alt Hacker NewsThere is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.
There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.
It's not equally suspect. Profit seeking behavior, left unchecked, yields problematic outcomes rather quickly. Unmonetized actions don't seem to have this tendency. Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line. Until we can find a way to bias our economic outputs away from things that harm and towards things that help, guilty until proven innocent is the right heuristic for profit seekers.