this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Bro it's their job not a volunteering venture, let's take the hyperbole down a few orders of magnitude.
Do you put any blame on the people who came up with this idea? With executives who steer and determine what is going to be implemented? It's also just their job. My point was (and is) that doing bad things because it's your job is not different than doing bad things that aren't part of your job. And the point I made and I'll reiterate is: ideas are just ideas; its the engineers who are implementing the ideas and making them reality. No one at the company is innocent, and that includes engineers.
If my job was asking me to do evil things, I'd not be comfortable working that job. It's the same nonsense with Facebook: you know you're working for an evil company, which is destroying the social fabric around the world, and yet you don't judge yourself for contributing to evil because it's your job. It's inexcusable.
Unless you're a volunteer firefighter or charity worker you're not making the world any better. I think this kind of judgment is shameful.
That's a weirdly reductive and frankly useless way to frame the situation.
First, a paid firefighter and paid social worker are making the world better, just as much as a volunteer firefighter and charity worker. I'm not sure why you made the distinction.
Second, it's not a dichotomy between making the world better and worse. There are things that obviously are bad, and there are things that obviously are good. But there are also things that are almost entirely neutral, or somewhere in between. It's not an all-or-nothing situation: things can be degrees of good and bad.
If you insist on making it relative: these people are currently doing something more bad than what they were doing before. Whether you think what they were doing before was good or bad doesn't really matter. What matters is that this new thing is bad. And that's the problem.
I find the defense of someone doing active harm under the guise of "their job" to be shameful.