The only thing I ever retweeted on my otherwise completely empty and unused Twitter account so that I could copy and paste it when needed:
"For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives."
You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood, not in university courses. Most of the rest is the quote above. University classes talk to and train parts of the brain whose involvement in the ethics of your decisions is minimal.
The ethical questions a software engineer (or almost any professional) faces are not "basic". More specifically, the "basic" ethics we learn as children relate to direct interpersonal relations and small group dynamics (including excessive deference to authority, which "good" ethics must unlearn).
These lessons to not prepare us to deal with questions that involve millions of people whom we know very little about.
The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up and to the right.
And that is where I refer back to my comment: Pretty much nobody will become the whistleblower or the guy who prevents their company (or their country) from landing that billion dollar arms sale or from raising drug prices to levels unaffordable to many sick people even if they are perfectly well aware of how bad it is. There is one Snowden outlier for a million other people. "If I don't do it somebody else will" is just one of numerous rationalizations (and it even is actually correct).
Statistically speaking the impact of ethics education vs. incentives is like 1 : 1 billion or worse.
This has an impact on your quote because the urgency with which one pursues these rational incentives is going to depend on that person's estimate of their need (i.e. how much they perceive themselves to be lacking, in a very broad sense which includes needs of kin, emotional needs, etc.).
Words to live by if you've never encountered a problem you can't solve with A*...
I've never taken an ethics course myself, but we discussed ethical problems extensively when I was in high school and I've read numerous books on the subject. It's taken me until middle age to be able to easily recognize and debunk unethical rhetorical strategies and philosophical positions, and I'm sure than in 10 and 20 years I'll bemoan my present lack of sophistication.
If you want to create change in the world, you need rational thinking, not wishful thinking.
Most of the troubles we have with Healthcare in the US is due to very poor incentive structures. I'll never understand why people were surprised when investors realized they could buy niche lifesaving drugs and raise their prices by 6,000% since insurance providers would pay for them regardless.
Obviously they would do that. The system was never designed to reduce the incentive to not do that (ie. making it illegal). The problem isn't "unethical" people. Trusting people to act ethically without any disincentives (ie. Jail/fines/social stigma/etc) is like trusting your toddler to run safely around a busy intersection.
The question is, why do you invent stuff I didn't say? Is this show you get your highs? People like you are one of the major annoyances of online discussion.
The question is, why do you invent stuff I didn't say? Is this show you get your highs? People like you are one of the major annoyances of online discussion.
I didn't say anything about my childhood. Stop making stuff up, troll.
And clearly that is not happening.
Have you ever considered that the ideological opposition to collective action and glorification of individual liberty that obtains in hacker culture is in fact a form of social engineering expressly designed to disempower you and prevent you from threatening the social structures that rule your life? While public companies are nominally semi-democratic and allow open access to participate in their commercial rewards, in practice almost all large firms are dictatorships and operate on the same pragmatic principles as dictatorships.
It's baffling to me that so many people who conceive of themselves as free individualists are in such a rush to put themselves as the disposal of autocratic rules. Meanwhile the open-source movement systematically cuts itself off at the knees by displaying an irrational antipathy to any sort of private profit, thus ensuring a steady supply of free voluntary labor which is economically unsustainable for anyone who isn't willing to live as an ascetic.
If that bothers you, talk to a union rep, because few businesses in existence would rather do the right thing if doing the wrong thing makes an extra buck. If the money flows in, those maintenance costs will keep you employed; if it doesn't, those costs won't need to be paid.
You don't refuse to deploy, you don't leak, and you don't shame. If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first. (Don't mention your intentions to HR at your exit interview.)
What if you don't question that the change will make money for the business, but have ethical concerns about it (either because of its effect on users, competition, third parties, etc). How do you decide if you have ethical concerns?
What if you are writing firmware for brakes that is going to get deployed to thousands of cars?
>If that bothers you, talk to a union rep
What union?
Even if there was a union, this entirely avoids the central question: what behavior is ethically concerning?
>If you feel as you you ethically must do any of those, quit first.
This answer entirely avoids the ethical question of '(when) should you do any of those things'. All it says is "quit first" (a position which solidifies your moral high-ground, but which I do not agree with from a purely ethical standpoint).
Exactly. Software professionals don't have a (powerful) union or trade association, so our ethical concerns are not significant from a business standpoint. The company hired you to do what the company wants, not what you think is best. You have no leverage to enforce your views.
Making an ethical stand can get you fired or blacklisted from future promotions. Or it might get you recognized and rewarded by the company. It all depends on the company leadership. Do you believe your company leadership has the same respect for ethics as you?
The course was surprisingly contentious. A lot of students saw it as a waste of time or just an easy GPA booster. It did have some weird content, like a Meyers-Briggs day, but overall I thought it was worthwhile.
My ABET accredited ethics course in college took the attitude that ethics (for some definition of ethics) can't be taught in a semester at college so we'll just inform you about consequences of different choices engineers have made in different situations.
This also seems to assume there is an inherent wrongness in discriminating what price is offered, which many wouldn't find unethical (especially if the discrimination isn't based on protected classes).
I feel that the 'definitely' comes from a personal system of ethics that is by no means shared with others. A system that, at least to other systems, might be unethical to enforce on others.
I don't see how a single course in an engineering degree can even begin to fix this. I aced my ethics course but consider it a waste of time, not because ethics is a waste of time, but because what the course presented was so light as to be useless. Imagine giving a one semester intro to programming with javascript to MDs; that's what it felt like.
Anyhow, I agree that other people may judge the situation differently than me. (I'm sure that for a given ethical conclusion, there's always some ethical system that disagrees, so if you're after certainty, you've picked the wrong topic.) You asked; I answered. If you don't like the answer, just fill out the refund form.
Intro courses aren't meant to fix anything. They're meant to wake people up to the topic and prepare them to dig further, either in other classes or on their own. If you're arguing that more should be mandatory, I could get behind that. If, on the other hand, you're arguing that no education is better than some education, I'm not persuaded.