Ask Lemmy

I left my industry because it made me question my morals daily. It's not worth the money

Not me at least. After looking for a job for 9 months I saw one at Palantir that fit me exactly. Just considering applying made me feel dirty af.

Thr unsavory businesses are paying a premium for being unsavory. There are SOME people who will not work there, which reduces the size of the labor pool and drives prices up. There are others who can be bought, for a price, and that also drives prices up.

Industries with neutral or beneficial impacts on society do have this pressure, so the wages are lower. Simple supply and demand.

I find it noble to go against your own best interest for the greater good, but I don't expect it and don't blame anyone for not doing it when it would seriously impact their ability to live life if they did.

I still expect morality though. There's balance and proportion for everything.

Great question the answer is pretty much no.

Either you live with the guilt or you change your moral framework to make it not bad.

You should read up on how the nazi's operated the most succesful industrial size operation for genocide while most of the people tried hard not to notice.

You're supposed to feel at the very least uncomfortable with it if your involvement/impact is minimal. And you should carry that guilt for as long as you're there since the least you can do is feel bad about it. And ofc, once you don't, you've lost your moral north and you become one more of them... Maybe try to steal a little or even sabotage things discreetly?

they don't have one to begin with.

i taught business ethics for two years as a grad student. 60% of the class would write papers how ethics are stupid because the only thing that matters is maximizing company and personal profit for themselves.

ethics is a nice thing people gesture and worry about, but when push come to shove, they will shove you in front of the bus to save themselves.

Whatever you do, you're going to be a part of the system.

Even if you become a civil service firefighter you're going to be driving a gas vehicle and working to help preserve capitalism.

Get the best paying job you can, and protect your family first.

Unless you want to become a full time revolutionary.

"There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism" is a useful parallel concept. One can consume at least more ethically by buying in solidarity with, eg, Fairtrade sellers, local sellers, co-ops, or maybe living a vegan lifestyle.

Not to be confused with finding an ethical form of capitalism. It doesn't exist. Any system designed to maximize profit will put any other goals (like human rights) secondary.

I think working in this society is similar. I can choose the more ethical option from the limited options available to me and work to make my life and the lives of people around me better. But I can't find or create a system that is ethical. Even that co-op referenced above probably has suppliers who are less ethical, or they may have to rent from a profit-driven landlord.

I try to focus on small improvements over my baseline rather than thinking anything short of immediate perfection is a failure.

You can't solve systems by focusing on individuals.

None of us a free moral agents. We're surrounded by systems of family, culture, and law that compel and coerce us. And all of that is built in to the signifiers "employment" and "labor". It's incoherent to slice off a traunch of all these interconnected systems, strip it of all context, and pretend it's a free moral choice.

Changing systems requires collective action. Individuals are weak and the Western obsession with individualism is no coincidence.

In good faith? No, I don’t think so. But I have a friend who worked at Facebook with the specific intent of dealing damage by delaying or stopping projects and generally slowing things down. It was a drop in the bucket, but she lasted 4 or 5 years before they realized she was adding literally nothing of value.

There is rarely a complete agreement on what is "negative impact".

Can they? Probably. Should they? Definitely not.

I’m gonna be real with it. As long as the money is good I don’t really care about negativity affecting others / planet / future. 🤷‍♂️

It’s a dog eat dog world. My survival or ability to survive supersedes my care of others. As long as I can pay for the roof over my head and food I’m my stomach, other people don’t matter to me.

This is where I believe Karl Marx’s concept of alienation becomes more of a blessing than anything else. Marx argued, broadly speaking, that under capitalism, workers are doomed to feel disconnected (alienated) from the work they do. I think this disconnection works wonders in the kinds of jobs where what you do has negative consequences. Employees can pull a Nuremberg: “I’m just following orders,” and that way, even though they’re technically helping to create more harm in the world, from their point of view, they were just doing their job. Surviving, like all of us.

It is a clear conscience achieved through self-emptying.

(There’s also the case of people who honestly enjoy causing harm in the world, but that’s a separate issue.)

The world is complex and the vast vast majority of people in the world are wonderful humans. The closest thing we have to super villains are people like Martin Shkreli, Jeffrey Epstein, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. and those kinds of folks only make up 0.01% of the world's population. If someone's actions appear to be evil then it's far more likely that you just don't understand their perspective. And you don't have to agree with someone's perspective to understand their perspective. For example, maybe someone is working for a defence contractor designing new missiles because they were personally affected by a terrorist attack. I can understand that perspective while also believing that better missiles won't reduce terrorism. I'm not excusing bad behaviour, I'm explaining why other people might not see their actions as bad behaviour and will have a clear conscience.