The story about Ibtihal Abu Alsaad, the Microsoft engineer who was fired for telling Microsoft not to use their software to aid #Israel in the Palestinian #genocide, is something I’ve feared all my career. Abu Alsaad said: “My biggest fear is waking up for my 9 to 5 and realising that my code has killed children today.”

I wrote this in 2018: “Software used to guide a missile has consequences. So does software used to profile applicants for potential jobs, or help people live a healthier life. Will you accept the moral consequences of your code? Will you accept both praise and blame for how your software is used?”

I’m always painfully aware of what the code I write can potentially do. There are bright red lines I will not cross, no matter the reward.

#fridayDevAdvice #software #morality #principles

https://www.humancode.us/2018/03/30/personal-values.html

A stop-you-in-your-tracks moment in Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”

One of many!

Abbott skewers Starmer on cuts

Keir #Starmer has been urged to stop referring to his plans to slash the benefits budget by billions as being “moral”

Mother of the House Diane Abbott told Starmer, “there is nothing moral” about taking an axe to social security net

“This is not about #morality, this is about the Treasury’s wish to balance the country’s books on the back of the most #vulnerable & #poor people in this society.”

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25020810.diane-abbott-skewers-keir-starmer-benefits-cuts/

You’ve heard of the Shopping Cart Test as evidence of one’s moral character, right?

What do you call this:

Seen in #SantaClara #sfba

Morality and Self-Interest Edited by Paul Bloomfield, 2007

Ever since "Know Thyself" was inscribed at Delphi, Western philosophers have struggled to understand the relations between morality and self-interest. This edited volume of essays pushes forward one of the oldest and most important debates in philosophy. Is morality a check on self-interest or is it in one's self interest to be moral?

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#philosophy
#essays
#morality
#SefInterest

This is not a popular opinion, but I have come to believe that social movements do not ultimately bring systematic change. Not be a contrarian, but I think it takes the right individual that sparks the final measure that brings about real, fundamental change. Let me give some examples.

Martin Luther King, Jr. I know he didn't do it on his own, but he was a singular force, and that is authentic.

From fiction:

Gabriel Bell from the famous Star Trek: DS9 two-parter, "Past Tense" and the Bell Riots. Yes, he also very much did not do it on his own, but he was a force to be reckoned with.

John Sheridan from Babylon 5. He also did not do it on his own, he had both an immediate crew and an extended crew, but he was hands on and even died only to come back and finish the job. He ultimately made the decisions that changed history.

I know how generic I sound. I know I seem like I lack faith in the collective. Well, having lived with severe disability for 27 years, yes, I do lack faith in people at large. I know what you are willing to do to me when no one else is watching. I know it takes a single soul, the right person who possesses the qualities that the collective claims to be in favor of, but they are never actually capable of those moral values, not personally, they are not. It will take one leader to bring change. The group cannot do it.

my moral compass
insists it's pointing steady,
that the world's spinning

It isn’t ethical. It’s corrupt.

The tote bags I'm using for shopping today...

1. Fuck Your Morals
From a stick-up outside #Booksa bookshop / café in Zagreb, Croatia.
I turned my photo of it into a paper negative and printed it in #cyanotype

#anarchy #blueprint #morality

1/3...

Heartwarming aspects of this Sci-Fi dystopia:

* Rebel forest rangers
* Fursuited public-interest cryptographers
* Librarian dark networks
* Everyday people doing distributed archiving
* Doctors of the Resistance

RIGHT NOW THIS IS EXCITING! https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ucsfapathy/

"This is what it means to worship a state, to treat a state as an idol. It justifies itself no matter what it does. This is the moral catastrophe that has been unfolding slowly in Israel and in the American Jewish community simply has now reached a new kind of crescendo in which Israel, with America’s help, destroys an entire society and then says, well, the place is destroyed, so you’d better leave."

~ Peter Beinart

#Israel #Gaza #AmericanJews #morality #Zionism
/1

https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-evil

Title: An Ethical Dilemma Finally Resolved

By @existentialcomics

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/258

#AskingAutistics (although feel free to answer even if you're not autistic!)

What things are often considered 'sins' in conservative religious terms, but yet don't harm other people?

First thing I could think of was gay marriage, and other rights around loving who you wish (as long as it's consensual and they're not underage).

Then gender identity. Being trans in particular (that seems to raise religious ire!).

It makes sense to me that #morality is not something given to us by a higher power.

I get that it breaks #christianity to say otherwise, but wouldn't it be a BETTER world if we were all responsible for our own actions instead of having them handed to us by a narcissistic god?