Can you expound upon which aspects of society are political and which are nonpolitical? The Supreme Court is currently considering whether or not companies can discriminate on sexual orientation, just as it had done for race and religion. What do you say to such people whose identities are inherently political?
I think his point is that any aspect of a person not directly related to the question at hand should be off-limits. In his example, that would mean that the literature should be judged on its own merits, without any reference to the character or activities of its author.
Which seems to me like a reasonable and consistent ethical position. However, it does have some consequences that might be hard to stomach. Such as, that selling computers to the Nazis would be an acceptable activity, even knowing what they intended to use them for.
I don’t understand how exactly a person can consider themselves ethical when they knowingly assist in performing actions they find unethical - it seems like a contradiction that people find bearable as long as they themselves aren’t directly impacted by that decision. It sounds more like dressing up amorality than it does a principled morality.
I suppose the viewpoint is best viewed from a system design perspective. Do we want each cog responsible for producing widgets to be making independent ethical evaluations of those up and down stream from them in the process? Or do we want to have our cogs be amoral, and have a "morality" module somewhere else that deals with those kinds of questions?
To be clear, i'm not sure if I subscribe to this perspective. But I can see its appeal.
If you’re amoral and don’t care where your revenue comes from as long as you follow the law you should say so. But you definitely shouldn’t champion yourself as having values above and beyond the letter of the law if those value don’t inform your actions. But it sounds like GitLab is trying to hide it’s amorality and market itself to perspective customers and employees that it does have some kind of moral code.
I don't think it's amorality per se. I would characterize it more as having the humility to defer to the structures society has in place for addressing those sorts of things.
Well, I think that's arguable. At least in the US, we live in a democracy. That democracy sets up the structures to regulate business. One could argue that if our democracy has not decided collectively that we should not do a certain thing, it is not the place of corporations to regulate that thing by refusing to do business with it.
Is it ethical for a doctor to provide medical help to someone they find unethical? Would it be moral if it refused to help someone because of different political stance?
If your ethical framework would approve of selling computers to the Nazis knowing they’ll use them to commit genocide… maybe find a new ethical framework?
