Engineers are people who come in all ethical flavors. I used to know one whom I consider evil, in the actively, knowingly malicious sense. I've known a whole lot more who generally just don't think about these questions.
Thinking knowledge, intelligence or capability correlates with ethics is a category error.
It's more an industry error, I suspect. The University I went to forced all the Software Engineers to do some of the traditional Engineering papers, including courses on ethics. The professional institute that accredits the University's ability to call their course an Engineering course required those courses.
Courses like that don't fix unethical people, but they make the rest of us aware that ethical concerns exist. Software/Computer Science is such a young discipline that, industry-wide, I don't think we've learnt that one from the other industries yet.
I question the amount that such ethics courses actually help. Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine, and yet you don't have to go far on HN (even in this very thread) before you see people saying business majors are unethical.
The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying that it helps people avoid spam, or get better advertisements, or whatever, and then the engineers think they are being ethical and beneficial to society by building these systems.
> Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine
I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)
Not that I minded personally, but it was a strong lesson to me that teaching people categories and how to think won’t give them a desire to respect any particular brand of morality.
Impartial view here, not entirely sure where I fall on free speech:
You've concluded that the absolute morality expressed by public consciousness should be the arbiter of publicly expressible speech. Maybe the next thing that gets people killed is not allowing public discourse to challenge socially accepted, morally unacceptable beliefs.
> what arguments exactly do you feel could not legally be expressed in a modern first-world democracy, that actually should be expressed?
Many people use “free speech” to describe more than what is covered by the First Amendment in the USA. For instance, freedom from retaliation, by being fired from your job. According to that view, entities other than the government can engage in suppressing free speech.
I read the argument and then re-read it. Went through few odd stages of amusement and I still disagree. Defending Nazi right to express free speech is more necessary now than ever given that people apparently forgot what an important right it is.
As for the argument that, opinion gets people killed, I can only reply with the following.
Opinions don't kill people. People kill people. It is important to know the difference.
I totally agree, nuclear bombs don't kill people, people kill people. There is no reason people should be unable to build their own weapons and bombs. And don't even start with the WMD slippery slope.
More seriously, limiting speech should not be necessary in a good society were people don't let such stuff spread. But that doesn't seem to be how humans work. The marketplace of ideas does not necessarily prevent bad outcomes. And pretending that a root cause analysis for a genocide doesn't include speech as a vital segment in the chain leading to that atrocity seems illusory to me.
So yes, having reasonable rules doesn't seem that wrong to me. It certainly comes with all the usual problems of gov/regulation. I'm kind of fine with what we have here in Germany. Not that its perfect... but it kind of reminds me of that saying about aerospace rules... they are written in blood.
It is a good argument. It sounds reasonable. But having 'reasonable rules' is a vague statement. It is something akin to me saying in a corporate meeting 'it is all about balance'.It is and it conveniently can be applied to anything.
For the record, I personally dislike German approach despite understanding its genesis.
I can't really speak for aerospace rules, but I am not certain they say that much about speech.
edit. I just remembered. Internet has all manner of rather dangerous information out there. Materials may be highly difficult to procure, but knowledge is still at your fingertips.
Saying that business majors are full of unethical people is like saying that politics is full of unethical people, it is the job that attract those characteristics.
The objective of those ethical classes is to move the neutral/good majority in hope in hope to counterbalance the unethical minority.
And computer science is just as full of unethical people. The highest paying jobs available to those in their 20s and 30s, by far, are computer science jobs. That alone attracts an incredible amount of people only in it for the money.
On top of that, companies which are usually regarded as some of the most unethical companies on the planet (especially in regards to privacy) are companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which are worshipped by and have computer science people scrambling to get hired by them. Going back a little further in history, before FAANG, the companies that were revered by the tech world were the very same ISPs that this post is railing against.
Programmers as a whole seem to have no problem at all being unethical as long as it gets them either money or the chance to work on the latest tech fad.
I do not disagree with this, but it stands that the presence/prevalence of unethical people is not really an argument against ethic courses, as they are meant to do little more that containing the problem
Unless you imagine some sort of industry-wide reckoning from a political/legal perspective, the industry will probably never "grow up". This isn't the sort of industry where a couple bridges might fall down and everyone suddenly gains self-awareness that it's time to be a little more adult.
Just look at the resistance on this forum to the idea of GDPR or data privacy bills. This is one of the most self-aware forums on the internet and still probably a majority of users are not only aware of who (and what) is signing their paychecks, but they actively endorse it in their personal discourse during their time off too.
Thinking knowledge, intelligence or capability correlates with ethics is a category error.