If I gave that impression, I apologize. It wasn't my intent. So let me say clearly: it was a lapse of sound judgement, I disagreed with it both then and now, I've said so both publicly and internally since the day it happened, and I think a lot about how to avoid such errors myself.
I don't want to minimize the error. I want to show it in the light in which it was made, because no one ever comes up to you in business and says "hello, do you want to sell your soul today?". That's not what moral compromise looks like. It looks like trying to do a good job and not fully processing the decision you're actually making. That's an error that you make with normal human levels of normal human failing even though that error is abnormally costly.
To return to the bridge analogy for a second, the board that votes to re-open the bridge isn't sitting there going "hmm, should I kill fifty people today?". They've got a dozen people telling them a dozen things are immediate crises, and this one is particularly costly to listen to. So it's a little easier to believe that the civil engineer's report is just someone being alarmist than it is to believe that you've got a really hard decision to make, especially because you're not thinking about it too hard. And that's doubly true when you know it's likely to get you voted out of office, replaced by someone who cares about infrastructure less than you do, who definitely wouldn't close the bridge.
That doesn't make fifty people any less dead when the bridge collapses. But it does change the solution that helps you not collapse bridges, a solution that - as a newly-elected board member in this analogy - is a question that I am deeply concerned with.
I agree, fundamentally, with what you're saying: that you have a responsibility to overcome your incentives, that if you're one of those board members you have to get over your fears and close the bridge. I get that, and I agree with it. But to accomplish that requires understanding the kind of mindset in which one opens the bridge, which is usually not the mindset of deliberate malice. We don't have to compromise our moral principles or our understanding of right and wrong to understand the human weaknesses that lead people astray.
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<warning: unfocused rambling ahead>
I'll give you a concrete example from my recent history. On my very first sales call for Otherbranch, which did not go well, I asked the person I was talking to (who happened to have been a salesperson) for advice afterward.
His advice? Lie more.
Of course, he didn't say it in those words. He said something like "listen to your prospect's concerns and needs, and then talk about how you're a really focused solution to them". So if your prospect says they're concerned with candidate quality, you talk about how candidate quality is the focus of your process, the thing you're really specialized at. Or if your user says they're concerned with time investment, you talk about how that's the thing you're really specialized at. And so on.
In the one sense, this is totally expected behavior. Everyone already assumes a person on a sales call is already doing this. I would imagine that, to most people, this isn't really even a moral blip of significant size. And yet the advice fundamentally is "you should lie more", even if it's lying in this localized, normalized way.
Now, I don't do that. But I don't know how much that costs me. It almost certainly does cost me something, at least in the short term. That's a cost I am, provisionally, choosing to pay. But suppose that I knew for certain the decision was "if you don't do this, your business won't exist, and someone who does lie - a lot more than you do - will take your place". Would I be justified in bending to the fact that this is just the reality of doing business? I'm not sure I would make that argument, but it's not like a reasonable person couldn't make it. Is it better to be uncompromisingly moral and fail to be effective, or to win by being as bad as everyone else? It's not a trivial question.
One of the first things I wrote, when I started planning Otherbranch, was:
> Do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern.
That gets tested every single day. Every single day. It's tested on every call, every conversation, every sales pitch, every email, in ways large and small. I've been amazed at just how often I catch myself wanting to spin just a little teeny bit, because it's obviously the best approach to take in terms of getting Otherbranch off the ground. And if I think I'm a more ethical businessperson than most (and I do), isn't that better than the alternative? Those are the thoughts in my head.
And the thing is, I might be wrong about this. This might be fatal to running a company. It might just not be possible to win by those rules. I might have doomed my entire company and every bit of work I and others are putting into it when I wrote those words on like hour 60. And if I did, and the next person who comes along sees my failure and recognizes that fact from my next company postmortem, would you be able to blame them if they lied just a little?
I struggle with this kind of question a lot. Because I share your moral convictions and your belief that, ultimately, we need to call a spade a spade and call out when people are harmed or their autonomy disregarded. But I also want my moral convictions to have teeth, and that means not completely sabotaging my ability to get anything done. I don't think this is a particularly new moral conflict. I cannot possibly be the first person to try to navigate these waters, which should scare me even more, because it looks like the sharks ate the last guy. But I don't get a choice about navigating them if I want to get anything done.
Does any of this make any sense? This is already way longer than I'd intended to write and is definitely not my best work, but I'm trying to articulate something complex and personal because it's the only response I have to what you're saying. I think we agree on the moral principles, but I think I'm arguing for a nuance in their application that you aren't.
"... because no one ever comes up to you in business and says "hello, do you want to sell your soul today?". That's not what moral compromise looks like."
Actually. it looks exactly like that. It can also be more subtly, but is usually more up front.
I don't want to minimize the error. I want to show it in the light in which it was made, because no one ever comes up to you in business and says "hello, do you want to sell your soul today?". That's not what moral compromise looks like. It looks like trying to do a good job and not fully processing the decision you're actually making. That's an error that you make with normal human levels of normal human failing even though that error is abnormally costly.
To return to the bridge analogy for a second, the board that votes to re-open the bridge isn't sitting there going "hmm, should I kill fifty people today?". They've got a dozen people telling them a dozen things are immediate crises, and this one is particularly costly to listen to. So it's a little easier to believe that the civil engineer's report is just someone being alarmist than it is to believe that you've got a really hard decision to make, especially because you're not thinking about it too hard. And that's doubly true when you know it's likely to get you voted out of office, replaced by someone who cares about infrastructure less than you do, who definitely wouldn't close the bridge.
That doesn't make fifty people any less dead when the bridge collapses. But it does change the solution that helps you not collapse bridges, a solution that - as a newly-elected board member in this analogy - is a question that I am deeply concerned with.
I agree, fundamentally, with what you're saying: that you have a responsibility to overcome your incentives, that if you're one of those board members you have to get over your fears and close the bridge. I get that, and I agree with it. But to accomplish that requires understanding the kind of mindset in which one opens the bridge, which is usually not the mindset of deliberate malice. We don't have to compromise our moral principles or our understanding of right and wrong to understand the human weaknesses that lead people astray.
-----
<warning: unfocused rambling ahead>
I'll give you a concrete example from my recent history. On my very first sales call for Otherbranch, which did not go well, I asked the person I was talking to (who happened to have been a salesperson) for advice afterward.
His advice? Lie more.
Of course, he didn't say it in those words. He said something like "listen to your prospect's concerns and needs, and then talk about how you're a really focused solution to them". So if your prospect says they're concerned with candidate quality, you talk about how candidate quality is the focus of your process, the thing you're really specialized at. Or if your user says they're concerned with time investment, you talk about how that's the thing you're really specialized at. And so on.
In the one sense, this is totally expected behavior. Everyone already assumes a person on a sales call is already doing this. I would imagine that, to most people, this isn't really even a moral blip of significant size. And yet the advice fundamentally is "you should lie more", even if it's lying in this localized, normalized way.
Now, I don't do that. But I don't know how much that costs me. It almost certainly does cost me something, at least in the short term. That's a cost I am, provisionally, choosing to pay. But suppose that I knew for certain the decision was "if you don't do this, your business won't exist, and someone who does lie - a lot more than you do - will take your place". Would I be justified in bending to the fact that this is just the reality of doing business? I'm not sure I would make that argument, but it's not like a reasonable person couldn't make it. Is it better to be uncompromisingly moral and fail to be effective, or to win by being as bad as everyone else? It's not a trivial question.
One of the first things I wrote, when I started planning Otherbranch, was:
> Do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern.
That gets tested every single day. Every single day. It's tested on every call, every conversation, every sales pitch, every email, in ways large and small. I've been amazed at just how often I catch myself wanting to spin just a little teeny bit, because it's obviously the best approach to take in terms of getting Otherbranch off the ground. And if I think I'm a more ethical businessperson than most (and I do), isn't that better than the alternative? Those are the thoughts in my head.
And the thing is, I might be wrong about this. This might be fatal to running a company. It might just not be possible to win by those rules. I might have doomed my entire company and every bit of work I and others are putting into it when I wrote those words on like hour 60. And if I did, and the next person who comes along sees my failure and recognizes that fact from my next company postmortem, would you be able to blame them if they lied just a little?
I struggle with this kind of question a lot. Because I share your moral convictions and your belief that, ultimately, we need to call a spade a spade and call out when people are harmed or their autonomy disregarded. But I also want my moral convictions to have teeth, and that means not completely sabotaging my ability to get anything done. I don't think this is a particularly new moral conflict. I cannot possibly be the first person to try to navigate these waters, which should scare me even more, because it looks like the sharks ate the last guy. But I don't get a choice about navigating them if I want to get anything done.
Does any of this make any sense? This is already way longer than I'd intended to write and is definitely not my best work, but I'm trying to articulate something complex and personal because it's the only response I have to what you're saying. I think we agree on the moral principles, but I think I'm arguing for a nuance in their application that you aren't.