If you do business with me, and you're an asshole, your moral defense can be that you didn't know you were being an asshole. I'd personally give you the benefit of the doubt. Of course the next time you do the same thing it'll be clear.
>But the question of whether his actions were in accordance with the “rules of the game” has very little bearing on whether they are repugnant.
If you break an explicit rule or request, then it's clear that you knew you were being an asshole, doing things other people don't want. When that rule is not explicit, it's hard to say if you knew you were being an asshole. The rules weren't explicit, and could have very easily specified not to scrape.
If Sam took advantage of anyone it would have been naive experiment participants who donated money under the false assumption it would be used for a specific purpose. But even then, Sam's actions could be interpreted as Robin Hood-esque by some.
There is NO DOUBT, from the view point of the supposed victims that Sam's actions are repugnant because they go against what they wished, but so did the people who Robin Hood robbed from I bet. However, from a more global perspective, who's to say they're repugnant? Assume some of that Stark Card money actually reached some unfortunate children in the third world and made their lives slightly better... Would a non-victim really believe that to be a worse appropriation of that money than buying coffee for some first-world person (assuming the money actually reached those kids)? Many would argue that is a better use of the money, regardless of what the original experiment participants expected the money to be used for, because the experiment participants wrongly assumed in the first place.
This doesn't really address the morality issue. Suppose you could get away with it. The question remains, did you hurt people who didn't expect it etc.
When someone comes to play poker with chips, is it immoral to beat them and take their chips? No, they factored it in.
However, is it immoral to figure out a new collusion strategy and beat them?
Was it immoral to figure out a card counting strategy to beat casinos?
In other words, is it immoral to figure out new strategies in what is essentially an experimental game where participants assume there is risk?
In well established games like poker, which explicitly have gentlemen's agreements of "no collusion", it may be immoral.
But in a new experimental system such as a cryptocurrency whose software may be buggy, is taking advantage of the bugs really immoral?
When is it "buyer beware" and "a fool and his gold are soon parted"?
Isn't there any threshold for taking the money of a risktaker?
What you say feels right intuitively, but I can't figure out the logic behind it. Does participating in a marketplace automatically make one partially responsible for the crimes of others who participate in it? That doesn't seem quite right. There's a lot of violence in poor inner city areas, is it morally wrong to own a gun shop in such an area? Are we morally responsible for the actions of the corporations we buy from? What about our nation's foreign policy? To take an extreme example if you sell food to enough people, you know that eventually you'll feed a murderer. But intuitively there's a big difference between selling food and money laundering. I don't know.
The Ross Ulbricht case doesn't really help. Ordering hits is morally wrong whatever the context, so that doesn't help in figuring out whether his other actions were wrong.
I think there's an aspect of morality that you're missing. There comes a moment when taking advantage of someone's lack of foresight, lack of intelligence, and/or carelessness becomes immoral.
I'm not sure where exactly that line lies, but I think I have a good staring place:
If you've created a system that takes someone's money -- even when that transaction was done with the person's prior permission in some way -- and that person says "Woah, wait a minute, this isn't what I thought I signed up for," that's a hint that you might be on the wrong side of that line.
If millions of people have that reaction, and legislators start making public inquiries into what you're up to, that's a REALLY good sign that you might be on the wrong side of the line.
One flaw in your reasoning is that often times people are willing to pay for things which are bad. For example, the Holocaust was bad (a lot of good people died), but people were willing to pay for help in carrying out the Holocaust. Therefore, it doesn't follow from the fact that people are willing to pay for a thing (the Holocaust), that that thing is a morally correct thing to do (the Holocaust was bad). That is to say, just because someone values something (people valued the Holocaust), doesn't mean that it is a moral thing to do (the Holocaust was not a moral thing to do).
To see my point all you need to do is imagine either a bad person or an ignorant person having money. If you think either of those situations is plausible, then you can surely imagine such a person paying for something which has a bad effect on the world. For most ideas of morality, doing things which can reasonably be expected to have bad effects on the world is considered immoral (this is very loosely stated, but hopefully you can see my point).
So by that logic I could advertise coffee beans as handpicked by child slaves and you could buy my product completely guilt-free? I don’t think it’s functionally any different from arguing you aren’t a murderer simply because you’ve hired a hit man. Maybe you didn’t directly do the bad thing but you’ve paid someone to do the bad thing on you behalf. At a certain point isn’t financially supporting the bad-actor tantamount to supporting the bad action?
Using other people's visage without their permission is gross. It's immoral and unethical.
The idea that you can have morals and ethics without sometimes acting on them is also sort of incoherent. If you claim to believe it is immoral to do something and then do business in spite of that, it directly puts the lie to your claim. This is separate from whether you believe that there should be legal consequences or other government action attached to certain acts.
> Or is it a “they have sinned and you can’t pay off sin?”
Interesting. Yes, this is the closest of your choices. Not quite
Biblical Sin :), but that will do for the moment.
Please note that I asked a genuine, good-faith moral question. I'm
not making an assertion here.
I removed a remark that "perceived fairness is often more important in
human-centred affairs than summative outcomes" - but then noticed
that you teach human centred design and obviously get that. So let's
explore it together.
> many are reforestation projects in the developing world.
Regardless of how "good" the purchased offset is, it does not impact
the Kantian moral argument - in particular I am thinking about
universalisabilty. I don't think it matters whether one bribes the rich
or poor in this case. the question is about the ethics of transferable
responsibility - for which I used the obviously extreme edge case of
buying immunity from murder charges.
> I see this as "I made a mess in the street and I hired cleaners to
clean it up." Sure, I didn't do the cleaning myself, but I’m still
being responsible for it, right?
No, I think that's where I would differ. Let's say you made the mess
the next day, and the next, and the one after... and each day you pay
someone to clean it up. You're not off the hook. Somewhat like the
broken window fallacy, you're still creating a net loss to society.
Unless you think those cleaners have nothing better to do with their
lives than labour cleaning up your mess.
Let's consider another slightly more ordinary place this logic
operates and fails. Parking or speeding fines. Why do we have motoring
restrictions? Ultimately it's to reduce loss of life. Careless driving
or parking gets people killed. But paltry fines have no effect on
those who simply see it as an extra charge to be factored into being
an anti-social driver. Now suppose that instead I can simply pay
another driver to stay at home so I can speed around by the local
school and park across the hospital entrance.
Being "responsible for it" would be not making the mess in the first
place. You're "making amends for it" - those would be better words.
But if that delivers no deterrence from doing it again, a fundamental
aspect of justice necessary for regulating human affairs is not
served.
The problem is this a preposterous example, but let’s say we’re targeting kleptomaniacs. Is it immoral to target them, despite their propensity? I don’t see how.
Let's take another example, even more extreme. Suppose I run a pawn shop. Somebody comes in looking to sell goods that I know are stolen. I buy them from him. This contract is entered by both of us consensually and without coercion. It is also entirely immoral.
People are social creatures. Trying to ignore that and treat everybody as isolated individuals ignores those.
I'm not excusing it, I'm only being pragmatic. It's well and good to push people to be more ethical, but relying on that trait is a separate question.
The human conscience doesn't do very well with abstractions. The further removed someone's actions are from the damage caused down the line, the weaker that moral signal gets. If we want to improve our society, we have to be realistic about these things and design our institutions to buttress against them.
You miss my point I think. You can't eat a bank note, and you haven't killed a person you've parted it from. Indeed, requesting more bank notes than necessary for something is many levels of abstraction removed from doing a person direct harm, and that makes it harder for people to have a gut feeling about the morality of it.
That doesn't mean overcharging necessarily doesn't do real harm; it just means it requires mental effort to understand it as moral or immoral. Maybe not much, but more than deciding whether outright killing someone is immoral or not. Ergo, it is not necessarily true that no moral dilemma might benefit from discussion.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it is morally consistent to take something that you paid for, while putting forth an argument that you should not have been made by others to pay for it in the first place.
It's not morally wrong to categorize them. It's morally wrong to use them to take their family's money, though. (And maybe that's what being gotten at: a notion of these as regular and eager customers of free will, which is wrong.)
There is nuance in my view, as I believe that the action matters more than the intent.
Putting spiders on people is immoral because it causes psychological distress and potential harm due to spider bites. However, other behaviors are far more reasonable (e.g. asking for their newspaper, for a few dollars, or for a food sample from, say, an ice cream store). In isolation, these other behaviors sound perfectly reasonable in other contexts.
However, I agree with you for some of the other examples in the article (e.g. asking to try on someone's shoes or someone's sunglasses) wouldn't be reasonable or useful in other contexts.
Except moral relativism is not any more defensible. Suppose the creator of a work asks you to pay for it, but a pirate chooses not to. Why shouldn't we call the pirate an asshole? They've disrespected the terms of use set by the author, as well as the author themselves.
>But the question of whether his actions were in accordance with the “rules of the game” has very little bearing on whether they are repugnant.
If you break an explicit rule or request, then it's clear that you knew you were being an asshole, doing things other people don't want. When that rule is not explicit, it's hard to say if you knew you were being an asshole. The rules weren't explicit, and could have very easily specified not to scrape.
If Sam took advantage of anyone it would have been naive experiment participants who donated money under the false assumption it would be used for a specific purpose. But even then, Sam's actions could be interpreted as Robin Hood-esque by some.
There is NO DOUBT, from the view point of the supposed victims that Sam's actions are repugnant because they go against what they wished, but so did the people who Robin Hood robbed from I bet. However, from a more global perspective, who's to say they're repugnant? Assume some of that Stark Card money actually reached some unfortunate children in the third world and made their lives slightly better... Would a non-victim really believe that to be a worse appropriation of that money than buying coffee for some first-world person (assuming the money actually reached those kids)? Many would argue that is a better use of the money, regardless of what the original experiment participants expected the money to be used for, because the experiment participants wrongly assumed in the first place.
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