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How Do Developers Handle Moral Dilemmas?

DwightFagen asks: "I'm curious to know how developers in the Slashdot community handle situations in which they are given a project that rubs against their moral borders. I was recently hired as a Flash developer for a design and development company and am just beginning my second project. This particular assignment is to build the video portion of an online magazine. This magazine deals with various topics and is by no means a pornographic site (although some content may border on that), but it seems one of its key tenets is to be untethered by social moral values. Though I do not believe such things should in any way be censored or banned from the internet, I do not wish to actively support something I believe to be an exploitation of human beings. What would you in the Slashdot community do in such a situation? Have any of you dealt with something like this before?" "For the sake of clarity, I'd like to mention that I'm all for the freedom of expression on the internet and that I do not in any way judge people based on the media they choose to consume.

If this were a clear cut case of pornography, my choice would be simple; but that is not the case. I do still hold myself to certain standards and believe in the value of integrity and I would also like to do work that my family and friends can be proud of (or at least work that I could show them). However, I would also like to keep my job and would not want to put my small company of very nice people in a difficult position (as the deadline is not so far off)."

1 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Libertarian moderators can suck my left nut by spun · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Hey, mod this down too, assholes. I have more karma than I can possibly burn through. That's the libertarian way: stifle any dissent and call it a consensus. You obviously can not refute anything I have to say, and are so scared of other people reading it and understanding what a crock of shit your failed iddeology is that you must mod me down.

    Well, I have made tons of anti-libertarian posts for the last ten years on Slashdot and for the most part they get modded up because most sensible people can see how ludicrous libertarianism is. I will continue to make anti-libertarian posts and get modded up for them. Try as you might, you can't make black into white and you can't make libertarianism into something sensible, logical, or workable.

    Why is libertarianism the only political ideology that has never been tried in the real world? Two reasons: first, libertarians are all such selfish assholes that you could never get a group of them to agree on what libertarianism is, let alone put it into practice. Second, libertarians know that as long as libertarianism remains purely theoretical, they can go on being theoretically right. As soon as it was put into practice, the world would see it as the failure it is and libertarians would have to shut the fuck up.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton