
Deciding to do morally risky work (2019) - selebela
http://joeroussos.org/2019/02/13/deciding-to-do-morally-risky-work-management-consulting-and-the-military/
======
ojnabieoot
> So here is an important moral question: is knowledge of moral risk (in the
> sense of a risk that I will do something bad, unknowingly) a reason to hold
> me morally culpable?

I would say yes. Let’s make an analogy to physical risk: suppose you are a
shift manager who is aware of general and persistent safety issues at a
factory (by hearing about mutilations and deaths), even if you don’t know any
of the specifics. Formally, inspecting equipment is not your job and you only
have “standard” safety responsibilities. Still, if you take no effort to
investigate potential safety issues in your own factory line, and one of your
workers gets killed due to an undiagnosed machine fault, I would say you held
significant culpability in their death.

This might not be _legal_ culpability vis a vis manslaughter or OSHA trouble,
but in an informal and societal sense, you could have done more to protect
that person, and the only thing stopping you was your indifference and a
shield of “it wasn’t my responsibility.”

In general: if you are aware of potential ethical or moral liability, you
can’t lawyer or philosopher your way out of it. Engaging with the question
itself is assuming responsibility.

~~~
kd5bjo
> Engaging with the question itself is assuming responsibility.

This is a dangerous sentiment as it incentivizes people to not engage with
such questions in order to avoid the accompanying duty, which cannot be known
before considering the question.

~~~
ojnabieoot
To be clear the question is not “is this morally questionable?” but rather “I
know this is morally questionable, is there a way for me to avoid
responsibility?”

Otherwise I am having a bit of difficulty actually untangling your comment.

~~~
kd5bjo
By putting a burden on people who know something is “morally questionable,”
you are discouraging people from taking actions which might reveal such
knowledge to them. In the hypothetical you posted, the manager is not in a
position to avoid this knowledge.

By your logic, an activist that knows about the conditions inside the plant is
also responsible for the safety of the workers, and no action other than
successfully protecting the workers will satisfy that responsibility. In this
framework, it’s better for an outsider to actively avoid learning about the
working conditions because it might impose a duty that’s impossible to
fulfill.

~~~
ojnabieoot
This is a tortured misreading of what I’m saying - and regardless is addressed
by my argument.

> you are discouraging people from taking actions which might reveal such
> knowledge to them

If you are _deliberately and knowingly_ avoiding that knowledge to escape
culpability then that’s morally equivalent to having the knowledge but failing
to act. A police sergeant who says “get a confession, and if you rough him up
don’t tell me about it” might be protecting themselves from _legal_
responsibility but certainly not _moral_ responsibility.

Again: there isn’t a loophole here. Constructing a loophole is itself immoral.

> By your logic, an activist that knows about the conditions inside the plant
> is also responsible for the safety of the workers

No - the manager has substantially more capacity to act than the activist.
There is some fuzziness - is the activist is deliberately suppressing
information about conditions inside the plant then they do share
responsibility. But if the activist is merely ineffective then it’s not
reasonable to blame them for injuries or fatalities. This is not a question
that’s amenable to algorithms or flowcharts, which seems to be giving you some
difficulty.

> and no action other than successfully protecting the workers will satisfy
> that responsibility.

This is not what my logic said at all! It’s such a ridiculous misreading that
I wonder if you are arguing in good faith. I didn’t say the manager had to
_successfully_ protect the worker, but that they had to _try._ If machine
maintenance is the responsibility of another team then perhaps the manager
could do everything right and still have a worker killed. No one human can
solve every problem that might come up. But if the manager knew there was a
risk and did nothing, not even taking a look, then they share moral
responsibility with the team actually responsible for maintaining the
equipment. There is a huge difference between “the firefighters failed to stop
the fire because it got too dangerous” and “the firefighters failed to stop
the fire because they went out drinking,” even if in the latter case the fire
was hopeless.

Again - you really can’t lawyer or logic your way out of moral responsibility,
even if it works on a legal or social level. And no, there isn’t a foolproof
algorithm for determining moral questions like this. But if your approach is
“where are the gaps in this moral framework that lets me get away with bad
things?” then you are not interested in acting morally.

~~~
zodiac
I think the OP is concerned with the question "how do I create incentive-
compatible moral codes", not "how do I behave given a moral code". In
economics theres lots of cases when these two questions are very different
questions in a pretty counterintuitive way (except with "laws" replacing
"moral codes")

~~~
TeMPOraL
I interpreted it that way too.

Ultimately, you can try and build a perfect theoretical moral framework, but
if it disagrees too much with how people feel about it in aggregate, it won't
take (and you'll do more wrong than good by trying to force-feed it to
people). It's e.g. one of the bigger failing of communism - it turned out that
the concept of private ownership is close to fundamental to humans[0], so the
then-new system failed as soon as people with guns stopped enforcing it.

\--

[0] - Don't know why, but my pet hypothesis is that it's fundamental to each
of us to be able to think about some things as "it's mine, I control it, I'm
responsible for what happens to it". Might have been necessary to survival -
if there are things your life depends on, you want to have absolute say about
what happens to them, so that they are always there when you need them the
most.

------
ilammy
Many countries still have military conscription, so sometimes enlisted
soldiers do not really have a choice: you are either drafted with national
pride, or drafted feeling moral guilt, or jailed for dodging and then maybe
still drafted afterwards into a penal batallion. Or you break and bend the
law.

~~~
RashadSaleh
Very important point. It should be considered a cornerstone of democracy to
have only voluntary drafting -- just like a free press and general elections.

~~~
kzrdude
I would not take that as a fact. Drafting allows for a more representative
selection of the population, giving more conscientious and better troops.

Drafting is democratic because it is equal. Drafting should also be an anti-
war effort. Would you vote for someone who wanted to go to war, if you knew it
would send your children or friends into the war?

With a draft, the choice to go to war becomes higher profile, and everyone is
more invested in it.

~~~
effie
> Drafting allows for a more representative selection of the population,
> giving more conscientious and better troops.

Maybe that is correct, but it does nothing to get more conscientious
government and military leadership. There are bad consequences as well - draft
can increase duration of war, leading to more crimes and more deaths. Also,
drafting strips many people of belief in personal responsibility.

> Drafting is democratic because it is equal. Drafting should also be an anti-
> war effort.

Do you know what democratic means? If you got drafted into Vietnam war, there
was nothing democratic about it. Government lied to people from the start and
was covering up evidence of how the war was going.

~~~
mantas
> Maybe that is correct, but it does nothing to get more conscientious
> government and military leadership.

It does. Then public knows that their elected leaders may send themselves
and/or their family/relatives/friends. Warmongering suddenly is much more
touchy-feely when you got skin in the game.

> There are bad consequences as well - draft can increase duration of war

Longer war is better than loosing. Especially if you're defending.

> leading to more crimes and more deaths

Loosing defence war to some sort of not-exactly-human-rights-loving regime is
much worse.

> Also, drafting strips many people of belief in personal responsibility.

How so? It becomes everyone's personal responsibility if the country gets in
war.

> Do you know what democratic means? If you got drafted into Vietnam war,
> there was nothing democratic about it. Government lied to people from the
> start and was covering up evidence of how the war was going.

And government was democratically elected, wasn't it?

As a non-american, IMO fully professional US military is the reason for war-
happy government. For better or worse.

~~~
effie
> It does. Then public knows that their elected leaders may send themselves
> and/or their family/relatives/friends. Warmongering suddenly is much more
> touchy-feely when you got skin in the game.

Again, it didn't work that way during the Vietnam war. Maybe it will next
time, we'll see.

> And government was democratically elected, wasn't it?

Technically it was. In practice, Johnson wasn't elected and the high-ranking
officials including the president maintained the war on back burner, burning
through American and Vietnamese lives, to keep up with their dubious agenda.
The war effort was a lie and massively opposed by the public.

------
ganzuul
Young people have not established themselves and feel vulnerable in world
where news of insecurity travels fast. A young adult is thrown out of their
nest into the wilderness, and perception of right and wrong changes as a
result. Humans are wild animals.

All moral is relative. Non-relative moral is ethics. If you have misgivings
about embarking on an endeavour it is your duty to gather more information. If
the information is witheld you can not proceed with your ethics intact. With
enough compromise you will be without ethics and morals, and become an enemy
of your kin.

It is hard to live without ever compromising one's ethics. These companies
probably exploit what little flexibility young people have. I would refuse to
share a dinner table with their leaders.

------
shoo
> Why do people continue to work for management consulting firms?

I gather the money might have something to do with it.

As the great philosophers Devo once said: freedom of choice is what you've
got, freedom from choice is what you want.

------
thenoblesunfish
The really tricky issue also comes up in activism. When is inaction wrong? To
one degree or another, we all participate as low-level players in evil
systems. At what point should we change our own behavior? At which point are
we justified in condemning others?

The line is never going to be well-defined, so the best we can do is approach
things in good faith, trying to keep a balance and assuming (almost) everyone
else is trying to do the same.

------
einpoklum
> Gadaffi... South Africa...

What about the US federal government? Banks and investment firms? The oil
companies? Blackwater, Haliburton, Bechtel and the like? Mineral extraction
companies? Or perhaps - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft et al, who spy on
you all the time?

> There are obvious and important differences between war and management
> consulting. The first straightforwardly involves killing people, the latter
> does not.

Well, a lot of the companies I mentioned above delegate the killing of people
to other elements. E.g the government and its military forces.

~~~
badrequest
They’re also bad, and the author never said otherwise. Why engage in
whataboutism here?

~~~
einpoklum
Because it may change the default: Perhaps you're more likely to end up doing
immoral than moral work / working for an immoral, violent, indirectly-
homicidal organization. The esoteric clients like Gadaffi rare.

------
roenxi
> There are (plainly) bad consulting projects, and so it is true that there is
> a risk of doing bad work as a consultant.

This bit of the argument contains the major flaw - it can be applied to
literally any occupation. The most theoretically moral institution we have is
the church. Ostensibly dedicated to doing nothing but espousing and
propagating good in the world. Now look at what that means in practice for
some of the scandals that priests get involved in.

There is no alternative morally safe place to work.

~~~
ken
You're trying to exploit a slippery slope. There are many churches which have
had no such scandals, and are not associated with any who have.

Just because Monitor (dozens of offices, thousands of employees) worked for
Gaddafi doesn't mean "John & Jane's IT Setup Helpers" around the corner must
also be an inherently immoral institution.

~~~
roenxi
A core part of the slippery slope argument is some sort of slippage along the
slope, ie, change. I'm not arguing anything will change; I'm saying having an
impact on the real world always runs an ethical risk. The slope slipped at the
birth of commerce, thousands of years ago.

And what if Monitor contracts John & Jane's IT Startup Helpers to do some
work? Are they ethically firewalled in some way that Monitor's IT staff are
not? Ethics issues could be resolved by clever corporate structure and
contracting out services instead of bringing them in-house.

------
kazagistar
This is a distraction. Systemic problems require systemic solutions, not
individual moral mandate. People have power to effect change together, but
when atomized, you will find ways to survive and rationalize. Anyone driving
the conversation towards individuals, rather then asking why these evil
entities are allowed to exist is distracting from actual solutions and
twisting the narrative towards one that is friendly to perpetuating broken
systems.

------
RashadSaleh
From:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_hierarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_hierarchy)
"strict accountability – those who issue orders are responsible for the
consequences, not those who carry them out"

If you are a subordinate and you disagreed with a certain order, either
because you think the order is stupid or morally wrong, you can (and should)
still carry out the order to the best of your ability.

If the emotional distress caused by a contradiction (perceived or real)
between carrying out your duty (which you have agreed to follow strictly) and
your moral principles -- if this emotional distress becomes unmanageable to
the degree that makes it impossible to carry out your duty (although you know
perfectly well that you won't be responsible for the outcomes), you can simply
submit your resignation or ask that someone else takes your place.

There is also the scenario where the orders you are given conflict with the
law itself, in which case your superior(s) are violating the law in which case
you have no duty to carry out the orders.

This is why not every civilian can be a military person.

~~~
austincheney
This line of thinking does not apply to the US military. If you have reason to
believe an order is illegal, or even should have known, you are just as guilty
of the illegal act as the person giving an order. That being said don’t
execute an illegal order hoping chain of command will qualify as a valid legal
defense.

~~~
lb1lf
-While I have no first-hand knowledge of the US military (or, for that matter, any military - I was conscripted into a branch which didn't take hierarchy too seriously), just about every time the subject of immoral/illegal orders came up, consensus was that the smart (for the individual) thing to do was to acknowledge the order, then do nothing.

The reasoning was that refusing an order would get you in serious trouble much
faster than your claiming it was illegal would get you out of trouble - hence
your best bet was to get hit with a (lesser) charge of incompetence rather
than having the full weight of the army come crashing down on you for
refusing.

~~~
RashadSaleh
Sounds like a case of corruption. Military systems can be corrupt for the same
reason that humans can be corrupt. Unfortunately, nobody found the magic wand
yet, so we still have to be responsible for ourselves and make difficult
choices. Reform is hard work and a lot of people might not want to make the
sacrifice (and understandably so).

------
appleflaxen
What would an "unjust consulting project" look like?

I work it a field without any, so it seems like this is assumed knowledge that
I don't have.

Can anyone explain it to me?

------
t0mmyb0y
To answer your question: 1\. A job/career that pays money. 2\. Your morals are
not my morals. Why try to fit your morals onto others?

------
CaptArmchair
This is a great blogpost on moral thinking. I think it's in line with the work
of the german-american political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt who
did reflect on these very questions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt)

Arendt was of german and jewish decent and experienced first hand the rise of
totalitarianism and persecution during the 1930s. She was able to escape with
her family to the United States in 1940. Post-war she became a writer and a
visiting scholar teaching at many academic institutions. She developed her
political theory during the 1950's publishing various seminal works.

Notably, in 1961-1963, she attended the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem on
behalf of The New Yorker, eager to test her ideas developed in The Origins of
Totalitarianism. She was especially interested in Adolf Eichmann as an
individual and how he ended up becoming the architect of the Holocaust.

> On this, Arendt would later state "Going along with the rest and wanting to
> say 'we' were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible".
> What Arendt observed during the trial was a bourgeois sales clerk who found
> a meaningful role for himself and a sense of importance in the Nazi
> movement. She noted that his addiction to clichés and use of bureaucratic
> morality clouded his ability to question his actions, "to think". This led
> her to set out her most famous, and most debated, dictum: "the lesson that
> this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the
> fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil". By stating that
> Eichmann did not think, she did not imply lack of conscious awareness of his
> actions, but by "thinking" she implied reflective rationality, that was
> lacking. Arendt, who eschewed identity politics, was also critical of the
> way Israel depicted Eichmann's crimes as crimes against a nation state,
> rather than against humanity itself.

> Arendt was also critical of the way that some Jewish leaders associated with
> the Jewish Councils (Judenräte), notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted during the
> Holocaust, in cooperating with Eichmann "almost without exception" in the
> destruction of their own people. She had expressed concerns on this point,
> prior to the trial. She described this as a moral catastrophe. While her
> argument was not to allocate blame, rather she mourned what she considered a
> moral failure of compromising the imperative that it is better to suffer
> wrong than to do wrong. She describes the cooperation of the Jewish leaders
> in terms of a disintegration of Jewish morality: "This role of the Jewish
> leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest
> chapter in the whole dark story". Widely misunderstood, this caused an even
> greater controversy and particularly animosity toward her in the Jewish
> community and in Israel. For Arendt, the Eichmann trial marked a turning
> point in her thinking in the final decade of her life, becoming increasingly
> preoccupied with moral philosophy.

It's an interesting observation since Arendt points out that the moral failure
of compromising on an imperative is a far more nuanced story then first meets
the eye. The lack of reflective rationality can happen regardless of time and
place.

The failure to reflect on one's own actions came to the foreground in another
highly covered court case: the My Lai massacre (1968) in which a company of
U.S. Army soldiers ended up killing 347 south-vietnamese unarmed villagers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre)

The court case ended up a scandal as officers, NCO's as well as privates where
accused and prosecuted. Most notably, the failure of "command responsibility"
and the fact that many involved resorted to "I was only following orders"
stirred outrage.

I think it's interesting here to look at those cases with the hindsight of
history and see how those dynamics and the questions raised about the morality
of our actions still apply today. Even more so, I think this is the exact
reason why education systems should teach about these cases and show what
happens if you eschew your responsibility of reflecting on your own actions in
order to own up to a shared imperative.

------
1cvmask
It is interesting that he brings up the assistance of helping Saif Qaddafi
getting a PHD as morally flawed.

The destruction of Libya led Africas richest country - with free education and
healthcare - to become a failed state with black slave markets and human
trafficking.

Is everyone that voted for Obama also complicit in the human misery/genocides
in Libya ( or insert Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, Chad etc.)?

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-
rights/exe...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-
rights/executions-torture-and-slave-markets-persist-in-libya-u-n-
idUSKBN1GX1JY)

[https://www.amazon.com/Dissent-Channel-American-Diplomacy-
Di...](https://www.amazon.com/Dissent-Channel-American-Diplomacy-
Dishonest/dp/1541724488)

~~~
scarmig
Nah. Voting isn't some divine representation of the will of the people; it's a
feedback mechanism to push the governing apparatus toward goals that are
beneficial to the voting population, however halting or misguided the approach
is.

Some people voted for McCain over Obama; does that give them the moral, anti-
war high ground, since Obama killed Libyans and McCain never had a chance to?
Not at all. Nor does throwing away your vote by going third party, spoiling
your ballot, or abstaining give you any particularly sympathetic reason to
morally preen.

Voting isn't a moral activity.

~~~
ses1984
Voting isn't a moral activity, this is a really, really strange proposition
that I am not sure I can accept.

Don't morals factor into deciding what goals are beneficial to the population?

(I'm not even sure I agree with the proposition that voting pushes the
governing apparatus this way in many democracies including the USA)

~~~
scarmig
> (I'm not even sure I agree with the proposition that voting pushes the
> governing apparatus this way in many democracies including the USA)

I agree that it doesn't, but it's the intent. I don't think that's inherent to
democracy, though, just the particular "democratic" structures that have
evolved that we live with.

> Don't morals factor into deciding what goals are beneficial to the
> population?

As individuals, we can vote how we like, and everyone can and should use
whatever individual morality they have to cast their vote (or not).

But the act of voting doesn't mean that the voter has delegated their moral
agency (and, with that, the potential for moral blame or praise) to the people
in government. If I vote for someone who decides to do something monstrous, I
may be an idiot if I mis-predicted that would be a result, but I discount
attempts to put the moral blame for their actions onto me.

This is a relatively unpopular view nowadays (because people see it as a way
for Trump voters to distance themselves from Trump's actions), but a world
that does assume voters bear moral responsibility for the actions of their
government merely by the act of having voted for whoever is performing the
actions is a world where it's impossible to be moral.

~~~
cycomanic
I don't think I can agree with that argument. There is definitely a moral
responsibility of the people to hold their governments accountable. I
definitely see a responsibility of the German during the 3rd Reich to have a
moral responsibility to what happened and the generation which did live during
that time were justifiably challenged by their children about what they did or
didn't do.

