
Ethics can’t be a side hustle - fagnerbrack
https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-cant-be-a-side-hustle-b9e78c090aee
======
schaunwheeler
I find that people in tech, especially in my own field of data science, treat
ethics as a relatively simple problem. If they were building a technical
product, they would at least make an appearance of checking assumptions, and
worrying about breadth and depth of stakeholder buy-in, and building tests for
unintended consequences. But when it comes to building an ethical "product" to
guide their work, it's like all of the best-practices go by the wayside. For
example:

[https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-
to...](https://www.wired.com/story/should-data-scientists-adhere-to-a-
hippocratic-oath/)

Data for Democracy came up with an ethical code for data scientists and is now
talking it up asking people to sign on to it. The thing is basically the
product a few months of working groups plus a day-long hackathon, and it's
already been put out on the market, so to speak. So it's not surprising that
they produced something that could, in many ways, actually run counter to
their goals. I firmly believe the ethical code as written is itself unethical:

[https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-
about...](https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about-
ethics-66acaea6f16f)

What I've found amazing is that the community that built the D4D ethical code
has been entirely unwilling to invite criticism of the code, or even engage
with those who question it. The fact that willingness to entertain criticism
and consider unintended consequences is actually one of the pillars of their
ethical code makes it doubly troubling.

~~~
ssivark
I think the “problem” is that ethical questions and nuanced thinking generally
get in the way of “getting things done”. It seems that the
software/startup/disruption community glorifies moving fast, shipping an MVP
and then iterating on improving measurable metrics. None of these are
conducive to dialectic and thinking carefully about consequences. Heck, the
popularity of weak/dynamic typing and REPL-it-till-it-works shows that many
programmers today aren’t willing to reason about effects even within their own
code... leave alone societal consequences! Nothing wrong with that style of
programming as such, but I think it’s a symptom of the ratio of thinking-to-
doing that many find comfortable.

Software is unique in that it gives us the flexibility to fix bugs after
shipping, unlike any other engineering field. Over the last few decades, we
seem to have gotten increasingly carried away with emphasis on that feature.
Also has to do with the incentive structure encouraged in SV.

~~~
s73v3r_
I think the problem is, you can fix technical bugs after shipping. It's much,
much harder to fix ethical bugs.

~~~
schaunwheeler
Exactly. The cost of fixing a bug after the product is out the door is much
higher when the bug is ethical rather than technical. Therefore, don't move
the product out the door so quickly. Ethical QA takes time.

------
ryandrake
I quit a job once, for a number of reasons, but one of them being that as I
learned the intended application of the technology I was working on, I grew
more and more ethically uncomfortable. I was initially lured to the company
for the opportunity to work on cool technology (GIS, sensors, airborne
mapping), but soon realized the stuff was being primarily sold to law
enforcement for the purpose of, among other things, surveillance and
immigration enforcement. So the end of the day I decided I don’t want my name
to be associated with that. I don’t want to have to explain to my daughter one
day (whose mother is an immigrant) that I was part of building an immigrant
surveillance system. So I went and found something different to do.

There are lots of opportunities in software to take the ethical high road. Do
I help the company try to sneakily get the user’s personal info? Do I help us
cheat this benchmark? Do I hide our bugs by silently restarting the app when
the user is probably not at his PC? (each of which I was asked to implement at
one point in my career) Does what I’m programming sit well with my personal
ethics and beliefs? I should be able to explain why I am writing the program
i’m writing and be able to live with it. (EDIT)If I am the owner of a company
and I’m interviewing someone and they worked at some company notorious for
using dark patterns or anything else ethically questionable I think it’s fair
game to ask about their involvement.

------
beaconstudios
I don't think this is a straightforward as the author claims. I'm sure there
are plenty of people at Uber who believe that governments are acting in an
oppressive manner by trying to come down hard on Uber. Not that I agree with
that stance, but there are multiple ethical stances that co-exist in this
world - that's why politics isn't a solved problem.

~~~
dictum
> that's why politics isn't a solved problem

There's another problem: under certain viewpoints, it's unethical to not send
the _bastards_ to a concentration camp, gulag, etc.

~~~
bjl
Except not all viewpoints are valid or true. If (as a vast majority of
philosophers think) morality is objective, then those people are simply wrong
about what is ethical/unethical.

~~~
gnode
Error theorists would argue that no moral viewpoints at all are true.

~~~
humanrebar
I'm not sure what implications you want people to draw from that statement.
It's hard to argue that murder is OK, for example, so it's hard to argue that
laws are all subjective expressions of power.

~~~
tremon
But your example is begging the question. If you frame killing a human being
as _murder_ , you've already decided that it's unjust or unlawful. How about
the death penalty, euthanasia, extrajudicial execution, war, honour killing or
jihad/crusade? In all those cases, the killing party believes their actions
are fully justified.

~~~
humanrebar
Nobody argues that there is no such thing as murder. It's not begging the
question just because people don't agree about edge cases.

~~~
gnode
You're right; I don't think anyone here is arguing murder isn't real. The
argument is that murder is not an objective truth, but rather a subjective
truth. This doesn't mean we shouldn't care about murder, just that murder is a
conceptual reality.

------
amelius
I think our economic model is highest on the list of needing an ethical
makeover. If the person on one end of the supply-chain makes 1000000x as
people on the other end of the supply-chain, then it's time to scratch our
heads and deeply investigate what's wrong and how it can be fixed.

We can do ethical work within our current economic framework all day long, but
that's not going to solve the most pressing ethical issues.

~~~
lolsal
Why do you think that model is ethically wrong? If every link in the chains is
compensated fairly (no one is coerced) and value is added, it seems like an
inevitability that one end of the chain would be magnitudes larger in
compensation.

~~~
tachyoff
There are a billion assumptions wrapped up in those statements. I will address
some of them.

1\. Every link is NOT compensated fairly. Wages have been stagnant for
decades; meanwhile, the cost of everything else (especially housing) continues
to rise, sometimes astronomically. $7.25 is the federal minimum wage, and it
is impossible to live on.

2\. Plenty of people are coerced into enduring terrible employment simply
because they need to survive. I get it, Walmart needs employees too, but they
should be in a union. It shouldn’t be possible to fire something and hire them
back to start them back at the lowest pay grade (yes, this is a real thing
they actually do).

3\. Capitalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; nothing does. The Randian “well,
everyone’s trading value for value” falls apart the minute you look at a
$10,000 MRI bill, or a $7.25 minimum wage, or an entire city that’s been
destroyed because production moved overseas. It doesn’t particularly matter
how much stocking shelves “is worth”; if you are alive, you don’t deserve to
live in squalor and poverty in the richest country in the world.

~~~
lolsal
> 1\. Every link is NOT compensated fairly. Wages have been stagnant for
> decades; meanwhile, the cost of everything else (especially housing)
> continues to rise, sometimes astronomically. $7.25 is the federal minimum
> wage, and it is impossible to live on.

If I offer you $1 for your banana, and you agree and then we exchange the $1
and the banana, is that not fair?

> 2\. Plenty of people are coerced into enduring terrible employment simply
> because they need to survive.

Are you arguing that 'providing for yourself' counts as coercion? What actor
is doing the coercion?

> I get it, Walmart needs employees too, but they should be in a union. It
> shouldn’t be possible to fire something and hire them back to start them
> back at the lowest pay grade (yes, this is a real thing they actually do).

Are they agreeing to be re-hired?

> 3\. Capitalism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; nothing does. The Randian “well,
> everyone’s trading value for value” falls apart the minute you look at a
> $10,000 MRI bill, or a $7.25 minimum wage, or an entire city that’s been
> destroyed because production moved overseas.

Why? MRIs provide a lot of value! Minimum wage effort provides low value.

> It doesn’t particularly matter how much stocking shelves “is worth”; if you
> are alive, you don’t deserve to live in squalor and poverty in the richest
> country in the world.

Why? You're implying that being born in one place or another changes what you
'deserve' as a human being. That's an interesting, but scary line of thought!

~~~
matt4077
You're wilfully ignoring the substance of the comment you're replying to which
makes me think you're acting in bad faith.

There is an argument to be made that the US' economic system is fair. I
disagree with that position, but it isn't completely unreasonable.

But your argument simply "proves too much". Your definition of "agreement",
for example, includes a hostage agreeing to pay the ransom. It would also
cover child labor, any form of discrimination, selling yourself into slavery,
the abolishment of all labor standards including safety laws, shrink-wrap
TOCs, non-compete clauses, forced arbitration for all disputes etc. etc.

~~~
lolsal
> You're wilfully ignoring the substance of the comment you're replying to
> which makes me think you're acting in bad faith.

I'm not.

> There is an argument to be made that the US' economic system is fair.

I myself wouldn't agree that the US economic system is totally fair - there
are cheaters/liars/coercion/exploitation everywhere. There are lots of things
that are unfair, but choosing to work for minimum wage is not one of those
things. An entrepreneur making 10000 more than someone else in the chain is
also not one of those things, in my opinion.

> But your argument simply "proves too much". Your definition of "agreement",
> for example, includes a hostage agreeing to pay the ransom. It would also
> cover child labor, any form of discrimination, selling yourself into
> slavery, the abolishment of all labor standards including safety laws,
> shrink-wrap TOCs, non-compete clauses, forced arbitration for all disputes
> etc. etc

I'm deliberately excluding situations like this where actors are being
coerced, so my examples do not include hostages, child labor, slavery, etc.
Those are crimes for a reason and excluded here. See my original comment for
where I omitted acts of coercion.

------
austincheney
> ”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean good as in “on the side
> of the angels.”

That is a fundamentally huge misunderstanding of ethics, confusion between
ethos and pathos. Ethics is about doing the right thing even if in opposition
to your personal beliefs. There is nothing necessarily ethical about
activities in fulfillment of a cause.

This isn't the problem I most prominently see in software with regards to
ethics or product quality. I far more frequently see people half-assing
product quality in order to make timelines and either keep their jobs or
fulfill some qualitative metric that earns a larger annual bonus.

------
Vinnl
So what if you don't directly work on a product you consider unethical, but
you know that others in the company do? Sure, you're not working on it
directly, but you're keeping a company alive that does. But where else to
work? What if the company you're working for isn't directly creating products
you consider unethical, but is e.g. a customer at an unethical bank, or
creates products that help companies that produce products you consider
unethical?

And what if you work at/for such a company, but you're not a programmer, but
e.g. a cleaner, are making ends meet, and you're lucky to have a job in the
first place?

~~~
strudey
I would suggest the answer is: if it was easy, it wouldn't be ethics.

------
golergka
> ”And they don’t mean “good” as in quality. They mean good as in “on the side
> of the angels.”

And the author means "angels" as in "people who share my very specific
political beliefs".

> You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design
> databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics
> offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle.

If I was a US citizen, and had an opportunity to work on software that helped
enforcing immigration law, I would feel pretty proud about it.

~~~
aerotwelve
You may disagree with the author's political beliefs, but you also aren't the
subject of the author's critique.

If you help design or write a portion of a product, you are a crucial part of
bringing the system into reality. If you support and believe in the mission
and ends of a product, there's no issue there.

The problem occurs when you work on a system that is designed to fulfill an
outcome that you don't agree with, or one that you believe is bad for society.
The author's thesis is clear: If you choose to contribute to the development
of such a system, you cannot divorce yourself from the consequences that will
follow when your work product is turned on.

[edit: I'm not arguing for moral relativism; I'm trying to separate the
argument from the concrete examples given in the piece.]

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booleandilemma
_Can you imagine a doctor not telling you about a dark spot they found on an
x-ray...Can you imagine an auto mechanic not telling you your brakes are shot
because they didn’t want to deal with the problem..._

The problem with these examples is that doctors and mechanics have a direct
relationship with their customers while software developers do not. Not unless
the developer is a freelancer.

~~~
humanrebar
Doctors and mechanics have professional societies and/or licenses. It's not as
abstract for them. They go out of business for many unethical behaviors.

------
jstanley
Well said.

