> I make shooter video games. Is that a bad thing? According to some people I'm evil.

If you thought that shooter video games were bad and you built them anyway, that would be poor ethics. That other people think shooter video games are evil isn't what matters; it's what you think that matters.

Obviously when we tell engineers to consider the ethical implications of the project that they are working on, we are talking to the first group (particularly the parenthesized subgroup). The people who believe their work is unethical won't stop working on it just because we disagree, but that should not discourage us from encouraging people to grow a spine and not work on projects that they have ethical objections to.

For people in the second group, we can work with alternative techniques. One possibility is socially ostracizing and blacklisting people who continue to work on unethical projects. (As discussed at some length on HN three or so weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6714585)

There's a tangential group to this, which are the people who work on something they don't consider unethical, but may change their minds when they learn the true scale of what they are part of (it's unlikely many people in the NSA outside the very top have full visibility on all the programs detailed in the Snowdon leaks, and it's very possible that each, viewed in isolation and with the right context can be quite defensible).

The second suggestion overemphases just how attractive hanging out with judgmental purists actually is. Today it's NSA, tomorrow it's people who work on social gaming, the day after it's finance and the next it's ads. These sectors are already shunned by (some? large? At least they're vocal.) parts of the tech community that considers themselves and their endeavours morally superior, yet they thrive just fine.

The NSA is different from all your other examples, though. Finance, social gaming, ads and pretty much everything else is or can be regulated by the rule of law.

Intelligence agencies cannot.

There is no precedent of a surveillance society that managed to keep from turning authoritarian. Why should anybody assume that this time is different?

But more importantly, law and ethics are not the same thing. Merely not breaking the law does not make you an ethical person (and that's not the point of the law). Conversely, breaking some laws under some circumstances does not make you an unethical person.

You seem to have not fully read my comment, or misinterpreted it.

I am not telling people who consider their (in my opinion, unethical) work to be ethical to grow a spine. Disagreeing with with other people, even me, on matters of ethics does not imply that somebody is spineless.

Performing a job that you consider unethical makes you spineless.

I am telling people to act on their own assessment of their work. Frankly I shouldn't even need to tell people that, it is practically tautological how common sense it is.

No, I think when "we" tell engineers that, we're addressing a straw-man, posturing and showing off our superior ethics. Imagining that there's an audience of engineers who just need to be told that what they're doing is unethical is vain.

Telling people to, in essence, 'follow their heart' and do what they think is right is not "posturing and showing off our superior ethics". If they think that their work is unethical, then they should not do it.

The third paragraph is the paragraph that endorses posturing and showing off our superior ethics.

while (! allHackersHaveSamePoliticalBeliefs) {

  // Should randomize topics NSA, Snowden, Wikileaks, US Govt, US Military

  postPoliticalStoryToHackerNews(); 

  sleep(1_DAY);

}

It also works if enough other people believe it. For example, the medical doctors who helped design torture at Guantanamo. Would you join a practice with them? Allow them to admit to your hospital?

Consider the extraordinarily extreme case of Bruno Tesch. He was hung because he provided his pesticide for the express purpose of killing humans, knowing that this is what it was for. This was evidenced by the sale of the pesticide without the standard warning odorant, and witness testimony. Conversely, I am unaware of anybody that was hung for manufacturing train cars.

An NSA employee may claim ignorance, and assert that they were told the systems they helped develop were only to be used for legal and ethical purposes. If this is work that they did before various NSA revelations became public, they might even be believed and therefore excused.

Is that actually useful in any way? It sounds like self-help "be true to yourself" kinda nonsense.

Ethics are rather pointless without some general priors to agree on. It's hard to reach full consensus even on basic human rights. Even if everyone did, they diverge rather quickly. The whole topic is logically pointless.

But to expand the discussion a bit, ethics is a multilayered thing. As Crito points out above, there's a difference between "x is wrong" and "x is wrong but not my problem because I just build stuff". A major thrust of the article is that engineers should take ethically responsibility for the consequences of our actions, which the author sees many engineers as failing to do. Thinking through the ethical implications--assuming those ethics are founded on some general priors--results in a world more closely honed to those priors. Think of "take ethical responsibility" as a meta-ethic.

In that context, "be true to yourself" isn't as nonsensical as your dismissal makes it out to be. It's true that arguing about moral axioms isn't helpful (and wasn't that sort of my point?), but that's not actually what's happening here.

Frankly, these lists of things that engineers need to follow in order to behave ethically pop up every now and then, and it's clear to me that the authors of these lists have their own agendas. As I've said, I refuse to be used. I'll pick my own standards.

The lists appear to be so broad that they're useless (e.g., "Don't be evil") or so narrow that they are instruments of control ("Don't work on X or Y or Z").

So I think we're in agreement.

Finally, it's likely that the number of engineers who actually do evil is quite small, and of a character that, upon reading a code of ethics, they are rather unlikely to shake their heads, wake up and change their ways. (I'm thinking in particular about malware writers, but there are many other examples).

Along with a question of whether you've done an appropriate amount of reflection on the matter.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals

Hitler had a lot of self confidence