Talks about ethics is a way of indirect manipulating another people. It's actually unethical itself. It's about that person who start discuss about ethics of another people surely has absolutely proper ethics principles. You have to understand that there always exists PoV from what absolutely any activity may be considered as "unethics". And it's mostly cultural and contextual things.
There is good and simple example. There still is a lot of places where child labor is used. Western, mostly European people consider it as completely inapropriate. Somewhere some activists manage to prohibit it. It would sound beautiful if not to know what will happen with this kids later when they stay without job. Western people mostly doesn't think abo
ut it. Most of that kids will starve to death. So, what about ethics in this case?
While I agree that there are different points of view to any matter, I don't buy that exploitation and oppression can be "ethical" in some contexts.
Your example is flawed. There are a few small companies in the business selling ethically produced goods that go to these same countries where other companies are exploiting children and give their employees better conditions and higher pay so that their children don't have to work. It's not about if we don't keep doing this bad thing, something worse will happen, it's about how can we change the world so that this bad thing doesn't need to happen.
Is it an easy thing to do? Not at all. Is it always clear what's the alternative? No. We've spent the past millennia messing up the world big time, so undoing some of that mess is going to be hard and take time. That doesn't mean that some bad things that we don't know how to fix are ethical.
It's remarkable that you've used words "exploitation and oppression" that has highly negative connotation in any context. In this case, I should say "sure, you are right". And I will agree, it is.
But the problem is that kids even don't know such words. For them it may be just ability to get some money to helps their family or themself without_crime. To work to buy a food yourself or your family is it ethical? For me and from side of that kids it is highly ethical.
So what is unethical here?
Yeah, I say directly it's manipulation. But it shows pretty well how easy "ethics/unethics" may be turned one to other.
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
To take a development metaphor here (seems appropriate?), I like to view these grey areas as partly refactored code, there is work to do moving towards a 'better' society (my philosophy here is the golden rule: we should all be able to treat others as equals), possibly work arounds (such as continuing to pay child labourers or permit abortion in certain circumstances) until the root causes can be reached. Of course like code, refactoring social systems is never really done as they also evolve under other influences. Our work here will never be 'done'...
Hi northbear, yes it's true that different humans and different cultures have different standard of ethics. I'm not a scholar in the fields of philosophy and ethics so I'm ill equipped to take on the larger issue, after all my post was only about programming.
Let me say these things though:
if you read the original discussion on hacker news you will realize that most of the people who posted have also shown regret for what they did. So if you are regretful it means the deed violated your own sense of ethics. Which is perfectly in tune with the motivation of my post
ethics, moral codes and laws are not stones. they change in time. for most of the history of humankind the concept of "human rights" was non-existant but then a lot of people (not all) decided we should ascribe to this fictional concept (because there's nothing in nature saying humans should have rights, just in human society). Ethics are fluid yes, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about anything.
If the world is being eaten by software, software programmers should study something in addition to computer science. That's it, that's all I'm saying.
I'm not trying to bring about worldpeace with a few words on dev.to
Talks about ethics is a way of indirect manipulating another people. It's actually unethical itself. It's about that person who start discuss about ethics of another people surely has absolutely proper ethics principles. You have to understand that there always exists PoV from what absolutely any activity may be considered as "unethics". And it's mostly cultural and contextual things.
There is good and simple example. There still is a lot of places where child labor is used. Western, mostly European people consider it as completely inapropriate. Somewhere some activists manage to prohibit it. It would sound beautiful if not to know what will happen with this kids later when they stay without job. Western people mostly doesn't think abo
ut it. Most of that kids will starve to death. So, what about ethics in this case?
While I agree that there are different points of view to any matter, I don't buy that exploitation and oppression can be "ethical" in some contexts.
Your example is flawed. There are a few small companies in the business selling ethically produced goods that go to these same countries where other companies are exploiting children and give their employees better conditions and higher pay so that their children don't have to work. It's not about if we don't keep doing this bad thing, something worse will happen, it's about how can we change the world so that this bad thing doesn't need to happen.
Is it an easy thing to do? Not at all. Is it always clear what's the alternative? No. We've spent the past millennia messing up the world big time, so undoing some of that mess is going to be hard and take time. That doesn't mean that some bad things that we don't know how to fix are ethical.
It's remarkable that you've used words "exploitation and oppression" that has highly negative connotation in any context. In this case, I should say "sure, you are right". And I will agree, it is.
But the problem is that kids even don't know such words. For them it may be just ability to get some money to helps their family or themself without_crime. To work to buy a food yourself or your family is it ethical? For me and from side of that kids it is highly ethical.
So what is unethical here?
Yeah, I say directly it's manipulation. But it shows pretty well how easy "ethics/unethics" may be turned one to other.
To take a development metaphor here (seems appropriate?), I like to view these grey areas as partly refactored code, there is work to do moving towards a 'better' society (my philosophy here is the golden rule: we should all be able to treat others as equals), possibly work arounds (such as continuing to pay child labourers or permit abortion in certain circumstances) until the root causes can be reached. Of course like code, refactoring social systems is never really done as they also evolve under other influences. Our work here will never be 'done'...
Hi northbear, yes it's true that different humans and different cultures have different standard of ethics. I'm not a scholar in the fields of philosophy and ethics so I'm ill equipped to take on the larger issue, after all my post was only about programming.
Let me say these things though:
if you read the original discussion on hacker news you will realize that most of the people who posted have also shown regret for what they did. So if you are regretful it means the deed violated your own sense of ethics. Which is perfectly in tune with the motivation of my post
ethics, moral codes and laws are not stones. they change in time. for most of the history of humankind the concept of "human rights" was non-existant but then a lot of people (not all) decided we should ascribe to this fictional concept (because there's nothing in nature saying humans should have rights, just in human society). Ethics are fluid yes, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about anything.
If the world is being eaten by software, software programmers should study something in addition to computer science. That's it, that's all I'm saying.
I'm not trying to bring about worldpeace with a few words on dev.to
On the other hand, it would be really cool if you managed to bring about world peace with a few words on dev.to :P
ahhahaa :D