News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ex-Google engineer describing the company's role in China... by gjm11 on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @05:32PM (#18233495)
A lot's hanging on the definition of "decent" here, and utilitarianism is also an established ethical and moral framework even if you consider it a pernicious one.

So let's avoid arguing over the definition of "decent" by being more specific. I claim:

It's possible for someone to endorse the position taken by Google management on this even though that person is highly intelligent, is far from indifferent to others' suffering and oppression, and habitually goes out of their way to treat others well, including others who are unlike them and far away.

I do, of course, agree that if you get to define what "decent" means then you can make it so that no decent person disagrees with you. In this case, I think that requires a definition that has built into it either an answer to the specific object-level question at hand, or else a specific position on a subtle philosophical question (consequentialism versus deontology versus virtue ethics versus whatever else) on which smart people who spend their whole lives thinking about this stuff are far from all agreeing.

There are no comments on this comment yet.