Working with ICE and Ethical Dilemmas

If you are in the right technological circles, you probably have heard about the current situation with the tech company Chef and their ICE contract. During the past few days I saw hints of what was brewing, but it was the CTO’s response that got my brain going on this one.

In his post, he claims both that “It’s been impossibly hard for me to decide how to approach talking directly about something as vile as kids being torn away from their parents” and that “Chef’s software deal with ICE is not structured or intended by any means to enable any of the abhorrent behavior this community has been concerned about”.

I personally, find this stance confusing. I am obviously not aware of the details of the contract, but with the knowledge I have about Chef’s technology, I find it hard to believe that it can be true. Does the contract automate and monitor the infrastructure that aids in operations that are not related to detaining and processing detainees?

Maybe the CTO believes that ICE is evil and this is the rationalization that he has created to be able to continue to work on a project that he finds immoral; or, he disapproves of some things, but does not necessarily think that ICE’s mission is evil; or he actually agrees with ICE’s mission and he is simply lying to try and stop the backlash.

Well, I don’t find this speculating that interesting, so lets say we take him at his word: He thinks ICE does VILE things, but he also believes that his work is not INTENDED to ENABLE those vile things.

I think this is the crux of the situation: How close is too close to evil?

Some people might argue that the answer is simple: Just don’t work with evil. I might argue that evil is not a binary, but a spectrum. Regardless, the equation is probably not that complicated: The more evil one thing is, the furthest away you should be from it.

The problem with that equation is that it does not ring true to me. Do we really need to stay away from evil? Should one never engage with “evil” ideas, people, organizations, etc?

Hopefully at this point you are realizing that I am trying to burn my own straw man. The question is not about general proximity to VILE/EVIL things, but about the proximity to ENABLING those things.

What is the answer? How close is too close? I believe that one needs to be a person of extreme moral fortitude when playing in some of this ethical muddy waters, because I do not believe the answers are easy.

Lets walk through an example. Lets say that we are prison guards, in a prison in which the conditions are bad enough that some of the inmates inevitably will die. Maybe we started before knowing that inmates where dying, but now that we know, what should we do? By helping keep the inmates in the jail, we are definitely aiding/enabling the death of some of them. In the realm of evil there might be muddy waters, but most of us can probably agree that most systems that are actively causing the death of others are not good ones. So, maybe, the answer is simple. We will quit our job. Well, maybe it is not that simple. We are not one of those guards that are here just for a job, we became prison guards because we believe that a majority of the inmates in this jail are causing great harm to society. So, maybe the question is: How many lives is the jail taking compared to the number of lives it is saving?
And just like that, we started doing the math on what a life is worth compared to others. We are just prison guards, and even though we know someone somewhere must be playing God, we are not doing that. So, we quit! But, if we quit, the positions will just be filled by others, the conditions will not change, and people will die anyways. So, am I doing a good thing?

I am sure I could continue down many rabbit holes in this example, but hopefully I made my point. It being that these ethical conundrums are not easily solved, because most of the times the situations do not fall in a place where it is painfully obvious what should be done.

So, should Chef be working with ICE? I really don’t know.

I have become too cynical. I do not watch the news because I do not believe I can trust anything it is reported without it being tainted. So, I am mostly unaware of the details of what is happening on the border with ICE, except for the headlines, and other things I have heard in passing. In short, I do not know enough.

As I say that, it almost feels like an excuse. The more pertinent question is, can anyone know enough? Maybe my toy example illustrated that systems and situations are too complex for us to KNOW.

Maybe, after all, the most sensible solutions is what Chef chose: “I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business.”.

Maybe we should all continue doing the things that seem innate to us, like building gas chambers in concentration camps, and hoping that at some point the moral dilemma becomes clear enough so those being asked to drop the poison pallets into a chamber full of people have the moral fortitude to say no.