2024-06-14 Morality, justice and the law
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Some actions are legal and still reprehensible. People won't get
punished by the state or the police but that doesn't protect them from
scorn, disdain, harsh comments and insults. Actions have consequences.

Perhaps some people need to see it spelled out. I think when I was
young I also needed somebody to tell me because when I grew up, I
thought that the state is great, the law is great, and we're all good
people. But morality, justice and the law are not the same. The law
only concerns the things were the state will come and impose fines and
punishment. Justice is the thing we aspire to (but which the state
often cannot deliver). And the moral good goes further than that.

To be morally good or bad is different from being just or unjust and
that is different from something being legal or illegal.

So please, when people say that something is reprehensible they
usually don't care whether it was legal or not because they aren't
going to call the cops. It's an occasion to be happy for just being
called names, for only getting demeaned and ridiculed, for just
getting inundated with mails and complaints. It's a learning
opportunity because when the cops show up and take your stuff, when
you get invitations to show up in court, when the bills start coming
in, then it's worse. Much worse.

I've seen this a few times on fedi, now. Somebody thinks it's OK to
index all the status messages for their search engine, ingest all the
status messages for their sentiment analysis or for their training
data, and then they're surprised when people get angry. A discussion
ensues, and some people will say, hey, it was not illegal now, was it?
Therefore there's no point in getting angry or acting surprised.

This misunderstands how humans manage to live together. When I was
young and learned about hackers breaking into computer systems cheered
for them because I didn't like the corporations. And if it wasn't
illegal it was good or something like that. I was confused. But now,
as I look around, I see defence in depth all around me. The garden
fence has a gate that is trivial to jump over and to open, but to do
so invites trouble. Whether jumping the fence is legal or illegal
doesn't matter at first. Perhaps somebody runs away from bullies or
creeps and they're welcome to jump that fence and escape. Things are
negotiable. In a civilized world, many things need to happen before
the state needs to get involved, and this is how it is supposed to be.
Differences can be resolved.

A recent example of what I'm talking about:

> A recent investigation by Liaizon Wakest revealed that Maven, a new
> social network founded by former OpenAI Team Lead Ken Stanley, has
> been importing a vast amount of statuses from Mastodon without
> anyone’s consent. – Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts, by
> Sean Tilley

People react harshly:

> I can’t emphasize enough how much I would love if all the data
> centers containing the code running these things, across every
> network, just suddenly exploded. Take it all back to zero, and then
> put up a digital wall, like in Cyberpunk 2077 when they built a
> whole new internet that isn’t infested with garbage. – Hey It’s
> Maven! Who’s Maven?, by @cmdr_nova@cmdr-nova.online

"Move fast and break things" is shit advice.

"Act now and ask for forgiveness later" is shit advice.

It breaks all the good will accumulated so far and it'll take a
lifetime to rebuild.

The advice that has been true for generations is: "Ask politely and
respect the answers given".

> So there's a difference in opinion in the fediverse on whether it's
> important to get consent to use somebody's public posts for a
> purpose they didn't originally intend it for: adding them to a
> search engine, using them as part of algorithmic recommendation
> systems, "bridging" them to another social networks, using it to
> train artificial intelligence systems, and so on. Some think this is
> just fine, or that it's enough to assume consent and give people the
> ability to "opt out" and withdraw consent. Others think that these
> uses should require informed, affirmative, "opt in" consent. – Eight
> tips about consent for fediverse developers, for
> @nexusofprivacy@mastodon.social, by @jdp23@blahaj.zone

​#Philosophy