Re:Apple Is Normalising Surveillance
by zaptheimpaler on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @05:03AM
(#29010955)
Call me crazy but I don't believe everything is best taught directly like just crank out a college course. Ethics is one such subject. If you are truly interested in ethics, you can learn about it everywhere - in the news, on TV shows and movies, in novels, watching your friends and just reflecting on all that you see. If not, you can see all the same things without learning anything about ethics. Developing a sense of ethics is a natural by product of being constantly thoughtful and reflective about how your actions impact the world. It's the sort of thing you learn implicitly from your parents & peers & what gets rewarded in the world. In more concrete terms, honoring those who do good and punishing those who don't is a pretty good way to "teach" ethics. Ethics are more a matter of enforcement than teaching maybe.
I think the moral issues around a lot of tech is more than just "lying is bad" - to conflate it to that means that subtler moral issues will go unnoticed.
What are the moral issues people have with advertising? Is it that lying is wrong? No, I don't think so. What are the moral issues people have around the rentier structure of modern "App stores"? Likewise, it's not just about lying.
I also can't tell if your comment is suggesting that this moral breakdown is a break from the old, or a continuation. Most of the historical evidence seems indicative of a continuation.