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Comment by rf15 | Hacker News Reader

Let's not make this a witch hunt. Yes, the company should be ostracised, but don't ask for every little person remotely involved with them to pay the price of a stupid lead decision.

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I don't know much about this particular case, so I don't have an opinion on the comments above, but the argument that employees shouldn't be punished for participating in an unethical for-profit scheme doesn't really make sense to me.

Well, there is also the question of actual participation: Let's say [A]dam thinks they're not getting enough data and had this stupid idea to fix the problem, bought a bunch of repos when he had the chance, and told programmer [B]en to patch this in, while [C]hloe in another room is working on the website or tweaks the ML algorithm. How much is she at fault and involved here? What about [D]elilah and [E]ric in Support? Blaming them all individually and equally harshly for being associated with [A]dam is not really justifyable.

Completely agree, it's the classic Nuremberg defense.

This kind of polarised thinking doesn't really work - usually you don't have a choice if the entire system turns because it happens relatively fast and not all implications are completely clear to you in the beginning, and usually the system will also just plain lie to you to appear much less destructive than it is. Also: Then every single American is at fault for Trump? I mean, they let it happen, right? So they must take responsibility.

Collective punishment and guilt by association are morally reprehensible but getting everyone off the hook is equally wrong irrespective of their rank in the food chain.

I am not saying that you necessarily advocated for this position in your comment but I just felt the need to make my point clear.

Of course you can't paint all the employees guilty and leave it at that, that's not what the Nuremberg defence means. If an employee knowingly acts malicious under orders from their boss, then they are just as accountable.

To be clear I'm not advocating a witch hunt, but saying all employees are innocent because they were following their bosses orders is a Nuremberg defence.

I know - my comments were more about the initial demand, and it's a little bit of a misunderstanding that people immediately compared it to me trying to invalidate the nuremberg trials.

If programming were an engineering proffesion, each engineer would be responsible for ensuring that the code they worked on was ethical at the potential cost of their license. It isn't of course, but there is nothing unusual about demanding personal responsibility for social implications from individual employees like that.

What makes you think that that the coverage of this event to be unbalanced and vindictive?

I think that we all agree that this event should be documented and reported objectively as it's newsworthy proved by this very article here and it deserves a mention in a subsection on their Wiki entry.

The effectiveness of this line of defense hasn't improved since the Nuremberg Trials. And the directly responsible committers are not "every little person".

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