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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

> not about if Uber has changed

Shouldn't it be though? Even without getting into the weeds of Machiavellian ethics, I think if one can argue "you helped a high momentum company do X bad thing", then it's fair game to argue "you helped a high momentum company reach Y good outcome" as well. I don't mean to shit on the taxi industry when I bring them up, I mean that there are positive things Uber does today that are only feasible due to the sheer scale it achieved through the means it took to get there, and because even through its darkest periods, there were many insiders that sincerely wanted to do the right thing (and who eventually prevailed).

Is it "bad" if bad things happen from shaking things up and then good things materialize after that? As I said, I don't know to what extent the goods outweigh the bads or don't, but I'm trying to form strong opinions held weakly.

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Let's try a thought experiment:

I get a bit drunk at a friend's house and my friend realizes I shouldn't drive home so he offers to let me sleep on in the guest room until I sober up. I refuse and get behind the wheel and make my way home. On the way I see a flipped car in a body of water near the road. I stop and jump in and save the trapped person.

Did the morally good act of saving a person negate the morally reprehensible act of driving drunk?

The end results don't make your actions in the original instance OK, even if the bad case (wrecking and killing someone) didn't happen but instead a good one did. I shouldn't have been driving since it objectively at the time was immoral and I had no way of knowing what would happen.

I think your thought experiment differs from the original topic in few different ways.

For one, the person you were replying to isn't the CEO. A more accurate analogy might be drawing ethical conclusions about the accountant in the company that built the road that led to the accident (or one at the beer company or a weapons company if we want to be spicier)

And the other thing is your drunk driver analogy has a big serendipity aspect to it. The change of tune at Uber was very deliberate in response to the reputational damage its earlier iteration inflicted on itself. A more useful thought experiment might be one about an ex-con gangster turned community service volunteer.

I agree reprehensible occasions remain reprehensible no matter what, what I don't agree with is the notion of immutable morality (X person is always as moral as they were previously), ascribing morality of amorphous groups to individuals, and various other cognitive biases I see people committing in threads like this.

I was trying to convey to the person I responded to that he or she should carefully evaluate the cause and effect of things before shrugging off culpability, even though they felt that they were doing good because they wanted to do good. My point was ultimately supposed to be that good intentions are not helpful if you don't bother evaluating the effect of your actions.

Being able to walk around guilt free is nice, but I won't respect you for saying 'but I was intending to do good' if you willfully ignored the reality around you.

Then after getting knocked around regarding the peripheries of my message and whether or not taxis are good or Uber actually was bad, I ended up operating defensively and lost the tether on the thread with which I had started.

I accept that I approached this poorly but I maintain that my message shouldn't be discard solely due to my incompetence at delivering it.

Thanks for following through with this and I do hope we converse again.

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