Why is 'because it's legal' a valid argument for nearly everything? Whatever happened to civic duty and moral obligation?

They did their civic duty and moral obligation by paying the exact obligation asked of them by society. If they don't use the number they got by following the tax law as written, which number do your propose is the ethical one? Rule by moral indignation of upper-middle class software developers is not a scalable system.

If the tax law is written unsatisfyingly, try to fix the tax law. Don't claim immorality on the part of those who are working within it.

Or colloquially, don't hate the player, hate the game.

> If the tax law is written unsatisfyingly, try to fix the tax law. Don't claim immorality on the part of those who are working within it.

Why not do both? Especially to the extent that the actor being criticized is undertaking an immoral action which is insufficiently disincentivized by the tax law?

I am a bit curious, does this "Exploit all the loopholes you can find in the law and as long as you follow the letter of the law you have done your civic duty and moral obligations towards the society" apply only to tax laws or is that a more general view?

What moral obligation are you referring to here? Or, perhaps I'm interpreting correctly and so it raises the question in another way: is it a moral obligation to contribute as much as possible to society, or as little?

Ethics and laws are distinct, legally.

You are required to follow the law You are not required to follow ethics, though it is generally advisable

> Rule by moral indignation of upper-middle class software developers is not a scalable system

That's a quite unwise ad hominem argument.

> Don't claim immorality on the part of those who are working within it.

Let's simplify things a little bit.

You decide to share a flat and the rent with a friend, but despite you are friends you make a contract anyway (because, say, you legally have to).

A little detail: for technical reasons you don't split the rent 50/50 and you don't know its exact total amount. All you know is how much you contribute.

Next, you discover that your friend uses a loophole in the contract to pay less than his/her share. To your dismay, there is no doubt that it was a deliberate "exploit".

Is he/she still your friend?

> That's a quite unwise ad hominem argument.

I would argue that accusations of immorality is also ad hominem.

Informal relationships between friends like the one you describe have direct feedback mechanisms if you take actions that you believe to be unfair towards each other. Because we both respect each other, we're very unlikely to do something that would be considered untowards to each other because we both value and wish to continue the relationship. We can choose to or not to choose to bring law into this situation, but intent is more important in this relationship because it is a close relationship.

In the tax law situation, it's more of a social contract. Social contracts are between individuals who have no direct relationship with each other. The way we describe these social contracts is via codified law. It's very difficult to interpret intent from law, and then turn that intent into action or inaction. And those who are part of the social contract should not have to. My primary issue with assertions of immorality is that it's unquantified and completely subjective. Your tax haven is somebody else's foreign investment. You're imposing your own subjective view of intent on it.

If you want to change the social contract, then please do so with trying to change the laws. It requires you to start from first principles and makes you examine what your actual intentions are (Increase tax revenue? Reduce income inequality? Discourage foreign investment in favor of domestic investment?) and also what the possible negative externalities are (capital flight? reduced GDP? etc.). But by making assertions of immorality or "evil"ness on the part of perceived bad actors, you're not offering any solutions, and instead starting the conversation from a place where no progress can be made.

As you point out, the legal software as a huge technical debt, and must deal with compatibility issues as well. The consequence is that loopholes will always exist. Perhaps "rule by moral indignation" doesn't scale, but fixing the law doesn't work, either.

> My primary issue with assertions of immorality is that it's unquantified and completely subjective.

Who talks like a software developer now? ;-) It is more or less as you say, though. But I believe it's better to let people judge for themselves. The same way people do make their own judgement about whether or not it's ethical for company X to outsource its production in country Y where working conditions are known to be terrible.

> But by making assertions of immorality or "evil"ness on the part of perceived bad actors, you're not offering any solutions, and instead starting the conversation from a place where no progress can be made.

On the contrary, it is one step further than "let's fix the taxation law" hand-waving. It also goes deeper than just law and economy technicalities.

It lead some countries to enforce more transparency with regards to the income of their MPs, for instance. It makes legal tax avoidance tricks and various forms of "soft corruption" a little more difficult.

> I would argue that accusations of immorality is also ad hominem.

Its only ad hominem if the argument is made that someone's argument on one point should be disregarded because of their allegedly immoral action. Otherwise, its not ad hominem. (Ad hominem isn't saying someone is a bad person, its saying that their argument should be rejected because they are a bad person.)

Sure, but my exasperation about "middle-class software developers" moral posturing isn't really about refuting the argument on whether or not its immoral - since morality in this situation is purely subjective, I can't say whether or not their argument is wrong. It's more about the point that how the audience feels about the situation isn't really material to a sensible solution to the situation, especially if you can't quantify your feelings that it's immoral.

You're right though in that I could have made the same argument without singling out the users of this particular website.

In your example, there is an obvious moral argument for an even split. When you're talking about a wider social contract, the morality is less clear. How are people supposed to work out what's an intentional tax incentive and what's an immoral loophole?

Although honestly, what are you doing signing such a dubious contract, even with your friend? If I saw something like that, I'd at least query it, at which point we've probably established a verbal contract for an even share.

If you have to set up shell corps in places you'll never travel to, much less live in, to hide income and investments from your local jurisdiction -- chances are you're on the wrong side of that morality.

Because people have different opinions on morality. Civic duty is not an objective, quantifiable constant. It is a matter of personal opinion, with a great deal of variation, and those sorts of things should not be legislated.

If you reduce your tax burden from 30% to 20% using legal avoidance loopholes, and you think that one's moral obligation to support the community ought to be around 10%, that's still another 10% worth of loopholes to find before you'll ever feel like picking up litter at the local park.

It's a perfectly valid argument when someone is implying you've committed a crime.

Do you donate additional money to the treasury every year when you file your tax return?

> Whatever happened to civic duty and moral obligation?

Went out the window in the age of moral relativism.