There’s some odd stuff in the culture to the effect that doing a bad thing for fun is drastically worse than doing it as part of one’s job.
If you refuse a job getting paid to do 478 units of bad things for $3,000 you will not prevent 478 bad things from being done. At best removing yourself from the labour market may mean that the sinister employer may only be able to afford someone who can do 475 bad things for the $3,000.
There are also cases where taking the job yourself may reduce the amount of ‘bad’ that gets done. If you actually care about what is happening you may be able to minimise the damage. You will not take shortcuts, maybe you will put in some extra effort to give the employer what they want while doing slightly less damage.
Conscientious objection and blaming the individual employee (calling them ‘bad’, etc) is a naive approach to achieving change.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, it proves too much: it allows one to engage in all sorts of wrongdoing so long as someone is willing to pay for it. Second, there’s some acausal effects whereby if you refuse to do bad things, people using the same algorithm as you will similarly refuse to do bad things.
Also, by doing bad things, you give your implicit approval of others doing them.
Finally, by accepting pay to do wrong, you encourage employers to pay people to do wrong.
If you refuse a job getting paid to do 478 units of bad things for $3,000 you will not prevent 478 bad things from being done. At best removing yourself from the labour market may mean that the sinister employer may only be able to afford someone who can do 475 bad things for the $3,000.
There are also cases where taking the job yourself may reduce the amount of ‘bad’ that gets done. If you actually care about what is happening you may be able to minimise the damage. You will not take shortcuts, maybe you will put in some extra effort to give the employer what they want while doing slightly less damage.
Conscientious objection and blaming the individual employee (calling them ‘bad’, etc) is a naive approach to achieving change.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, it proves too much: it allows one to engage in all sorts of wrongdoing so long as someone is willing to pay for it. Second, there’s some acausal effects whereby if you refuse to do bad things, people using the same algorithm as you will similarly refuse to do bad things.
Also, by doing bad things, you give your implicit approval of others doing them.
Finally, by accepting pay to do wrong, you encourage employers to pay people to do wrong.