It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it's necessary to do so. I don't think your inference makes any sense. Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns.

That said, I would certainly like to see them improve in this area. I'm a big fan of Tesla, but they are not without their flaws, and working conditions appear to be one of them. They should do better. Not because it somehow conflicts with their mission, but just because it's the right thing to do.

> It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it's necessary to do so.

To paraphrase: "The ends justify the means".

I disagree. That road leads to all kinds of evil.

The key part of that, that makes it obviously morally correct is:

> if it's necessary to do so

There is no road in the context. It's either sacrifice the small group, or save the whole - that's the entire proposition. If you remove the necessity part, that changes the equation entirely.

> The key part of that, that makes it obviously morally correct is...

There's nothing obvious about it, look at the debates around assassinating Hitler for a historical example: http://theconversation.com/killing-hitler-when-is-assassinat...

>That road leads to all kinds of evil.

As long as we drive on that road on autopilot, no one will notice.

> It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole, if it's necessary to do so.

Your confidently declared decree of fact here suggests that you have some sort of god view that allows you to see all possible outcomes and interactions in all possible worlds.

It's also possible that sacrificing the people who actually know how to make things in order to facilitate profit and ego will lead to the annihilation of the society.

Indeed. I don't think it's actually necessary here, hence why I think they should fix this.

> Poor working conditions for one factory and saving the planet as a whole are different concerns.

I think that's contradictory. If you are setting out to save the world, but you can't improve factory conditions for your own workers, how have you shown the capability to save the world?

I'm reminded of having a strong AI agent that's given the condition "save humanity". That condition can be satisfied by having no humans on the planet to save.

>how have you shown the capability

It's irrelevant. Nothing you do for worker satisfaction in one factory demonstrates whether you can or cannot save the world. There is absolutely no contradiction in treating them separately. This doesn't excuse making workers unhappy, but it's really a separate issue.

It is most certainly not contradictory. For example, one could make the argument that the allied effort against the Nazis in WWII was tantamount to "saving the world", yet the allied forces certainly didn't treat everyone in the most humane way possible -- see Japanese internment in the US, or the presumable "war crimes" that Allied forces committed in WWII. Yet that doesn't mean Allied forces weren't capable of destroying the Axis, which obviously is what happened.

A similar argument could be made about the Cold War and McCarthyism. It is simply nonsensical to mistake the goal of "saving the world" with the goal of "don't ever treat anyone slightly questionably ever again".

Let me consider the opposite question: if you are setting out to save the world, and you can improve factory conditions for your own workers, how have you shown the capability to save the world?

It's just not relevant. It's a non sequitur. It's "A is bad, B is good, you're doing A, therefore you can't do B."

> It would be sensible to sacrifice the well-being of a small group in order to save the whole

Why then we don't revert to capturing slaves in poor countries and have them "save the whole" (like, recycle garbage by manual labour) while working 18 hr/day?

We can surely sacrifice their well-being in order to save the world for us, can't we?

From a strictly utilitarian point of view, we could go with "because it's impossible". Enslaving one group would only make things slightly easier for everyone else. In an alternate universe where we actually could solve huge problems by enslaving Belgium for three years then it might be worth it. I might even volunteer to help do the work.

Saving the world by exploiting Tesla factory workers seems equally impossible.

Yes, that's true, it's very unlikely it helps Tesla much in the first place. But if it could be done it would at least be worth having a discussion about the pros and cons.

I think the solution here is Human Rights and also Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative.

You can't use people as slaves unless situation is so that everybody has to become slave. Also, you can't use people as a tool (without their consent).

There's not much to discuss. We've been there already with Hitler's Work Camps and Stalin's GULAG Camps.

> You can't use people as slaves unless situation is so that everybody has to become slave. Also, you can't use people as a tool (without their consent).

> There's not much to discuss.

Since it's just an unrealistic though experiment, I wouldn't dismiss out of hand the idea of "enslaving" everyone for a short time for some kind of amazing outcome.

> We've been there already with Hitler's Work Camps and Stalin's GULAG Camps.

Ha. No. Neither of those gave enormous benefits to the world. And they killed people, not just put them through unpleasant working conditions. Completely noncomparable.

Well, Stalin used GULAG to dig river channels (Moscow channel for example), design planes and rockets. He just replaced HR department with arrest squads.

One can argue he had quite similar result in mind to the proposed electric-vechicle-enabling indentured servitude.

I don't think it would be excusable even if he avoided killing people while defaulting to raping and beating the crap out of them.

It's odd to get these extreme responses when I went out of my way to say that this behavior is wrong and they should change it.

I'm not defending Tesla's behavior. I'm just pointing out that it's not inherently contradictory.

Because the post you originally responded to was contrasting Tesla's (alleged) treatment of its employees with its save-the-world ethos in order to question the sincerity of the latter.

By adding the "if necessary" bit you turned it into a trolley problem which misses the point entirely.

It uses an extreme example to illustrate how the two are not contradictory. But you're right, I should have just gone straight for pointing out that they're not connected.

This is a very good point.

I think it's a little extreme to think one company and its electric cars are going to "save the world"...

I'm taking the hypothetical from the parent comment and running with it, not assuming it must be true.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"

  -- Star Trek II, The Wrath of Kahn.

Whenever I see this argument, I always ask the same question:

Which position would you take in the line of people to be sacrificed? How much sacrifice are you willing to put up with? Not other people, just you.

If it was necessary? Sure, I'd volunteer.

I don't think it's necessary in this case, as I think my original comment made quite clear. There just isn't an inherent contradiction between these two things.

Your point is extremely well presented. I see that those with no counterargument resort to downvotes, because that is all that people of small minds and reasoning can do, downvote.

Yeah, Tesla is here to make money above all else, and they're gonna do as much time theft as they can, likely putting Amazon, Walmart & McDonalds to shame.

Shit must be real bad over there if they are attempting to unionize, if you notice the only places that still have a union in the US in spite of union busting are where the employer has made it an absolute living nightmare to work, hence the union to back the workers up.

Few people who would describe working as a teacher, an airline pilot, or a professional athlete as a "living nightmare".

Sure, few people may describe those jobs as a living nightmare, but most people have no first hand experience at working any of those jobs.

I'd never want to do any of those jobs, all three of them have positively awful working conditions, with the last usually resulting in lifelong mental damage from repeated jarring of the head (in addition to injuries), and most school districts & airlines push their teachers and pilots to the edge of the law, whether it be student load (and putting special needs students in classes with overloaded teachers illegally), or leaning on pilots to fly with the absolute minimum fuel they can get by with, despite regulations.

... do you have any firsthand experience working those jobs? I happen to know a number of pilots for major airlines and it's probably one of the nicest middle-upper class jobs you can get (assuming you can handle the responsibility).

> leaning on pilots to fly with the absolute minimum fuel they can get by with, despite regulations

You mean, asking pilots to use the minimum amount of fuel that is safe. Do you have any evidence that a major airline has ever pressured pilots to use less fuel than the (generous) regulated minimum?

Yes, public schools are just awful /s

You gotta educate 30+ children (some with special needs who likely aren't getting the assistance they are legally entitled to), the school administration, testing & overview policies (which treat teachers as totally incompetent here in the US) and deal with the kids parents to top it off.

Each of those factors alone can make for a bad work environment, combined it is a living nightmare. Plus the pay is very low, so its not as though you are able to afford much.

It's all about where you put the horizon in your short-term thinking. It's sort of like refusing to have your army defend against an invasion because some of your soldiers may die, when you're pretty sure the invaders are going to kill more people than that anyway if not stopped.

If Tesla's management really believes they are changing the world and having a non-negligible impact, then they might easily justify to themselves that while they aren't the most benevolent of employers, they make up for it with what they do. The problem is that a) people may not even agree their goal is beneficial, or b) accepting the prior as true may not agree the degree to which their actions are beneficial in the end, or c) accepting both the prior as true may not care because those actions may disproportionately affect the person in question.

In any case, I don't think it's as simple as you make it out to be.

I don't agree with this. I think the two are completely orthogonal. Your argument hinges on the assumption that saving the planet is strictly for the benefit of the humans living on the planet, and that seems wildly arrogant.

Then who or what is it for? Who cares about the earth if humans don't benefit? It's just a floating rock.

How about all the rest of the incredible amount of life that we share this floating rock with?

Well, for starters, more than half of that "life" doesn't even have thumbs, so even if that life were sentient beyond eat/fuck/kill, it couldn't pick up rocks or anything. I would say the majority of "life" on this planet is dumpster life, evolutionary mishaps that haven't yet been culled. There are more interesting animals out there, elephants, dolphins, etc., but again, thumbs.

It's incredible to me how dismissive you are of life itself given what an incredibly, unfathomably tiny percentage of matter can be classified as alive.

I agree, but most people couldn't care less about that. Most people eat meat, use housing that's displaced huge amounts of land that animals use to inhabit, etc.

Is it still on that floating rock when there's nobody to see it?

"If a tree falls in a forest"

> Then who or what is it for? Who cares about the earth if humans don't benefit? It's just a floating rock.

This is not directed at you personally, but the view that humans are all that matters is a kind of species narcissism. In fact, we derive all sorts of benefits from other species, such that if all of them were to disappear, so would we.

Yes. I mean I am totally a species narcissist I admit.

We gain a ton of benefits from other animals, obviously. But if we don't exist, then those animals no longer matter. We wouldn't benefit from them anymore. Anyway, this is getting a bit in the weeds.

Sure, except that by that metric, Tesla is a wildly inefficient venture. If your objective function is to reduce global warming, without any care about collateral damage to human quality of life, then a bioweapons company is a better choice than an electric cars one. So we have to assume that the objective function for Elon is a bit more complex than that.

A friend working over at spacex told me of the horrors there as well. Despite the love he gets here, Musk appears to be one of those nightmare bosses from the bad old days, the type that has not heard about peopleware and would scoff if he did.

Do you have any 'good' sources on other complaints about working conditions? Honest question, quick google search gives me a number of results but nothing that seems to have meaningful follow-up of any sort.

I thought of applying to Tesla as a software engineer, but after reading through Glassdoor reviews, I decided it's not worth to destroy my life, even if it's an amazing company in what it will hopefully achieve (and not so amazing in how it treats workers)

I think all public corporations should _require_ worker democracy. Democracy of our government naturally extends (with no logical inconsistency) to the publically-owned workplace. Unionization is more than a human right. A lot of negativity in here about "getting vending machine options"...how do you think we got the Weekend? By bowing down to slave-efficiency abroad? No. We need to be better than that. All publically traded companies should be unionized mandatorily. Think of it this way: should not a dictatorship be scrapped for a democracy immediately if one can do so? In this same sense, unionization is much more favorable than de facto feudalism. And our current system is feudalism with makeup. Make no mistake about that.

Forget about competing with China. We can raise the standard of living here for our workers. Union bosses have a seat at the board room table in Germany, why can't we do that here? Unionization (democracy in the workplace) is not just a right, it's an essential need. And it stems from the capitalistic fallacy: "You (the worker/producer) do not control the wages." And it shows in the devastatingly large surplus value that's caused crash after crash and recession after depression and the crippling wealth gap between rich and poor.

"Union bosses have a seat at the board room table in Germany"

From what I heard, they are sitting so often together at the "board room table", that you can't really seperate them from the ordinary bosses ...

> All publically traded companies should be unionized mandatorily.

I'm not against unions, but I think mandating them is a bad idea. Smells like a recipe for disaster. What if everyone's totally OK with their workplace? Government would be requiring an external (perhaps redundant) bureaucracy (with all its waste and inefficiency), supported from a cut of everyone's paycheck, regardless of whether people wanted it or not.

Makes no sense to me. Are you saying a doctor who smokes is not a good doctor ?

American workers should realize that they are competing with Chinese workers who will give life and limb to work in the environment that Tesla is providing them. They should either compete or let the Chinese do the work for 1/10th of the cost instead of whining about not getting diet soda in vending machines.

And the Chinese worker should feel lucky his job isn't shipped to Vietnam!...

And the Vietnamese worker should feel lucky his job isn't shipped to Bangladesh!...

And the Bangladeshi adult worker should feel lucky his job isn't given to Bangladeshi 9-year-olds!...

Seriously, you are right that if wages go too high and it's convenient for the company, they will take production elsewhere. That's not an argument for workers shutting up and taking scraps; it's an argument for a global minimum wage.

Or employ robots.

> American workers should realize that they are competing with Chinese workers who will give life and limb to work in the environment that Tesla is providing them.

They are realizing this - which is why they elected Donald Trump and his protectionist rhetoric.

> They should either compete or let the Chinese do the work for 1/10th of the cost instead of whining about not getting diet soda in vending machines.

"Let them eat cake."

> instead of whining about not getting diet soda in vending machines.

People are working forced overtime and cannot afford to pay for their housing. Critics like you are just polluting the discourse with these type of dismissive phrases.

This is not an effective way to advocate your point of view.