The most compelling arguments I found is that just because we happen to work in a field that lets us exert our influence over society doesn't make our moral sensibilities any better than the rest of society. What us privileged few who work in technology see as using our position of influence for good, many other people may see as a small minority abusing their power to manipulate society for the worse.

I think many technology worker do understand the power they have, and make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.

I agree this is problematic. However, programmers are uniquely well situated to create a system for asking "the rest of society" questions about what kinds of systems they would like a programmer to support.

> make the deliberate decision that refraining from exercising that power is the morally optimal choice.

Quitting would be (as close as one gets to) refraining from exercising power. What you're describing is cooperating with the status quo, which is definitely an exercise of power.

Working for ICE as an engineer would be you exercising your power for ICE. But working for GitHub as an engineer, where GitHub is customer-agnostic, doesn't seem like an exercise of power to me. Anyone can use the product you build, it's not specifically for ICE. Similarly if you design a car and some cars of that design get used by ICE, that doesn't seem like an exercise of power in favor of ICE, unless you build features specifically for ICE.

Threatening to quit if GitHub continues to sell to ICE seems like an exercise of power against ICE. Silently quitting and not telling anyone why you quit I would consider a very slight exercise of power against ICE, because over time if it happens enough, businesses that deal with ICE will be less competent that businesses that don't deal with ICE, and that will harm ICE slightly.

In that sense, continuing to work for github forwards the net moral "output" of its work. Each wrong or right is weighted differently and though I think we can all agree that there is a direction amplitude is harder.

I just want to add that, in the same sense that quitting github quietly is a tiny blow against ICE, continuing to work for github silently is also clearly supportive of ice. Actions are rarely totally morally neutral, which is ok as long as we don't pretend they are.

Nevermind "good" or "bad" by the select judgement of a few privileged people -- it's whether you even bother to _consider_, or instead just claim "this is hard".

We can create influencing machines, or consensing machines. Your rightful concern is applicable to influencing machines imho. A consensing machine has no centre it's drawing people into. It's a technology for users to find and coalesce around the centres that work for them.

The things the OP is implying unnavigable are the same class of challenges we navigated hundreds of years ago with intellectual property. We thought ownership was worth controlling access over, and we made arbitrary laws to propagate that regime in the world. We could deign it worth creating processes to collectively negotiate moral right/wrong together (without presupposing the will of the steward of the tech is right/wrong) and hold ourselves to that.

The fact that we don't even bother to consider the question of "should we do this" and instead fall on "this is challenging" -- that speaks volumes to how some of us are limited in our imagining of what the sickness in society might be.

I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems in western society, and I'm not religious myself. But it seems that for all its flaws, Christianity at least was an infrastructure of people and principles that hung together in some vaguely coherent manner such that people could pose the question "Is this right? Is this good?" and either answer it themselves by reference to a book, or ask it of a full time moraliser (priest).

The reason the OP is expressing unease at this kind of tech worker "morality" is because it's wafer thin in a way that makes medieval theology look like a towering pinnacle of intellectualism.

They aren't making moral judgements of their customers consistently. ICE is targeted only because a bunch of journalists started covering it extensively as part of their anti-Trump agenda. ICE did similar things before Trump but they weren't in the news, so GitHub workers ignored it.

Moreover their morality isn't universal. ICE is bad because it hurts people who only want a better life. OK, so, should there be no borders at all? What happens then to all the American workers in marginal jobs who suddenly lose their income because an immigrant willing to live in practically sub-Saharan conditions took their job? That worker only wanted a better life too, do they not matter? If not why not? Is it because they're white and GitHub workers are racist against whites? What about other border control agencies? What about governments in general?

Christian religious morals are very far from ideal but at least make a show of being universal. You forgive those who trespass against you - it doesn't matter who they are or what they did. You forgive them. You are the good Samaritan who helps those in need. Doesn't matter who they work for. You love your neighbour. Doesn't matter if they voted for the other guy.

You're arguing that tech workers should engage with morality as if it's any other hard question that can be whiteboarded out in a few hours. But tech workers have got nothing to say on this topic that hasn't already been said hundreds of years ago. They have no special insights to provide. The rigour of their moral logic is trivial compared even to a bunch of men in funny clothes reading stories about camels out of a book written anonymously 2000 years ago. Why shouldn't they be reminded of this?

Don't you think the FSF exists as a huge counterpoint to this? The FSF deliberate makes the decision that copyleft is the morally optimal choice and forces others to comply - and I'd imagine more developers view the FSF as a good thing.

All in all, the FSF is arguing for restrictions about how one class of individuals may use what they produce and for the benefit of the other class. Just like how FSF prevents other developers from using their products to lock other users out of their software, similarly, the employees are asking to prevent ICE from using their products against the questionable imprisonment of other human beings.

But I think the main difference lies in that copyleft limits itself purely to the realm of controlling how modified software is distributed. The only thing it limits is how modified software is distributed. The only thing it requires is how modified software is distributed. When a developer writes software to be used by others, it's necessary for the developer to decide how to distributed it, and copyleft provides an answer. Copyleft doesn't venture past the developer's necessary role.

On the other hand, limiting providing stuff to ICE ventures out of the developer's necessary question of how to distribute software and now starts thinking about human suffering, jails, politics, etc. You've gone past the question of how to distribute software, and are now thinking about broader topics.

Developers are allowed to create commercial or otherwise restricted software with FSF tools like gcc.

What, then, does?

Democracy is a good idea, sure. But what happens when democracy reaches a conclusion that seems obviously unjust? Do we decide that our own sense of right and wrong must be flawed? (This is a question I have no good answer to—where should we develop our sense of right and wrong?)

Moreover, historically there are many times that democracy says something is right that the people of a later era (perhaps even just a couple years later) decide was actually wrong, and that's the reason we have constitutional limits on what voters can do—but who decides what the Constitution says? We obviously need a veto over the will of the voters, but who should we trust with it?

What if instead of technical skills you have money? Is it wrong to use money in the service of influencing political goals? (In the US, neither the voters nor the Constitution believe so, by the way.) If others are influencing society with money, is it wrong to use money to counter them?

What about speech and communications media? If you have a platform (say, you're a popular entertainer or writer or talk show host), should you use it to convince others of a particular political position? If you have many listeners and your political opponents don't, is it still okay for you to speak to your listeners, or are you a minority unjustly using your influence and power?

What about weaponry? Traditionally, military might has settled many questions of whether a government should be permitted to engage in an action. Is it unjust to go to war with a country with a smaller army? Would it have been morally optimal for the US to say, we have about 5% of the world's population, the morally optimal choice is to not interfere with World War II?

I worry the argument that it's not our place to act on our principles is popular because it's easy and comfortable—keep your job, don't rock the boat—not because it's morally compelling.

And of these groups who can influence society—the politically-well-connected-200-years-ago, the rich, the media, the military, and the technical builders—if there is an argument for any of them to exert disproportionate influence, it seems to me the strongest argument would be for the builders, since technical work necessarily requires intelligence snd systems thinking more strongly than the others do. That is, if any group is to be entrusted with a veto if the rest agree and they disagree, the builders seem most likely to have a legitimate, informed, reasoned, and non-self-serving reason for the veto.

Society, incidentally, has no stories of praising people who exercised restraint when they saw an obvious injustice and the rest of the world going along with it. It usually disdains them as weak, cowardly, and opportunistic. It does have strong praise for those who took a stand even when it seemed like their position was in the minority.

In that case, we imagine a better democracy. If someone feels empathy is what makes their local democracy work better, and the further-above larger spheres of democracy no longer embody that:

We should imagine a new democracy that optimizes for empathy, no?

Are the protesters in Hong Kong imagining a new democracy that optimizes for empathy? Did the plaintiffs in Obergefell do so? What about the soldiers at Normandy?

Is refusing to work for employers that sell to ICE part of imagining a better democracy?

No matter what thing you are talking about, whether technical or political decision, a decision has to be made. Once it is made, as an employee, I think you've got to either go with it or decide to go somewhere else (perhaps starting your own company if you need to). I say this as a person who obviously holds a minority point of view in most of the companies I've worked for ;-)

At the end of the day, you've got to decide if you are aligned with the ideals of the employer you work for or not. Making suggestions is one thing, but trying to put political pressure on your employer to act in a particular manner is something I would advise people to refrain from.

Engineers are a powerful class of people with the opportunity to swing their weight around on political issues like this. Some believe this opportunity should be seized for good, others believe it is just a soft form of tyranny, an undemocratic exercise of power. This is particularly true when in your own country, where you ought to use the power of the vote to make a difference.