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Is Setting Up an Offshore IT Help Desk Ethical?
theodp writes "Except for a few odd jobs,' wrote an advice seeker to The Ethicist (NYT, reg. may be required), 'I had been out of work for nine months when I was offered a job setting up an [IT] offshore help desk. Would it be ethical to accept the offer?' Randy Cohen, who pens The Ethicist column for the Times, not only advised the job seeker that it was indeed okay to help co-workers lose their jobs, but also seemed to suggest that it would be unethical for him not to offshore the jobs, saying: 'Some people feel we have a greater ethical duty to those closest to us — our neighbors — but in an era of global trade and travel, that is a recipe for tribalism and its attendant ills.' The job seeker, who noted his father's auto-industry job was outsourced, chose to ignore Cohen's ethics advice — as well as his own wife's — and declined the job out of principle. He continues to seek work. Comments?"
...then the answer is no.
I saw that movie. You'll get to nail a really beautiful Indian girl. Ethics smethics.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I find it amusing that people are in favor of giving poor people in foreign countries food and money, but are horrified at the prospect of giving them jobs.
If he's doing a better job than somebody else for the same or less pay, then it is ethical.
What is NOT ethical is what the current worldwide corporate managers do. They get paid more than anybody else in the company to produce absolutely nothing. What they call "leadership" is worth nothing, do they think it requires any talent to say "hey, you! make this thing work!"
I believe in Leadership as it was in the old days, the leaders were the people who had worked in the factory floor and had showed their talent there. They understood the processes, the technical details that made the company create the products people would buy.
Today, the MBAs know nothing about that, all they do is bullshit.
One of the beautiful aspects of capitalism is that it assumes everyone is inherently greedy and therefore the system is constructed so that even the greediest of society's members cannot abuse the system.
One of the horrible aspects of capitalism is that if someone is not greedy or negatively greedy (like the man in the example) and looks out for others, they're eaten like a sheep among wolves. Of course it is not society that is harmed but merely the perceptually insane individual.
In an age where lawmakers are trying to strike down healthcare for all of your fellow citizens and Social Security is just a cookie jar to be raped by fiscally careless politicians it's unfortunately pointless to pass up this job. You're just ensuring that you're the victim instead of someone else. Sadly, in a capitalistic society, that's not a sound plan to ensure your future and survival.
I respect the man for his decision but as someone who has watched my father go on and off unemployment, I implore him to adjust his attitude to just consider legality and not ethics. We live in a world today where all politicians and businesses lead by example in this department and playing the game optimally means that capitalism rewards them.
My work here is dung.
I worked for years as a mechanical engineer in the automation industry. All we did was put people out of work by automating routine tasks. That is how we become more productive. Engineering is all about using your mind to improve the way things are done. This inevitably means putting some people out of work. The beauty of a free market system is that labor can move to where it is needed the most. For example.
I helped build a machine that assembled carburetors for Briggs and Stratton. Before there was an assembly line that ran 2 shifts with 12 people each shift. The machine allowed 2 technicians to build the same number of carburetors with less scrap in one shift. So 24 people were out of a job. How can this be good? Because it frees up those peoples labor so other things can be done. When someone first starts making something it usually isn't beneficial to automate because of the capital costs. But if the product is successful and the demand it there it makes sense to automate. Then free up the labor to go to where it is needed more.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Just make sure that when the CEO has trouble with his laptop, he has to call the call center in Mumbai.
One of my pet peeves since Randy Cohen started the column is that he's calling himself an ethicist when he really isn't. It's like calling yourself a doctor or lawyer when you're not, and giving people medical or legal advice that gets them into trouble.
It's part of the old newspaper mindset, "A good reporter can cover X even if he doesn't know anything about it, he'll just pick it up when he goes along," when X is a country where he doesn't speak the language, technology, politics, the drug war, health care, etc.
There actually is such a thing as an ethicist. I'm most familiar with medical ethicists, who are often employed by hospitals and academic medical centers. I've taken courses and gone to lectures on medical ethics, and I learned a few important non-obvious things.
An ethicist isn't like a doctor or rabbi who tells you what's right (according to God). The job of an ethicist (at least a medical ethicist) is to get the facts, figure out the logic of the situation, clarify the problem for you, and let you make your own decision. They also have to point out to you that different people would have different values and opinions, and you have to decide for yourself.
For example, back in the 1950s, when a pregnant unmarried woman went to a doctor, depending on who she went to, the doctor would tell her (1) you have to deliver the child and give it up for adoption or (2) You have to get an abortion so you can continue with your education/career. Later on, some doctors came up with the innovative idea that you should lay out the facts and options, and let the woman make her own decision what she wanted to do.
Today, medical ethicists help people decide a lot of Terry Schiavo-type questions about when a patient is hopeless enough to let the patient die, or whether to take a dangerous, unpleasant treatment like cancer chemotherapy when there's a very low chance it will do any good.
(There are corrupt ethicists, too http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/pharma-buys-a-conscience.html.)
The job of an ethicist is to clarify ideas
But Randy Cohen was answering ethical questions usually on the basis of nothing more than his own personal opinion or gut feeling. Up to the point where I stopped reading his column, I never saw a thoughtful consideration of the different viewpoints and options. Cohen just delivered his own opinion, as if he had a direct line to God.
What really annoyed me about Cohen was that he was taking a field with a lot of good, thoughtful logical and even scientific analysis behind it (for example, doctors did studies of how patients felt a year after deciding to let relatives die; for example, doctors recorded conversations between doctors and patients about fatal diseases and found out that the patients didn't usually appreciate the seriousness of their condition) and treating it as if it were just a matter of opinion, and entertainment, and his opinion was better than yours. It's like applying creationism to ethics. He's just a liberal version of those conservative Christians (or extremists of every religion) who think that they have all the answers and everybody should do what they say because they have a direct line to God. It's scientific ignorance applied to ethics.