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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Given how hot the market is for software developers right now, there's really no excuse to be working on ethically questionable products.

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I would be cautious about generalisations like that.

Sometimes the good jobs are where you aren't. Sometimes the good jobs won't return your calls. Sometimes you have to choose between your morals and your wife, deportation, debt, or all together.

Can you really say you have morals if you sacrifice nothing for them? Are they not merely preferences at that point?

Participation in community at some level is necessary, and, depending on your morals, may be a moral imperative even when your morals disagree with the products of the community with which you interact. Is it easier to promote change in a community from within or from the outside?

It's a tricky question. I agree that often morals involve making though choices. At the same time, those choices have to balance the magnitude of the evil, the consequences of sticking to your morals, and the consequences of just going with it.

To give a concrete example: let's say I have to choose between unemployment and working in a casino (assuming I believe casinos to be evil). I can work there and do nothing. I can work there and donate an X amount of my salary to addiction-recovery ONGs. I can refuse to work there and compromise my (hypothetical) children's well-being.

Which one of this is the "moral" choice? I can't say. And I'm willing to bet that you can make a moral argument for each one of those.

I'm with you in that sticking to your morals often involve sacrifice. But I wouldn't assume that the weights I add to each aspect of my morals are the same as everybody else's.

It would be easy to read your question as "wife, deportation, debt, or all together" == nothing, and in doing so dismiss it. It is easy to see it as "you aren't even willing to sacrifice [all or most of these things] for this?" I would imagine that for most people, their loved ones trump their morals by a wide margin.

If you are asking that question without the parent as context, I would say that it seems like the only distinction between morals and preferences is one of definition.

Even not-great software developers who live in poor areas need to eat.

Ethically questionable is a very low bar. Virtually all economic and technological progress made in since the industrial revolution has been "ethically questionable" in some way or another. In the end, almost everyone agrees that we've moved in the right direction. It's up to each individual to decide where they draw the line of what is or isn't OK. I don't think most people cross that line because like you said, it isn't too difficult to find a job that you're OK with. Who are you to decide for other people whether obesity outweighs the enjoyment people get from soda, for example?

The only reason the market is hot is because of those projects driving up labor demand and spending capacity. It's all blood money.

True. The market would look different if all the people working at Google, Facebook or any other company you view as ethically challenged would quit.

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