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Aswad -> RE: To profit off suffering… (2/17/2008 12:19:56 PM)
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ORIGINAL: CuriousLord
I doubt that the money will be worth the loss of self respect.
One of the defining aspects of intelligence is the ability to override short-term desires to work for long-term goals. If time, except for yourself, rewound to the point in time when Hitler was born (not just going backward, which would have all sorts of nasty implications, but simply time being erased back to that point, except for yourself), would you violate your own morals in the short term so as to prevent the Holocaust in the long term? And would you have the meta-moral fortitude to still respect yourself afterwards?
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I am not asking for advice or morality.
Seeing as you got some anyway, I just thought I'd chime in with the point above.
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What I am asking is this: Has anyone else been in such a position before? (Not necessarily with an internship, not even necessarily with a job.. but where one's work, while very much legal, would be of questionable morality though profitable.) What did they do?
I have done morally questionable things for various reasons.
Over the years, it has become exceptionally rare for me to do so out of a lapse in moral integrity, but it has remained the case that I have occasionally had to chose between an immoral course of action and a more immoral course of action. When I had a formal system of morality, this had all been resolved up front by the built-in tiering of the axioms. At all other times, it has been a more ambigous optimization problem. With my recent shift in values, the optimization targets have been less at odds with each other, so there haven't been quite as many dilemmas to deal with.
With regard to profiting in an immoral manner, my morals have always dictated that I uphold my commitment to me and my own. Thus there is a difference between the time before I had someone to provide for, and the time after. Before I had someone to provide for, I left a couple of good jobs for such reasons. After, I have looked about for exits that would allow me to provide, but held on to the job that was offensive in the mean time, as it was the less immoral course of action.
Without a doubt, there is a price a man pays whenever he has to choose between evils, and that price is either the distress of ongoing dissonance, or desensitization with consequent loss of integrity. I have opted for the former along the way, but have also found that dissonance suggests there is a misalignment between the world and our perceptions of it. Unless you know a good way to change the former, it seems a reasonable course of action to change the latter, and to reevaluate any assumptions contingent on it.
Just my 2¢.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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