That's all fine and true but it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical and Mozilla's record is less than spotless, to put it mildly.
People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves.
Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.
"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"
That won't work.
You do shape your enviroment, but your enviroment also shapes you. Meaning if you go to a miserable place on purpose, that place will just drain you, if you cannot change it completely.
And changing a company on your own as a lonely employee ... is doomed from the start and will lead to burn out and depression very soon.
I propose the opposite: ethical people gather together and create organisations and companies to show that things can be done better.
Talk and criticism is cheap. Actually doing something better, is much harder. But you need likeminded people around you. If they are all dispersed everyone fighting on their own against a behemot .. will not make things better. All those cold "evil" corporate people? Well, at some point they were humans with ideals as well (in most cases) but got changed by their surroundings.
His claim is that power in large organizations is a zero-sum game, and merely competing in this game in order to advance necessarily alters your personality and lifestyle. This is due to the demands that the game places on you. The whole series is worth reading.
Don't let the desire for perfection prevent improvement. And while I take your last point, trying to make e.g. an advertising company with tens of thousands of employees more ethical is going to be less productive than going somewhere that's trying to do some societal good in the first place.
The logical conclusion of this is to go join ISIS and do their IT. See how stupid this idea is? You're not going to change anything from the inside, you're just helping them do bad things.
My point is - and it is sad that this needs elaborating - that what works well for physics and maths problems does not necessarily work well for societal problems.
Changing a company from the inside is something that can only be done by those that are on the inside, hence my qualification that you should only join those companies that you can still stomach and then push as hard as you can in the right direction, rather than to join the very worst organization that you can find in the world, and one that you - hopefully - can not stomach.
It is an error to think that reductio only applies to “physics and math problems”. Logic is logic, it applies to all truths. (Though one has to be careful with things stated informally, to ensure that one is working with the claims that were intended. There is a danger of parsing an informal statement as if it were a formal statement, and as a result interpreting it to mean something other than what was meant.
Also, there may be a risk of people being more likely to derive in invalid ways when attempting the reductio, like making some hyperbolic statements, exaggerating the implications of a statement, and treating those exaggerations as if they actually logically follow.
But this doesn’t make reductio an invalid technique, just one that people can fail to use properly.)
Like I said in the other comment, the objection should be that the derivation of the absurd from the premise is invalid. For example, pointing to the “that you can stomach” part of your claim, and saying that the derivation was invalid in neglecting that part of the statement.
Talking about changing ISIS from the inside as the IT administrator doesn't convince anybody that it's impossible to change an organization from within. It's a poor argument that might win Internet points for being a spicy hot take, especially on Twitter, but it does little to debunk the idea that, eg, an engineer could ethically join Facebook with the aims of elevating the company up, through working on the team to detect Russian trolling rings/Anti-vaxxers/MLM marketers.
If someone argues “X implies <you should do something stupid and bad>. It is absurd to conclude <you should do something stupid and bad>, so therefore, by reductio ad absurdum, X is false.”
your refutation should not be “actually, reductio ad absurdum is invalid.”, but rather “It is not the case that <x> implies <you should do something stupid and bad>”.
Perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from the claim <X> was based on a misunderstanding of the claim <X>, or perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from it was based on some fallacy, or some false assumption.
But reductio is a valid logical step, so long as we have the validity of the argument that the absurd conclusion follows from the premise.
"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"
with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"
What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already verbose, and adding additional verbiage does not help the case (IMO)
"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"
with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"
What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already
It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee.
Otherwise, you're depriving an ethical organization of your contributions while aiding the competition.
Unless you're entering a leadership role it's very unlikely you'll be changing a damn thing from within, while being corrupted by the surely lavish compensation an unethical company generally can afford to shower on its individual contributors.
> It makes sense to go work for an unethical company if you're unskilled and/or lazy, and will essentially sit on your hands while burning their resources on a useless employee.
Now this is the kind of motivated reasoning I can get behind. I'm not lazy, I'm genuinely heroic!
Every company is to more or lesser degree unethical. I've yet to come across a company that was 100% good. So you will always be making this trade-off, I'm asking for it to be a conscious one and to then push in the right direction from where it has the most effect.
While I agree that I haven't found any 100% good companies, I have yet to see a company where any low-level engineer has any real input at all and can actually make any kind of difference as far as ethics. If you work up into management, sure, but then you're no longer an engineer.
People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves.
Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.