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Comment by IIIIIIIIIIII | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter how many ethics courses are offered and taken.

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.

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>You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood.

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.

This. My Cambridge CS degree (graduated 2002) included a short ethics course with some interesting problems of this nature.

Truth. Most people I have worked with know how not to be dicks. And if you put them in a situation where the human impact of something is obvious, they'll have the right reactions.

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.

> 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.

> "For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives." This is a great insight. Where does it come from? Your thought or someone else?

I pretty much agree with this perspective on ethics, but I think there is an important component missing. An individual person doesn't have fixed ethical responses; you'll find a huge amount of variation based on the person's estimate of what they lack at the moment. Take someone with poor ethics who's sated and they'll behave better than someone with excellent ethics who's starving.

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.).

>"For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives."

Words to live by if you've never encountered a problem you can't solve with A*...

I take your point, but not everyone learns the same lessons in childhood; furthermore, ethical analysis is not always so simple as it appears. You may intuitively know that one course is right while another is wrong, but lack the vocabulary to articulate why to someone else. Politicians and other social technologists profit from such conceptual illiteracy.

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.

Whenever a police officer beats someone up of shoots an unarmed guy there quickly are the "they need more training" comments. Pretty much all of these stories including the one here is about basic decency, not about complex matters, and that is what I address. You can always invent some complex outlandish scenario, but this isn't what this is about right here.

Phrases like 'basic decency' and 'human nature' are what people fall back on when they can't articulate why a particular ethical position is desirable. This makes you vulnerable in an argument, because when your terms are vague your opponent can project different meanings onto those phrases and you won't have a comeback. Intuition is an excellent guide for your own actions, but it's not by itself persuasive. You need to dig deeper and figure out what are the bases of 'basic decency.' Don't worry, it won't stop working for taking it apart and putting it back together again. Go back to Plato and look how Socrates keeps peeling back layer after layer of unstated assumptions to reveal the core truths.

Why is thinking and responding rationally a bad thing?

If you want to create change in the world, you need rational thinking, not wishful thinking.

The problem isn't the rational response. It's the incentives. Poor incentives are created by misguided policy or a lack of policy in many areas.

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.

> Why is thinking and responding rationally a bad thing?

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'm impressed by your enlightened childhood. see also: https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

As I said to somebody else's weird reply:

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.

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