alt Hacker NewsWhere do you draw the line?
You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression?
You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something??
How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?
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It requires discernment, to be sure.
The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible.
Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask).
At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.
Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.
Your obsession about teenage girls is worrying
EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.
A clear line would be if you are compensated directly in shared of Facebook, then your culpability is much higher than if you're just working a salary or buying ads.