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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

We all agree that ethics matter, but would we really expect students to be more ethical after the class than they were before?

Take Mozilla's firing of Brendan Eich-- we had several massive debates here about it. One side was saying that companies should be able to expel leaders whose values don't align with the ones the company wants to advance. The other side was saying that a culture where you can be fired for advocating for the wrong political position is literal McCarthyism.

Would you expect an ethics class to do anything more than provide a forum for debates like these? Do you think anyone will actually change their view?

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> Would you expect an ethics class to do anything more than provide a forum for debates like these?

No, not really. That's kind of the point of ethics classes - to debate our ideas of "good" and "evil", to make people think for themselves, and to alert them to the fact that the questions exist in the first place.

It isn’t literal McCarthyism. Literal McCarthyism would be some within the ruling party making accusations of treason towards someone at a company advocating for the wrong political position, leading to them being black balled. A culture where you can be fired for advocating for the wrong political position, without the interference of the government, is just one where public relations are given a high level of importance.

Except in this story the CEO wasn’t advocating for anything. He was also effectively blackballed as being a “gay hater”.

Was he blackballed as a result of being accused of treason by the government? If not, it’s not “literal McCarthyism”. It may be inspired by McCarthyist tactics, though.

Brendan Eich posted here that he was in fact blacklisted and could not get funding for his Brave start-up for several years.

The Hollywood blacklist was also maintained by companies and not the government. It really doesn't make a huge difference who's maintaining it, if enough employers / financiers ban employment / financing based on it.

Cory Doctorow refutes the idea that corporate censorship does not matter in their essay "Inaction is a form of action".

>Would you expect an ethics class to do anything more than provide a forum for debates like these? Do you think anyone will actually change their view?

I've been on the receiving end of several ethical issues and find that it is often less about ethics and more about tribal politics.

> The other side was saying that a culture where you can be fired for advocating for the wrong political position is literal McCarthyism.

So were the at-will laws that current exist discussed in extension to this or did that little detail just become the elephant in the room? Because political views are not a protected class, so their bad ending has already been here for a while. It strikes me as strange to treat that idea as a possible bad future when it's the actual present.

In California, where Mozilla is headquartered, political views are a protected class. It's not (in principle) legal for an employer to fire you for your off-the-clock political views.

Honestly, I think the most applicable courses to that situation are civics, logic, and law. Civics to make you realize how important it is to get the actual facts of the situation, logic to understand what they mean, and law for numerous applications of those two learnings.

In this case, the most relevant part is whether Eich was fired. As far as can be determined externally, he was not. Depending on your leanings, you may decide to believe (perhaps based on evidence, perhaps not) that what probably happened was morally equivalent to being fired -- but again, logic and law say that doesn't matter. If the law says you can't do X when condition Y holds, but Y is kind of blurry and hard to determine precisely, then all that means exactly nothing if you didn't do X.

Feel free to debate the legality or the ethics, but please don't get them mixed up.

On the contrary, respecting the intent of the law is a critical component of corporate ethics. If the people of California say that companies shouldn't control their employees' politics, but I don't like that rule so I find some loophole to do it anyway, I'm behaving unethically.

Isn't Google based there? It didn't work out that way for James Damore.

Without diving into the substance of Damore's views, note the "off-the-clock" caveat.

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