few players in many markets. This consolidation and many times algorithmic collusion has lead to the general ratcheting of prices higher. When you start adding things in like 'too big to fail' the market becomes horrifically unbalanced to large protected capital with unlimited funds from the money printing machine.
It's no wonder we quickly dropped ethics, most of us would starve to death in the system we've created.
As Gen-Xer I fully agree, I don't get the way things are with obedience, the rediculous situation that American families can lose their kids by having them playing alone in the garden, how everyone sells out for money (Punk would not happen today), the always smile and say no negatives at work being rediculous false (this one really drives me crazy),....
The exercised their rights not to vote. The “losing” side always thinks that higher turnout would have led to them “winning” which of course is a cry of a sore loser. The fact remains, 2024 election had the highest voter turnout ever and people have spoken (till the next one when we might get a chance to elect some adults to fix this shit)
When you don't vote, you're really just voting for "whoever happens to win". So I count the non-voters among (R) supporters, or at least as "OK with Trump". Otherwise, they would have voted.
Abstentions can be the most powerful vote, and with great power should come great responsibility. That's often not taught well enough in schools.
Abstentions can seem the laziest vote sometimes, but that doesn't diminish their power nor their responsibility. It is a freedom to be allowed to cast an abstention. Real democracy needs to allow for abstentions, especially explicit abstentions.
(In recent primaries there have been races where I have explicitly cast an abstention. No one will have read my "I don't care who wins this primary, I care who wins the general election" statements, but they are statements to be made. Right now some of the "strategy" in the US two-party system is one-party poisoning the primary vote of the other party by inflaming it with in-fighting in ways that leak into the general election. You have a harder time to win general elections when your candidate is already on fire coming out of the primary. "It doesn't matter who wins, let's stop in-fighting," is a message I can try to write on the ballot, even if not enough people hear it, it feels like the more powerful and responsible vote.)
The goal shouldn't be to get to 100% of people voting in every election, the goal should be to educate people that not voting is tacitly accepting the results of other people's votes. The goal should be teaching people that abstentions are a freedom, a right, a privilege, and should be treated as powerful and treated with responsibility.
I don't think that makes sense. If Harris had happened to win through some minor change in the timeline (she came very close after all), would those people whom you call R supporters instead somehow be D supporters, just because of that minor change in the timeline?
As for "OK with Trump", I think that describes some non-voters. However, there are also non-voters who are more accurately described as "not OK with either side, indeed dislike both sides so equally that neither one seems like the slightly better option".
There is also the factor of swing states. In most of the US, your vote for President pretty much doesn't matter. You almost might as well just put it in the trash. The vote in your state is, barring a massive political shift, locked in for one of the two major candidates. Now, yes, you can still send a message by voting in a non-swing state. But it's understandable why some people would just not bother to vote in a state where the outcome is almost predetermined.
every year we hear the same thing but wheels keep on turning. we will vote again, we will make more mistakes in 2026/28/30... this "there will be no election" comments are quite silly in my opinion, America gets stupid from time to time but we get the fuckers out and try something else (which inevitably leads to some progress followed by more failure followed by...).
Just remember it always comes down to - "it is the economy, stupid" - and economy is in absolute shambles and will get a lot worse before November and it'll be a massacre for the ruling part much like in 2018
I hope you are right, and that ICE isn't outside polling stations come November, pulling you away (just to "check your ID" for a couple of days, you know!) if you are a registered Democrat or look too brown or gay.
I was absolutely disgusted by stuff like 24 and zero dark thirty when it came out. "If you cut the throat of the terrorist's son he'll break down and tell you where the bomb is" - they expected the audience to treat that as plausible narrative, and a lot of them clearly did.
A lot of the war propaganda from back then is also depressingly similar to what gets pumped out now: you can't argue with success, you don't want to be on the losers' side do you?
To give 24 some credit, it showed some Americans as complicit in the terrorism or corruption in the story. ZDT also touched on how torture wasn't as effective as assumed. I agree that the broader themes often feel biased/propagandized, framing the anti-hero, who's basically acting as a proxy for the government, as justified at almost any cost.
Similarly in the pilot episode of Designated Survivor. "Let's nuke Teheran" was seen as a valid, and brilliant, tactical move in order to get negotiations with Iran to go Kiefer Sutherland's way.
Mike Judge still does. Serendipitously there's a show called Silicon Valley... I also enjoyed the more recent Common Side Effects. But you even see it in King of the Hill and it's hard to miss in Idiocracy.
My pet theory is that NYPD Blue and 24 paved the way in the American public mind for authoritarianism via the "good guys bending the rules and using violence because they know this guy did it" theme.
CSI and Law and Order as well contributed to the perception that the majority of police officers spend their time diligently and righteously investigating real crimes (usually resulting in finding the culprit) instead of spending their days watching traffic in pursuit of pretextual traffic stops, and solving less than 50% of violent crime cases.
No, you're right, and I distinctly remember the conspiracy theorists and counter culture thinkers immediately circling around "this is going to be used to restrict our freedom." And of course they were absolutely right.
I also remember it was the worse possible cultural faux paux to indicate you thought invading foreign nations wasn't a good response to 9/11. I mean go look at the votes for invasion of Iraq, damn near 2/3 of both the house and Senate in favor. Every radio blaring patriotic songs, every school doing patriotic projects, every brown kid living in hell.
And the military in movies used to be depicted as inflexible, stubborn, paranoid, incompetent, and usually either "the bad guys" or authorities that impeded the progress of the main characters. (With exceptions; I'm not forgetting about Top Gun).
Then there was a sudden switch, with the military shown with cool gadgets, airplanes, tech, heroics, and generally being glorified. The transition must have happened before the first Transformers, but it was in full swing by then.
Were one of a conspiratorial mind, one would guess massive amounts of money were spent in changing this image.
No conspiracy necessary. The CIA bought the rights to the 1954 film Animal Farm, modified the ending to fit propagandist ends, and it went undiscovered for four decades. The original Top Gun was intended to recover the image of the US Navy after the Vietnam War. Etc etc etc.
> No conspiracy necessary. The CIA bought the rights to the 1954 film Animal Farm, modified the ending to fit propagandist ends,
yea, I remember reading the book and then watching the movie and it had differences iirc, its available on youtube for free and I remember some comments talking about the different ending.
IIRC, in the movie, the animals finally kick the pigs out and everything. It was a good ending.
but in the book, there was not a good ending, the humans and the pigs were celebrating together and then ended up fighting in between each other
> Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This is the last paragraph I found from the book (had to download it via archive.org to find the last para)
If you are waiting until undergraduate level to take ethics, it's far too late to matter anyways.
Doubly so for "business ethics" classes which became à la mode in the post-Enron era. They attempt to teach fundamental ethics, when at most it should be a very thin layer on top of a well founded internal moral framework and well-accepted ethical standards inculcated from day 1 of kindergarten.
Morals are taught 0-9 [0], Ethics perhaps slightly later as it requires more complex thought processes.
Exactly. But, I would add ethics comes from worldview. The idea of teaching some sort of “secular” ethics has never made sense to me … even if you could pull it off it would never stick. Education is meant to make moral people, and that requires transcendent moral principles that come from somewhere outside of us — namely YHWH, our creator. Anything else is merely borrowing from our worldview — which is good as far as it goes but will always fall short.
> The idea of teaching some sort of “secular” ethics has never made sense to me …
An intro ethics class won't shy away from religion, it comes up a lot. You'll most likely even discuss differences in different sects of Christianity. You should also have the discussion of if morals are universal (and if so, which ones) or are all made up.
Secular just means you discuss more than one viewpoint. The idea of teaching morality from only one perspective never made sense to me. You won't even get that limited viewpoint in Seminary school, even though it'll certainly be far more biased
> Secular just means you discuss more than one viewpoint.
Secular is simply the viewpoint that claims to equalize all viewpoints while at the same time discounting them all in favor of its own … and then stealing the good parts of my viewpoint. :) It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t. At least in a good seminary they are honest about priors and articulate why
their viewpoint is different / better than others. Ethics is and always has been applied theology, answering the question “what do we do?” You can’t answer that question honestly or fully without answering the prior question.
> It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t.
I've heard about this from Fox News but I've never experienced it myself, even having grown up in a very blue state. I'm sure this happens somewhere, but I'm unconvinced it is the norm.
> Ethics is and always has been applied theology
This is trivial to prove false. You even do it! "What do we do?" You've implicitly added "if god exists". You're so strong in that conviction you claim there's a former question and yet never wrote one down. I'd even argue it is important for theologists to ask "What do we do if god doesn't exist?"
You seem to be under the belief that without god there are no moral convictions. Well I'll quote a very famous conman, as I feel the same as him.
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
- Penn Jillette
You can even find in the Bible plenty of passages to support his point. If the only thing stopping you from doing evil is the belief of punishment, then you are not a good person. Conversely, if the only reason you are doing good is because you are seeking eternal reward, neither are you good. One does not need god to have morals, one only needs have society and a theory of mind.
Hey look, we did Secular Ethics, and discussed religion! I disagreed with you, but you'll notice I never made claims about if I believe in god or not. You'll notice I make no judgement on you for believing in god. You'll notice, my entire argument is based on the origin of morals and really we've discussed is what is in a man's heart matters. This is no different than "Is an act of kindness good if one films themselves doing it?" There's a lot of gray in that question, obviously.
No ethics class is going to exclude you for being religious, as that would be unethical.
Agreed. I find that people who argue that religion is necessary for ethics tend to ignore the history of their religion and the fact that the original text largely serves as a jumping off point for religious philosophers to connect older “secular” texts to this new religion. Modern Christianity is a complex combination of Platonic, Aristotelian, Syrian, and Roman ideals which are taken out of their original context to align with the Bible even though the original writers would say they knew nothing about Jesus. The base texts which many of these ideas are based on make almost no appeals to God and focus more on what it means to live a “good life”. To be fair a lot of great ethical arguments are made by Christian writers but I think that’s more just a consequence of their cultural upbringing and the fact that the thing the New Testament really added to the discussion was that your ethical responsibilities generalize beyond yourself and your friends/family.
Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well.
You desperately need to study some history and philosophy.
“Your viewpoint” is a superstitious one that stole everything from previous superstitions. It’s also irredeemably immoral and violent. Not to mention based in an obvious fantasy which should have been left in the Bronze Age where it belonged.
I've met people who have never been in touch with organized religion. They generally have excellent ethical frameworks. I've also read the bible, it does not have a consistent moral or ethical framework.
How can it be that areligious people have ethics if they need god for ethics?
Ethics is all about being human, it does not require a god, and it does not require anyone to understand even what a human is, or what process led to us living life together. The subjective experience of life and the subjective experience of life in a society is all you need to develop ethics.
Don't worry, it was just a test of Abraham's loyalty. God was never going to let him kill Isaac. It's the perfect example of a completely ethical thing to do to another person...
You don’t need religion for ethics or worldview. How about: we all appear here on this rock, none of us know why, we’re all in it together, we all struggle, none of us know if we’re alone in this universe or what the universe really is. This unifies us all and puts us on an even playing field. We should be compassionate to one another as we all come from the same circumstance. We can create a concept of god to explain it, or accept that we don’t know for sure and maybe never will. God is a choice, but not the only one.
This exhibits the borrowing GP mentions: your ‘should’ does not necessarily follow from the stated priors. Why is compassion morally mandated by the priors and not competition, for example?
I don’t think religion is the only path, but that it has functioned as a prosocial positive-sum cooperating/compassion technology/mechanism in many cultural contexts. Not without downsides, of course.
That many today relatively reflexively default to ~‘we can all be nice to each other; this is obviously the (only) moral approach’ without stated precepts/priors/fundaments upon which that morality is moored I think tends to implicitly borrow priors from Western Christian tradition, albeit incompletely and sometimes critically so. Sam Harris’ recent appearance on Ross Douthat’s ‘Interesting Times’ podcast was IMO an example of this.
This kind of argument, while moral on a surface level, belies a misunderstanding of human nature. In Jungian terms, it assumes that the shadow self either does not exist or has been fully integrated without confrontation.
Once one has enough power and experience to achieve one’s goals despite opposition, and to use others instrumentally, the moral calculus can become difficult. We do not all start from the same circumstances: I am writing this on a phone produced by slave labour.
Both can be true that Leaders can use god to justify their terrible actions and Scientists can use theories/philosophies to justify their terrible actions too.
Justification of any evil action to consider oneself as a good guy might be a human quality.
That being said, Majority of wars/conflicts in the past have sadly been because of religions and that number doesn't seem to be stopping and is still continuing to this day sadly.
Either god is me (secularism) or god is something outside me (Christianity). One is going to be better than the other. It matters which one. Everyone has an answer, and it affects your morals. Whether or not you are consistent brings you back to that same question: “who says?”
I understand the argument, but the number of reprehensible Christians (or other flavor of religion) out in the world doesn’t seem to back up the claim that viewing God outside oneself leads to better moral results.
Option D: God may exist but has no perceivable after consequence and doesn't take part in any aspect of our day to day lives which are governed by physics (Deism)
Option E: God may or may not exist but once again, has no effect on our lives. (agnosticism)
So all option C), D), E) [I don't think that the concept of hell/heaven exists in it] have the same impact IMO that esentially there isn't any consequence on our day to day live and we are all gonna be just void when we die. Nothingness,
From here, we can approach towards what is the meaning of life and add onto the existenialism to find ones own meanings and that itself becomes a bedrock of morality
I personally fall somewhere along C), D), E) myself but I don't like to wonder about where exactly because it doesn't really have an impact on my life. I also sometimes fall into B) (God is outside me) in times of troubles to somehow get out of trouble or find strength if I am unable to find within myself during that time.
Logically, it might not make sense for me to believe in god during times of troubles if I can't have logic find the same meaning during not times of troubles. But I do think that humans are driven by emotions not logic at its core so its best to be light on yourself.
Also I feel gratitude towards the universe rather than god and the things which help me in my life during times of joy sometimes.
I also sometimes believe in rituals/festivals because they are part of my culture/community and it brings me joy at times.
But I have enough freeway leverage within all of this that I dictate this as my choice of life and If I see any religious figure person or anything being misused or see faults in any rituals being cruel. I don't feel dear to them and can quickly call anything out and be secular in the sense that I respect other people's rituals to be in co-existence with mine as long as they are peaceful about it because the element of coexistence is only possible within the elements of being peaceful/society being cooperative at large and I hold both people of my community/outside my community to the same standard and am quick to call out if new faults start to happen from my community but also from any other community. (Calling spade a spade)
Only people can say things. And following people that start by lying that they have unique and superior insight into what things ought to be is not a good strategy. Secular is just saying, we are all in this together as equals, let's figure things out, here's what we got thus far.
Transcendental moral principles can still be secular.
One that I find compelling is that Rawls' veil of ignorance lets us imagine that we might be on either side of a conflict, and that therefore moral actions are equitable to both sides. This gives us a secular morality that doesn't come with the baggage of religious outgroup dynamics.
First prove yhwh.
Then prove your favorite book is a direct transmission from yhwh. Disprove the claims of other peoples favorite books, there is a lot of competition there.
Demonstrate the telephone line by which this so called yhwh communicates his words and prove how and why it no longer does.
Fallen far, or maybe we are just more aware now, but anyway, I don't think that a lecture in ethics at university will fix things. That's:
(A) way too late, and
(B) without a strong character to begin with, this lecture will simply become a "necessary chore" for students, and basically go in one ear, and out the other ear. (Does that saying/phrase translate to English?)
By the time people start their undergrad, if they are not already at least trying to act ethically, that ship has sailed for most. Their upbringing and education did not manage to drill that into them before. I see it as more of an early childhood and parenting topic. If the parents are not leading by example and teaching their children ethics, then the children are often just going with the flow, not swimming against the current to uphold ideals. Why would they, if the other way is easier. I think it is rare, that people adopt ethics that they have not grown up with / raised according to.
So I would advocate ethics as a mandatory subject at school, if not primary school already.
Many prominent tech and science leaders have been disparaging philosophy for decades now. Not surprising that in the absence of any serious ethical thought, “make money = good” is the default position.
No, that isn’t what my comment suggests at all, on any level.
I don’t think you can have intelligent ethical opinions if you disparage and ignore the field that studies ethics (philosophy.)
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
I think there are definitely many positions with which I disagree, but are nonetheless well-thought through and coherent.
But it seems pretty clear that the people making these decisions haven’t done the work of thinking it through, and are instead just trying to maximize money. That’s my claim, at least.
> No, that isn’t what my comment suggests at all, on any level.
I don’t think you can have intelligent ethical opinions if you disparage and ignore the field that studies ethics (philosophy.)
You're not suggesting that, but then put up your own requirements for someone's ethics to be "valid". So in the end you are filtering others ethical choices by your own requirements.
And your logic seems to work backwards: someone does something you disagree with based on your personal ethical view -> assume they aren't well thought out
My requirements for someone's ethical opinions to be "valid" are that they don't criticize the field of ethics as useless. I guess that is a "requirement" I have, but it's a pretty nitpicking, useless distinction to make.
If someone criticizes the French language, but doesn't speak a word of French, sorry, but I don't have much respect for their opinion on French.
And no, I don't "assume they aren't well thought out," because many of these people have explicitly said philosophy is a waste of time.
I'm just having an intellectual argument with you, so thanks for sharing your thoughts.
In a non-theological world, the source of ethics can be anything - parents, community, study of ethhics. None of them is more valid than another - because requiring "a respect for the field of philosophy" is a ethical position in and of itself.
One of my best friends is a philosophy grad, and another is a very intelligent financier. What we've come to realize is that speaking and writing and making arguments is fruitless. You either have had the embodied experiences to recognize a statement is directionally correct -- to various magnitudes -- or you don't.
No amount of words will change that.
It is my experience -- after seeing the quality of thinking from those philosophically trained (I am not) -- that learning philosophy is learning how to think, and by extension figuring out for oneself what is capital g Good.
Morals and ethics are different and you conflate them. That is the crux of your confusion. Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it; but ethics requires actual intentional thought over years and years of reflecting on lived experience. What is good for you and your small circle can be grasped intuitively, but to grasp what is good "at scale" must be reasoned about. Without having seriously grappled with this, one is liable to have simplistic views, and in many cases hold views that have already been trodden through and whose "holes" have been exposed and new routes taken in unveiling ethics.
Without seriously having interfaced with it, it's like talking to someone about the exercise science when all they know is do steroids, lift weight, and eat. Sure, that works, but it lacks nuance and almost no thought has gone into it.
Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers. It requires intimacy and is a deeply personal conversation one should have with those close to them and explore together.
> Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it;
How so? This would infer some universal set of morality, which doesn't exist.
> Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers.
I think it's tiring because you view ethics and morality as a box that thinking has to happen in. But it's not. Ethics and morality can be anything (as we've seen through human history).
Excellent point. Philosophy (really anything not math-related) is seen as a waste of time by most people I know in tech. You end up getting a bunch of smart but unethical or misguided people. Engineering types end up being used as pawns in wider political games. Look at all the terrorists who are engineers, for example:
Would you consider being a contract killer (i.e. a hitman) ethical? What about being a creator of CSAM? Because those are both examples making money by providing others with what they want. And if we followed free market principles to their logical extreme then both of those would be allowed.
I think most people would agree that this would not be even remotely ethical. Nor would it lead to higher living standards than a more restricted market economy.
Sometimes I really don’t know how to reply to comments like these. Because they either seem to completely misunderstand the basic premise of my comment, or they deliberately focus on some tangential thing in order to make some trollish point. But I’ll reply here, and just assume my comment was somehow unclear.
Do you genuinely think that putting money above any other value is an ethical way to operate in the world? I certainly don’t, virtually no ethical theory does, and the vast majority of people don’t either.
This is not saying that making money is inherently a bad thing, but that placing it above every other value without question is definitely a bad thing, or at least a careless and thoughtless one.
To use your example: all sorts of things are in demand but unquestionably make the world worse. Does the fact that people are willing to pay for propaganda or chemical weapons or X other negative thing somehow mean that facilitating their sale is ethical? I really don’t understand the position.
I suppose there are some people out there who seriously have studied ethics and think making money is the ultimate good. It doesn’t seem like a serious position to me.
But I don’t think that’s become the default position because of serious analysis, but rather the total lack of it. Which is what my comment was about: when you refuse to engage in serious philosophical thought about something, you’re just going to revert to base values like the acquisition of money and power, or some variant of that which your local system is optimizing for.
He was trying to say that "making money in a free-market" is fundamentally linked to creating value for someone. It wasn't the 'money' word that you should have focused on, but the 'value'.
On average this way of creating value bottoms-up has undoubtedly produced the largest human flourishing in the history of our species. It has unlocked human creativity and has lifted millions of people from poverty. It is the best system we have been yet able to create. If you disagree - point me to an alternative (even if theoretical).
Of course, as in the case of averages, there is variance. Sure, greed, illegal money making is bad, but the total net benefit is overwhelmingly positive.
I think your blind spot is that you implicitly attribute no ethical value to 'money making'. For you they're disconnected. In fact, it's the oppositve - there is a lot of ethics in money making.
Here’s what I don’t get, and why these comments irritate me. They are just opportunities for someone to inject their ideological arguments about something that has little to do with the actual comment.
I didn’t say anything about capitalism being a bad system, nor did I say making money is inherently bad.
I said in the absence of ethical study, making money is treated as a default good. It seems pretty obvious to me that it isn’t a default good.
I’m completely uninterested in arguing about whether the profit motive has led to good societal outcomes, because a) in general I agree with that and b) it has literally nothing to do with my comment.
My original comment was just lamenting that tech leaders don’t study ethics, and therefore they just default to thinking that making money is always a good thing, no matter the consequences, no matter what values get ignored. In many situations, making money does indeed lead to good ethical situations. But my comment is about them not even bothering to ask that question in the first place. That’s all.
To add to keiferski's excellent comments: There is no such thing a truly free market. Neoliberalism is just an excuse to not care about things that stand in the way of people making more money or gaining more power.
This wealth we have built was not built on a totally free market (whatever that means), but much more social form of capitalism. The countries where there is the least povery and highest standards of living are countries that have a big social welfare state, such as the Norics.
Nothing human is perfect. However, history shows us that the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is. It doesn't have to be "truly free" to be effective.
In contrast, whenever socialism is tried and it fails, socialists describe it as "not true socialism". Since there is also no such thing as true socialism, the more "true" a socialism is, the more it fails.
To be fair, it wasn't like lockheed and raytheon and all the rest of the modern human killing machine companies have ever been hurting for engineering talent. Likewise for oil and gas.
Same with Ender's Game. They are playing war games but they're actually real. He sacrifices his units and commits genocide (xenocide) at the same time. Something he probably wouldn't have done had he known.
> Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
My undergrad wasn't in CS but my grad was. I was incredibly surprised to find that ethics isn't a requirement in most CS programs. That's a sharp contrast to traditional engineering and the hard sciences. CS people seem to love philosophy, yet I'm surprised not so much about this subset. We'll spend all day talking about if we live in a simulation (without learning physics) and what intelligence is (without studying neuroscience or psychology) but when it comes to what's acceptable to do at work the answer is always "if I don't do it somebody else will, at least I'll have a job". A phrase that surely everyone hears in an ethics 101 class...
Edit:
Oops, missed pazimzadeh's comment. I'll leave mine because I say more
And the world seen through media is heavily abstracted. And I think that makes people psychologically treat war like a game rather than something actually happening. We trick ourselves into believing it isn't real.
I wonder how much this changes based on country. The closest thing to a war happening within US borders was the attack on Pearl Harbor (I think). The US hasn't had conscription for 50 years. So there isn't much of a clearly visible and direct cost to war for many many Americans. I'm not arguing there isn't a cost, by the way, just that most can basically just not watch the news and have no idea war is happening.
Ender's Game the novel, but I would say that it's not actually super relevant. First, the original short story was 1977, and then Card expanded it into a novel which was published mid-1980s. The point in the story is that kids are sensitive, and supergenius kids more so, and that they don't want to interrupt performance with concerns about guilt. But Real Genius wasn't about that! It was about an anti-war stance born of the Vietnam War and creative-class hatred for Ronald Reagan's presidency.
Gotcha, I haven't actually seen the movie I just meant the concept of tricking and silo'ing genius kids to make them think they are playing a game when they're actually doing war/genocide is similar to the Ender's Game book. I don't know if this was just an idea floating around in the air or if it was inspired by Ender's Game, just interesting
You still take ethics. The only difference is political views. It’s very easy to be consistent from an ethical perspective if you are convinced of a government’s particular powers.
The government has a monopoly on violence. Whether you want to enhance it or not all comes down to your political alignment, not ethics.
Reminds me of the story of someone's woman working for a research lab to improve the computer-controlled automatic emergency landings of planes with total power failure.
... or so she was told.
She was unknowingly designing glide-bomb avionics.
I once saw the word nickel autocorrected incorrectly into something far worse. It was funny given the context (metals, not coins) but I wondered why someone would even have that word in their autocorrect dictionary.
My worst autocorrect story is a message to my mother in law referring to my sister in law. I told my mother in law that I’d give my wife’s sister “a*al’ when I got there. It was supposed to be ”a call” I’m still traumatized decades later.
What's in the autocorrect dictionary usually has nothing to do with what you typically write. No reason to wonder (i.e. if the insinuation being that that's a word they'd typically use).
We could joke about the auto correct knowing your subconscious mind.
Except if Facebook has auto correct, you can be sure it’s driven by a personal dossier on each of us, correlated by AI with every other person on the planet.
I feel like these stories are apocryphal. I mean, I can't say for certain that no US DoD research program used subterfuge to trick the performers into working on The Most Racist Bomb. But I can say that in 20 years I've never seen a dearth of people ready, willing, able, and actively participating with full knowledge that they are creating The Fastest Bomb and The Sneakiest Bom and The Biggest Bomb Without Actually Going Nuclear.
IDK, maybe it's different outside the National Capitol Region. But here, you could probably shout "For The Empire" as a toast in the right bars and people wouldn't think you were joking.
What? I'm not questioning whether the weapons research actually happened. I'm questioning the sincerity of people claiming they didn't know what they were doing. I've seen plenty of weapons programs. They aren't a secret to the people working on them. My point is, the government doesn't need to lie to researchers or even pay them very well to get them to develop weapons because there are plenty of intelligent-enough people willing to do it almost for free.
I've worked as a contractor for a safety system that turned out to be for a foreign military. I was given a signal, and told to write software to fit it. The signal could plausibly be collected for a wide variety of civilian purposes.
What I realized later was that none of the civilian markets could possibly justify the cost of the project.
The particular type of signal fitting I was doing was only achievable by a few thousand expensive domain experts in the world, so, I think that addresses your other point.
They knew the US was at war and they knew it was a government program for military purposes and they knew they were dealing nuclear materials.
A journalist not involved at all figured it out just fine, but at the very least it's not like it wasn't going to be a weapon.
Frankly though I wonder what the various judgemental people in these comments think about say, the tens of thousands of people who at the time were just straight up making artillery ammo.
If "This doesn't fit into my mental model, so everyone else must be lying" is how you deal with things you didn't personally experience, do what you have to.
The inability to accurately cite any story about this, and the "friend of a friend" structure is what implies it's garbage.
Not to mention it itself requires a conspiracy theory: "no one would do this work voluntarily" (or "all the smart people have to be tricked because they're so smart they obviously agree with me").
As though people don't just go and work at Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
The much more common reason is compartmentalisation. Employees are told as much as they need to know, no more.
If someone can design a glide bomb without knowing that it has an explosive payload, then they're not told.
The fear is not so much the employees themselves (they might be quite patriotic!) but that the information will leak out to the enemy, giving them a chance to counter the weapon or copy it.
That's a very different proposition to what the various parent posters are implying though. Like if you work for a defense contractor, you know what your work is for even if you wouldn't know exactly what the product or application was.
(spoiler alert)
Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...