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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I was responding to the "Look, they're all nice people" defense you quoted, not contradicting you. I agree with you in principle.
My view of morality is largely centered on intent, so "I thought it would be a good thing" is a valid defence (though there is also a degree of responsibility to check assumptions; if you never made any effort to check if it actually is a good thing, that's negligence)
...and by extension, when your livelihood depends on you being bad, yes. Not everyone's livelihood depends on their salary, but for many people it does. If it's hard to find a job that can pay the bills, I don't fault people for the human reflex of justifying bad things to yourself in the name of survival.
(But if they do have a choice and choose to enrich themselves at the expense of others, they're obviously pricks - just saying this might not apply to all the devs involved here).
That's fair - and it's clear that your moral premises are, like, diametrically opposed to mine (I completely disregard intent - for me responsibility takes the job).
I was aware that you weren't contradicting me but this sort of discussion is fun, sorry!
The willingness to be responsible for consequences does factor in. If you round the corner and crash into someone, you probably didn't intend to, but whether you'll be an ass about it and yell at the other person or whether you'll apologise and check they're alright makes a difference.
In a perfect-information-setting, intent equals result: If I know what my actions will cause and continue to carry them out, the difference between "primary objective" and "accepted side-effect" becomes academic. But in most cases, we don't have perfect information.
I feel like the intent-approach better accounts for the blind spots and unknowns. I'll try to construct two examples to illustrate my reeasoning. Consider them moral dilemmas, as in: arguing around them "out of the box" misses the point.
Ex. 1:
A person is trying to dislodge a stone from their shoe, and in doing so leans on a transformator box to shake it out. You see them leaning on a trafo and shaking and suspect that they might be under electric shock, so you try to save them by grabbing a nearby piece of wood and knocking them away from the box. They lose balance, fall over and get a concussion.
Are you to blame for their concussion, because you knocked them over without need, despite your (misplaced) intention to save them?
Ex. 2:
You try to kill someone by shooting them with a handgun. The bullet misses all critical organs, they're rushed to a hospital and in the process of scanning for bullet fragments to remove, a cancer in the earliest stages is discovered and subsequently removed. The rest of the treatment goes without complications and they make a speedy and full recovery.
Does that make you their saviour, despite your intent to kill them?
In both cases, missing information and unpredictable variables are at play. In the first, you didn't know they weren't actually in danger and couldn't predict they'd get hurt so badly. In the second, you probably didn't know about the tumor and couldn't predict that your shot would fail to kill them. In both cases, I'd argue that it's your intent that matters for moral judgement, while the outcome is due to (bad) "luck" in the sense of "circumstances beyond human control coinciding". You aren't responsible for the concussion, nor are you to credit with saving that life.