A question of programming ethics...

petitduc

This question has nothing to do with php specifically, but it concerns a situation that could be encountered by any web programmers.

In short, it's how far would you go to avoid being laid off.
Especially in the current state of IT job market.

Let's say you work for a dating site, letting people looking for a relationship contact each other anonymously.
The company asks you to implement a "race" filtering system. People are asked which "race" or ethnic origin they are on registration.

Thanks to it, members can block contacts coming from people of the wrong race.

Perhaps such a thing is downright illegal, I don't know, but it depends of the country.
I know a French site that does exactly that (no I don't work for them).

I have never been in such a situation personally but I'd like some input.

What would you do in this case ?

All PoVs welcome 🙂

planetsim

huh?

Weedpacket

How does it differ from filtering by gender, religion, sexual orientation, or eating habits?

petitduc

Originally posted by Weedpacket
How does it differ from filtering by gender, religion, sexual orientation, or eating habits?

I don't categorically declare it differs.
A similar situation can be found in perhaps some job sites, although I don't have a specific example in mind.
Employers could block some candidates to apply on their job offers based on some discriminatory criteria.

If we accept the premise that racial prejudice (or other gratuitous prejudices) are morally wrong (and of course if you don't accept this the whole discussion is moot for you), then it is arguable that implementing processes based on prejudice legitimizes it.
If you you think you have some moral values, can you let these values remain abstract and have no consequences at all ?

Some of the criteria you mention are entirely justifiable as they have practical consequences not derived from an a priori prejudice.
For the dating site example, filtering through gender is justified by the person's sexual orientation, homosexual or heterosexual.
Religion is more questionable, but it does have consequences on the relationship.
Criteria which are valid in a context may not be in another.
Actually, I would not necessarily do what I think is moral, I don't know. I justwanted to know what other people think 🙂.

drawmack

In a job site it would probably be considered illegal to use it, but I don't know if it would be illegal to offer it. What if the employer needs to higher a minority to me their quotas?

In a dating site, the government cannot tell me that I must date any given individual. If I only want to date black midgets from england that's my choice and the government can't say anything about it. Therefor, this would not be illegal in a dating site.

However, I believe the question is this: If you are asked to do something that is illegal and in doing so you may loose your job if the company is forced to close would you do it?

I would inform my boss of the possible situation. If at that piont I was told to continue with the work I would continue with the work. Insubordintation is reason for immediate termination. I would much rather do something that means I could possibly at some future date loose my job, then something that means I will immediately loose my job.

weekender

i'm quite lucky, in that the two MD's of my company are more matey than bossy (and both act like six year olds all the time). I'm in a position where my boss tells me to make tea, so i tell him to * off and he calls me a * and i walk off.

This also translates to business decisions - if he makes a decision, I can tell him i think it's stupid for whatever reason without any backlash. He'll take what i say, give it some thought, and if he still stands by his decision he'll try to show me his thought process. I've never gotten to this point and still disagreed - we have always come to a compromise where we are both satisfied, so I have never had to refuse a task as such.

adam

Weedpacket

New York Review of Books; Personals
Petite, attractive, intelligent WSF, 30, fond of music, theatre, books, travel, seeks warm affectionate, fun-loving man to share life's pleasures with view to lasting relationship. Send photograph. Please no biochemists.

petitduc

I would much rather do something that means I could possibly at some future date loose my job, then something that means I will immediately loose my job.

I don't know if you're aware of that, but law supersedes orders.
Not only illegal orders can be resisted, but they MUST.
Insubordination against illegal orders ins't a valid reason for firing.
I mean, acting upon orders doesn't extinguish your legal responsibility. It might be taken in court as an attenuating factor, but that's all.
What if you're ordered to kill ?
So you might end up not only jobless but also under prosecution...

Please no biochemists.

LOL 😃
She must have had bad experiences with biochemists I guess.
I saw once a similar ad except that it was "please no IT" 🙁
People are stupid and there's nothing to stop that... automating stupidity through programming is a little different I think.

Elizabeth

Personally, I think because it's a privately run dating site, your employer can pretty much make the rules, right? It's a private company providing a private service, so they can ask whatever they want- if someone visiting the site doesn't like it, they can go elsewhere. We have all-male country clubs that are privately owned, so they pretty much make the rules. Right wrong or indifferent, it's the same kind of situation. Does your dating service also ask for physical characteristics such as weight, height, etc? My brother is 6'5" and he much preferred taller women, so he would want to most likely filter out women under 5'0" tall. Some could call that discrimination. Or perhaps if you didn't want to date someone over 300 pounds, some could call that discrimination too. Same thing goes with educational background or occupation.

My opinion is that if you don't personally agree with the practice, and it's going to compromise your morals personally, then perhaps you might look for employment elsewhere- just to sleep at night 🙂

I've not looked at dating services- is asking for race a common question?

rgermain

I personally have not looked into dating services either, so on that note I do not know if that is a common question.

On the point of morallity of asking for ones race I see nothing wrong with this, when in the dating site area. How is asking/filtering race any different then sexual orintation. Sexual orintation is much like a preferance of what you like. Maybe there is a certain race, which you have not problems with, but that you just don't find attractive. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and plays a huge party in a relationships. So, if you find heavy people or people that are to skinny unattractive why can't you simply find someone of a certain race unattractive with out it being considered racist.

ahundiak

This thread seems to mixing up up two very different concepts: moralilty and law. I think it's very important to keep the two apart.

In most countries, discrimination is perfectly legal. Indeed, not discriminating can (in many cases) land you in jail. So if you being told to do domething that's against the law then you probably shouldn't do it.

As far as morality goes, you have two basic choices. The first is to join a religion. Religions take great pride in telling their members how to live their lives. And if a god says something is ok then who are we to argue?

The second method is considerably less expensive but more difficult. Examine the problem and decide for youself what is right and what is wrong. And be prepared to stand up for your convictions.

Weedpacket

....or hair colour....

And conversely, perhaps you're a xenophile, and you like exotic partners ("What do you think of New Zealand women? Frumpy, with big diffs?").

Ah, well. I can make a case for saying there is only one race of human being, so what the hey.

dave420

I used to work at a crappy advertising agency. They called themselves a new media business, but they just sold pop-up ads, full-page flash ads and small promotional flash sites for various customers (Sky News, NatWest, all sorts of on-line magazines, etc.). They sucked. Never have I worked with a bunch of more unscrupulous people. They wrote massive libraries of javascript to bypass some of the in-built security restrictions in the major browsers, and seemed pleased that they'd circumvented something the designers put in on purpose to stop idiots like this doing it.

Anyway, during the interview they never mentioned their business was flash adverts. It was only when I started did they tell me. I hated the job from the get-go. I just sat at my desk, wasting time, coding all sorts of PHP. It was good, though. Getting through their firewall taught me about SSH tunneling, and it opened my eyes to the hideous world of marketing.

They really sucked. I ended up walking out of there. I figure it's not worth doing something unethical. Even if you can bring yourself to do it, it'll catch up with you later on. You can't hide from yourself.

If I worked at that dating site, I'd let them know, in no uncertain terms, what I thought of them and their organisation.