I am much happier being able to get a bunch of clean money and then be able to give talks on the subject at conferences and get a lot of "street cred" in the tech community for my effort than spending the rest of my life wondering if there's someone from a real-world mob out there trying to hunt me down to recover the $100M I "owe them".
I just think it is also worth noting that, even if we do accept the false dichotomy, I would not be an effective criminal... which seems to continually disappoint some people ;P. (I'm sorry to be such a let down! lol)
Yours would likely be family or close relatives.
I think you’d take money to do something untoward if that was the alternative. Almost everybody would. And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that.
Aside from the problems of this statement being a completely vague and unspecific and extreme hypothetical, isn’t there a problem with switching from talking about incentives to talking about threats? Being threatened with death isn’t the same as being offered money, and this ground has been well covered by philosophers who point out that there are things wrong with “admitting that” as you call it. Calling it a price tag seems misleading at best. There’s further a massive problem with suggesting a person’s ethics might be based on what someone threatening them with death wants them to do, no? If the action isn’t something you are choosing to do, and isn’t something you would do if not threatened, for any amount of money, then why would you consider it your actions or part of your ethics?
It helps to frame it this way, because once you accept that you’d do that, you’re more likely to accept you would do something unethical for a billion dollars if it had no consequences to you. And from there, it’s a binary search to determine exactly what your price is.
Would you be able to say you wouldn’t lie to your wife if it meant you’d walk away with a billion dollars? Certainly this is contrived, but all examples in this territory are contrived.
"Would you sell your mother or your children at any price?"
And I hope - admittedly, that's speculation - I know what the answer to that would be.
So this is now an absurd discussion, whereas it started off from a rational point of view: there exist such people whose ethics can not be corrupted. The fact that you believe this is not the case says nothing about people in general.
You are asking what I would personally do. But it’s better to think of limit cases that everyone would do — such as lie to their wife for a billion dollars. Since it’s guaranteed you fall into the bucket of “everybody”, that means you can locate your ethical price tag.
It’s helpful for people to do this mental exercise. At least, I find it comforting knowing my own price tags in advance.
My statement is pretty simple: ethical people exist.
You countered with "Everyone’s ethics have a price tag. It’s better not to pretend otherwise, since it clarifies a lot of human behavior."
And have been moving the goalposts ever since. The fact that unethical people exist was never up for debate.
Since you’re misquoting yourself, it sounds like you don’t want to have this debate, or you may not have realized what you said. But “The whole assumption that ethics have a price tag attached is faulty” is not at all the same thing as “ethical people exist.” It’s not a pedantic distinction; one is debating whether people will take compensation for acting unethically, even if they feel they’re the most ethical person on the planet — I think the answer is “yes” — whereas “ethical people exist” is a point no one could disagree with.
It’s a bit unexpected for you to omit your “price tag” words and then continue with my argument.
But we’re past the point that readers are having a nice time reading this. If you’d like to continue, I’m happy to do so, but we need to restrict ourselves to a high caliber of debate, if only for HN’s sake.
Whereas in fact it is anything but pedantic.
"The whole assumption that ethics have a price tag attached is faulty"
For everyone.
> But we’re past the point that readers are having a nice time reading this.
You seem to be in a habit of projecting your own feelings onto everybody else.
> If you’d like to continue, I’m happy to do so, but we need to restrict ourselves to a high caliber of debate, if only for HN’s sake.
Suit yourself.
If you ever do want to probe deeper into the question of ethics vs cost, I think it would be interesting. But since you keep talking about me rather than the idea, the interest feels one-sided.
Ethics problems typically do not lend themselves to be translated into a caricature of the market economy. The habit of assigning price tags to stuff can help if the original problem is cost related, but it tends to be a crutch when things of a more principal nature are discussed, which would have a valid meaning absent such things as money or physical rewards. As long as you keep framing it like that you won't get further.
(Like, work to avoid creating the situation where you have to compromise, if possible)
The way I view it is that it’s important to seek out yours ahead of time -— to game out different scenarios, and to consider whether you would do X or Y if forced to choose. That way, when you’re in a situation where you feel like compromising, you’ll remember your limits.
In other words, I was less tempted to act unethically in the moment than I would have been if I’d been surprised by the opportunity.
This is especially important in scientific circles. It’s often trivial to falsify data, and the rewards for doing so are generally high. It’s also not always an active, conscious decision; it’s easy to make small mistakes that have favorable outcomes for yourself.
The exercise has helped me steer far away from any of those. I’ve watched peers fall into a trap that I’d label “scientific hype,” i.e. claim that you’re doing something impressive when in reality you’re nowhere close. This is a very easy mistake to make, and if I hadn’t mentally found my boundaries ahead of time then I’d have been vulnerable to making the same error. Or I may have stayed silent when my peers were doing something naughty.
Compare “kill this person to save your son’s life” with “kill this person to earn $1 million.” They’re not equivalent, even if both might be metaphorically referred to as a price.
The illusion that they feel different is extremely powerful. It’s worth resisting. It helps uncover all kinds of ways that we contribute to unethical behavior, if only through inaction.
The concept of having a price attached to your ethics is essential. Without it, people fool themselves into believing they’re above temptation. In my experience those same people tend to be the most vulnerable to it.
OP branched here: "it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'."
Any example relevant to OP's branch cannot end with the subject in a river. The very fact that you are discussing it proves we've jumped to the other branch of the conditional-- the one where the choice is exclusively between `commit crime / get bounty` (by threat of death in your example)
tldr; goto considered harmful on HN
Don't bleed all over us!, or let others bleed on us.