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215 points LaSombra | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.412s | source
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zokier ◴[] No.23080826[source]
I think there is one morally solid reason to stay at bad acting employer: if you are actively driving change of the behavior you consider bad. I pick this quote from Brays post:

> I escalated through the proper channels and by the book.

He only left after he felt he had exhausted his options of influence (This being my interpretation).

Leaving just as a knee jerk reaction without making effort to change would be bad, to me personally almost worse than remaining. Of course quitting can be in many cases feel easier/more attractive than trying to navigate through the office politics. But if you manage to flip even small corner of Google or whatever to not do evil (as they used to say) that probably has more influence to the wider society than you quitting.

Counterpoint being that you need to recognize if you are making that change or not, and if you are not able to do so then quitting might be the right choice

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1. empath75 ◴[] No.23081107[source]
That's a reasonable point of view, but I think your obligation extends primarily to saving your own soul, as it were. It's not your responsibility to make others do the right thing. If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.
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2. ardy42 ◴[] No.23081335[source]
> If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.

That reminds me of this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-bystand...):

> Some people unwittingly help atrocities occur by cooperating in an attempt to mitigate a monstrous situation. History demonstrates that this is nearly always a miscalculation. During the Holocaust, Jewish councils organized life in the ghetto and compiled lists of Jews for deportation, often thinking that they were helping Jews manage a nightmare. Ultimately, they helped the Nazis murder Jews by maintaining order and providing the Gestapo with the names of people to be deported and murdered. In his memoir, “Legislating the Holocaust,” Bernhard Lösener, a lawyer in the Third Reich’s Ministry of the Interior, relays how he hurriedly traveled through the night to get to Nuremberg in time to write the Nuremberg race laws so that the rule of law would be preserved, and how he fought to have the race laws written to count as Jewish those with three Jewish grandparents rather than those with one drop of Jewish blood. He too made the mistake of participating in the atrocity in an attempt to minimize the damages caused by its perpetrators.

> Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the rule of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn’t, but maybe not. What we can decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by terrible people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in order to try to make it less bad. It’s tempting, and can seem like the right thing to do: Lösener’s race laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule would (though that had negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned similarly: “If this thing had to be done at all, it was better that it be done in good order.” History shows that when you participate in an atrocity together with the perpetrators, in an attempt to make it somehow a little less horrible, in the end you’re still participating in the atrocity — and it is no less horrible.