Ethics are made up, so if you reach a conclusion that we're all pieces of shit and there's nothing to be done, you have the option to just rethink your system of ethics until it's sane.

Like, I'd maybe re-examine your ethical framework until it becomes an actually useful tool for figuring out what's the right thing to do in various situations. That's kind of the whole point.

e: Say, if your boss told you to shoot someone in the back of the head because he didn't want to deal with firing them. Would you say "Ah well... 'tis the way it goes under capitalism, amiright? Gotta pay the rent!". Nope, your line does exist, you just aren't showing your hand to us :P

In an industry notorious for jobhopping what leverage do you actually think these well compensated employees have? There's a horde of people willing to replace them if they wish to take an ideological stance and quit.

They can always start their own streaming service.

None, because techies won't unionize.

What? This has nothing to do with unions. If enough engineers don't want to work on $x, Netflix won't be able to work on $x. If there are enough, they'll find replacements for ones that leave and they'll be able to work on it.

The situation would be identical with unions, unless you think engineers who would be fine working on $x would be OK with their union deciding for them that they shouldn't. More likely they just wouldn't be members of that union.

I never understand why people want to inject an often corrupt, additional layer of insane bureaucracy into a work environment where they already have a lot of leverage. Techies don't unionise for very good reasons!

Your argument doesn't match your example? You're saying I should reconsider my ethics until they match with picking up the gun, since the line is made up

Or you can fight for absolute good and justice on a war to unweave entropy itself across the entire multiverse. Your choice.

Do ethics matter or mean anything if we just start changing them to fit the situation?

> Everybody is complicit just by living

Have you read The Rebel by Camus? He basically says the same thing. One solution is suicide. Really good book.

I think the error may be raising the bar to the point of making it a dichotomy, where you are either a saint, or you're evil incarnate, and because being a saint is effectively impossible, the choices are knowingly being evil or being an evil hypocrite.

That is entirely the problem. This false dichotomy is a predicate for the Hacker News “well I may as well sell myself to Facebook or Raytheon and make bank” mindset. In my experience, this does not reflect how people think in the wider world. Well, people privileged enough to be able to take ethics into consideration when choosing employment.

In his "The Myth of Sisyphus" he explores whether suicide is a reasonable response to an absurd existence and concludes that it is not. "The "Rebel" explores whether murder is acceptable and concludes, in a less black and white manner, that it also is not. You've got your books and conclusions wrong.

Thanks, guess I'll have to re-read. By "one solution is suicide" I perhaps should have said, "one option is suicide" - I know Camus doesn't think suicide is a reasonable option.

Plenty of people manage to pay the rent without needing to completely compromise their sense of "moral clarity" or "ideological purity".

Just because there's no ethical consumption under capitalism doesn't mean that helping Amazon union-busters agitate against bathroom breaks or smoothing the way for dozens of gigantic corporations to "headquarter" themselves in a single building in the Caymans, is somehow equivalent to working at an urbanist NGO despite owning a car or owning a computer whose assembly or constituent resources depended on child slavery (this is all of them, by the way).

It's true that none of us are "innocent", but one doesn't have to be part of the problem to make any money. Many of the conceivable blameworthy activities most of us engage in aren't really personally mediated -- I have to drive a car occasionally, but I've lived in places sporting thoughtful infrastructure that supported lifestyles in which cars were unnecessary. Having to choose to use one, and burn gas -- gasp! -- isn't a "personal choice" for most people, it's a structural consequence of the world in which they find themselves. British Petroleum invented the concept of the carbon footprint, in part to help prevent people from realizing this.

> Plenty of people manage to pay the rent without needing to completely compromise their sense of "moral clarity" or "ideological purity".

The point is these people need to find that fulfilling work somewhere else if they object to what their current employer requires them to do. "Ideological purity" and morals are not shared by everyone equally... and if Netflix were to comply with these fringe employee demands, they would lose subscribers who want to watch, for example, the Chappelle special and more.

Netflix isn't a church group... it's a for-profit organization that will always try to give it's customers what they want, despite what some crusading employees think.

Netflix subscribers really just want to watch the office and friends on repeat though.

It just looks better to blame the employees than the managers and owners that theyve lost access to the content that subscribers want

You’re right. Netflix is a for-profit organisation, with employees. “It’s capitalism, so employees get no right to exercise any discretion” is a uniquely nonsensical and frankly American take. If this is truly a fringe issue that nobody cares about, it can be ignored by everyone, including you. Yet here we are.

An alternative viewpoint is that the issue is not so much the right system of ethics as having a sense of proportion.

It sounds like you are in favor of that, but then your first two examples (Amazon vs the Caymans) are confusing - what is so palpably evil about the latter? Also, surely most giant corporations are not legally in the Cayman islands, but Delaware, right?

>what is so palpably evil about the latter?

"Legal" doesn't necessarily imply "ethical" -- interracial and homosexual relationships come to mind, both of which were illegal within recent memory. Thus, it's not enough that megacorps seeking tax havens "follow the law" when they have such resources as to ensure the law comports to their desires. It seems "proportionate" to want those with disproportionate power to have a little less...

>Also, surely most giant corporations are not legally in the Cayman islands, but Delaware, right?

Ugland House [0] is the building I'm describing. Despite being five stories tall, it's the registered office address for 40,000 US firms. You're certainly not wrong to invoke Delaware, whose Corporation Trust Center [1], a "suburban law firm"-looking building of modest size, sports seven times the number of fake corporate headquarters as does Ugland House. I'm given to understand that there are various benefits to the Caymans' regulatory environment, and those that don't have to be on US soil tend to prefer it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugland_House

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_Trust_Center_(CT_C...

Convenient ideology for escapism

What a sad thing to believe.

That's a perfectly reasonable response, but it can also be framed as empowering. For some, this realization precipitates a Deleuzian scream - a conflict that cannot go unaddressed. For those, it is the beginning of a lifelong project to resolve that very contradiction, a higher purpose as it were.