I honestly didn't think I was nitpicking, just trying to gain some clarity on your moral perspective.

Also, in terms of grellas saying it better than you could, he specifically notes that we "ought to avoid being a proximate cause of something deemed wrong even though technically legal." This directly contradicts your comment, in which you implied that you would work for any legal organization if the money was good enough. I was merely asking if you could address this contradiction, in the spirit of provoking reasonable discussion about the intersection of money and morality. But if you feel my line of inquiry was nitpicking, then I apologize.

Hey no need to apologize, it is all good. What I meant by "go read grellas' comment" was "Ignore what I wrote, Grellas says what I should have said".

Yes the use of the 'legal' bit (which I threw in to keep the ravening hordes off 'but but are you saying you are ok with drug dealing/child pornography/whatever'. In my defense, it was late at night here (India) when I wrote that and it is too late to edit now.

My position in my original comment was "Within the law (see below for an alternative to this clumsy phrasing), I'd probably do almost any job in software, provided I were paid enough". The "enough" might be quite high.

As a thought experiment, take a sw job you'd find distasteful, and ask yourself if you'd take it if your pay was a million dollars a year. How about if it were a billion? If you are the rare human being who wouldn't work for the NSA, no matter what you were paid, then more power to you. I would gladly work for them if they rewarded me well, because I don't think the engineers at NSA are evil demons bent on world domination. By that logic, nobody should be a soldier, because the essence of that job is killing other people for dubious political causes. Yet the USA worships its service personnel ("Thank you for your service") to a far greater degree than most other countries (where being a soldier is "just" another job).

Grellas of course lays all of tis this out much better than I can. "proximate cause" is the phrase I should have used, but I am not a lawyer and wasn't even aware of the phrase.

So, yes I probably wouldn't work on something that has a pure unadulterated horrifying evil proximate effect( and no good aspects) to it. But that isn't saying very much since this kind of pure evil job probably doesn't exist outside a platonic ideal.

I was objecting to the broadbrush sanctimony in the article, and the use of (in my mind) silly examples.

The whole "legal" bit was clumsy phrasing on my part and you are right to call me out on it.

Cheers,

Well, I guess I wouldn't work for the NSA no matter what (well, it depends on the specific job, of course, they might actually have some positions that are not ethically questionable, after all), and there is one important reason why pay cannot compensate for it: The effects are not just on others, but also affect myself, so that's a cost that I have to subtract from the pay. A society with complete surveillance removes everything from life that makes it worth living, for everyone, including myself, and you can not buy that back, so money would be worthless as compensation.

I think a common misconception is that ethics are somehow something that you obey for others to gain from it. A concensus of behaving ethically creates wealth for everyone, including yourself. It's not that we do not commonly mug other people in the street because we don't want to have their money, but because a society where you can expect to not be mugged is just so much nicer to live in, so that is a value in itself. The only problem with that is that society can support some free riders, and so there is some motivation to be the free rider.