> So, I guess that makes me complicit in all this too.
No, that makes the salespeople, and your bosses at that communications company, complicit. We're just as neutral and tool-like as the computers we program.
No, that makes the salespeople, and your bosses at that communications company, complicit. We're just as neutral and tool-like as the computers we program.
You can extend that to any point of the chain, salespeople can be considered as just neutral and tool like as programmers and the blame shifted up ad infinitum.
While I don't think that he was complicit in this case (maybe the thought that what he was doing could have bad repercussions never went through his head, I don't know...), if you know that you're writing a program that will be used to calculate a way to kill the biggest number of people in a terrorist attack, would you still claim that you're not complicit because your boss that is paying you are the one complicit?
If you don't know what are the uses of the program, I think that you can claim that, but if you know, definitely you're being complicit, even if you're being paid or working under orders (and not under duress).
There is also a very steep scale of diminishing complicity. Is the accountant that works at the electric company which provides electricity to the office building where the sketchy sales guys plot to sell their unhealthy products also complicit (assuming he knows what goes on there)?
I would also gladly write a program used to calculate a way to kill the biggest number of terrorists in a missile strike, and that has much less potential to be illegal (thus monumentally costly, and thus wholly counterproductive ... but again that's the businesspeople's concern).
And your argument is dangerous, by ignoring the ultimate authority+responsibility of any company's leadership and investors.
People aren't tools. No person is a tool, period. That's the point of my original reply. You can't excuse atrocities by saying people are tools and therefore not responsible for their actions. You also can't excuse atrocities by claiming people were just following orders. People are moral agents except in very extreme circumstances (such as lack of mental capacity, which the law does deal with). Programmers that helped big pharma ruin thousands upon thousands of lives are most certainly partially responsible for their immoral actions (working for big pharma) just like the Nazis who ran the concentration camps were partially responsible for the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt tackles this subject in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil."