Post 4

Case Study on IBM

Edwin Black found “more than 20,000 pages of documentation from 50 archives, library manuscript collections, museum files, and other repositories” that when put all together pointed back to IBM’s involvement through their Hollerith machines. It is difficult to find substantial evidence of IBM’s involvement to help decide its culpability in the matter because the historical memory is slowly degrading, which is leading to “diminishing pressure for IBM to take any responsibility for its cooperation with Hitler’s regime.” Carol Makovich of IBM stated that most of IBM’s documents about this period or the operations of the Dehomag were destroyed or lost during the war. Black, however, found documents in 2012 that showed IBM’s New York office continued to direct and manage the assets of IBM’s German subsidiary after Watson returned the honorary medal awarded by Hitler. Although Black accuses IBM of giving the Nazis the technology to do the evil that they did, we cannot be certain that the degree of the company’s culpability is correct. Who knows if the Germans would have figured out another way to accomplish their terrible plans. He is right in saying that it would have been better if IBM had not sold the Hollerith punch card system, but he cannot say that IBM “bears some unique or decisive responsibility for the evil that was done.”

According to Edwin Black in his book “IBM and the Holocaust”, he makes a case for “the utter amorality of the profit motive and its indifference to consequences.” He accuses IBM of refusing to turn down the opportunity to make a profit from trading with Nazi Germany – the company provided the technology that gave the Nazis the ability to commit terrible acts of mass genocide of the Jewish population in Germany. He contends that IBM is morally responsible for facilitating this. Unlike other companies, IBM stands out as “collaborating with Nazis in creative ways to help them design and execute the systematic destruction of the Jewish people.” They helped track people, trains, and logistics using the IBM Hollerith machine.

According to Carol Makovich of IBM, IBM and its employees “find the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime abhorrent and categorically condemn any actions which aided their unspeakable acts.” In her statement on Edwin Black’s book and the class-action lawsuit filed against the company, Makovich says that no new information has been discovered as what Black mentioned in his book are well-known facts that have been known for decades. IBM has not tried to hide the fact that the Nazis used Hollerith equipment supplied by IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. even returned a medal presented to him by the German government for his role in all of this. According to Makovich, all documentation that has survived from this time period are available to examine to help clear up any doubts of IBM’s involvement in all of this.

According to the Aristotelian ethical framework, the ethical culpability of IBM cannot be determined. Aristotelian’s emphasize the virtuous life – finding a balance between vice and excess – and educating others to strive for the same perfect state. In the case of IBM and the Holocaust, the employees were doing their jobs. They were not necessarily seeking to harm Jews; however, they should have thought more about their involvement. Aristotelian’s would have encouraged IBM employees to look at the bigger picture and consider how their work was helping to facilitate the mass genocide of Jews living in Nazi Germany at the time.

Analysis of Muslim Registry Controversy

President Trump’s campaign was full of empty promises, but some were alarming enough to make us wonder what the impacts would be should he follow through on his word. Of concern for our current discussion is that of a Muslim Registry, where he pledged to create a database of Muslims in the United States. However, this undertaking requires much more than just the waving of hands… personal data is governed and controlled by powerful tech companies, the majority of which are in high opposition to such registries. Silicon Valley is in large agreement that if it is to share user data with the government, it would only be for use in criminal investigations and not as a means of documenting an entire group of people.

However, while tech companies do have control over a majority of sensitive data, there are certainly still a myriad of data brokerage companies that exist, and have weak laws governing their actions. For example, ExactData.com is a company whose sole role is to harvest and sell data to marketers (or bad actors) for specific demographics of people. This is the whole business of “leads” and has been around for decades as a means of advertising and targeting potential customers. Under the “third-party doctrine,” established decades ago by the US Supreme Court, once data is legally collected about you for one purpose, it can be reused or resold by others for almost any other purpose. Government agencies can thus do an end run around laws designed to restrain them from collecting personal data about people by simply buying (or demanding) that data from companies that are subject to no such restraints.[1] And this is remarkably dangerous! According to a senior data industry source, “It is a reasonably open secret that US law enforcement and intelligence agencies procure data files from these kinds of companies to understand the American population.” Clearly, the feasibility of building a Muslim registry isn’t too far-fetched, even if the majority of tech companies don’t support it and won’t lend their own data.

Our argument against instating a Muslim registry by a private company will begin with a reflection of a similar registry that existed under President Bush after the attacks on 9/11. National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, was implemented and applied to non-citizen, non-resident visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria. It only survived for a year and 3 months, after active opposition. However, President Trump has already implemented a travel ban (during his first week in office!) and it was stricken down as unlawful. There are clearly elements of appropriating an entire race of people and labeling them as “dangerous” that is perverse and will not carry any different meaning should it be implemented by a private company instead of the government. Additionally, the process of collecting data on who identifies as Muslim is not only unconstitutional, but it is incredibly challenging. A 3rd party corporation would have to employ sketchy tactics in order to implement this data collection, and it would be riddled with inaccuracies and full of broken laws.

The final point against a private corporation implementing a Muslim registry returns to the tech giants of Silicon Valley. While these companies will certainly not be the ones providing information for a registry of this nature, they do still carry an immense amount of power, and as data privacy laws develop, these companies are key players. In the coming years, there will probably be dramatic changes to the precedents of handling personal data, and as such, many of the implementations of data brokers may become illegal. So even if a registry of this nature came to fruition, its likelihood of being destroyed would increase day after day.

Comparison Between Two Proposed Methods

Two proposed methods for solving unethical corporate behavior come from distinctly different philosophies. One is that free market forces will act against unethical corporations, such as boycotts or movements that affect a corporation’s bottom line. This solution is based in the fact that consumers will “vote with their wallets” for corporations that act ethically, and unethical corporations will be forced to change their ways in order to continue making a profit. Another proposed method is that corporations are forced to adhere to ethical standards through regulation and legislation by the government.

Both of these solutions come from the notion that corporations will always require some kind of concrete incentive in order to act ethically. They both stem from the view that corporations are dedicated to improving shareholder value first and foremost, and anything else is second priority, especially ethical behavior. However, the proposed methods have very different philosophies supporting them. The first is based in the philosophy that government intervention in business and commerce matters is unnecessary because the free market will regulate itself. If the consumers are unhappy about a certain corporation they will boycott their products and buy from a different corporation that does act ethically. The second is based in the philosophy that the free market requires regulation because corporations make it so that it is no longer free, and consumers simply don’t have the power to enforce ethical standards. Regulation by the government makes it so that the corporations must follow a set of ethical standards, with violators experiencing punishments such as fines, sanctions, or perhaps prison time for owners and executives. This is a different incentive but still a concrete and material one that, with proper enforcement, would shift corporate behavior towards a more ethical goal.

A good real-world comparison of these solutions in action is antitrust laws and the rise of corporate boycotts on social media. Industry monopolies represent a lack of fairness and competition, and are therefore unethical. Antitrust laws in the United States have existed since the 19th century, when they were used to break up the monopolies of industries such as oil and steel, and they are a great example of regulation to force corporations to behave ethically. These laws were once again used to break up the telecommunications monopoly in the mid 20th century and to force Microsoft to give up its monopoly over the PC industry, and now they are once again being brought up in regards to Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The free market solution is the only one that would work in this situation because a monopoly eliminates the free market, and consumers have no choice but to support the monopoly’s actions, whether ethical or not, especially in the case of companies as ubiquitous as Google or Facebook. The second example in this comparison is boycotts, which have been exacerbated by the instant nature of social media and the Internet. Nowadays, if a company acts unethically, the consumer has significantly more power than in the past to “vote with their wallet”: they can discuss it with their friends instantly, share it on social media, and write articles about it so that the message that “everyone should not purchase goods from this company because they act unethically” is spread far and wide almost instantly. Corporations now devote significant time and money into their appearance and portrayal online because they know how fast the wildfire of outrage can spread. This free market solution is often more effective in these scenarios than the regulatory one because it is difficult to set an ethical standard by which companies should abide and enforce that standard universally from a government standpoint. The consumers, however, exercise their freedom of speech and enforce the set of standards they believe is correct.

The proposal that is more favorable according to Aristotelian ethics is the free market solution, because it involves individuals acting ethically and using reason to uphold virtue, which is necessary to achieve true happiness. Each consumer is acting ethically because they are refusing to support unethical behavior. A government forcing corporations to act ethically, while still upholding virtue, is not as praiseworthy an approach as individuals acting virtuously, according to Aristotle. That being said, Aristotle would most likely argue that the actual solution in this situation is that the corporations themselves should realize that they are acting unethically and change their ways without any sort of incentive or outside force. Corporations are entities composed of individuals, and each of those individuals has an incentive to act ethically - true happiness and internal harmony. If these individuals continue to act unethically, especially if they know their actions are unethical, they will never be truly happy. After all, the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people, legally, and therefore they have the same ethical obligations that Aristotle places on individual persons. Corporations may see increasing earnings as the goal, but Aristotle would argue that they will never be truly happy if they don’t act virtuously, using their reason and knowledge to determine the “golden mean”.

In light of our analysis of the Muslim registry controversy, it should be obvious from our diction that we are quite opposed to the idea of such a database for several key reasons. Maintaining a registry of personal information of a certain class of people, whose selection is solely based on their religion, is unethical with regards to our ethical framework (and we are sure it is the same for most/all of the other frameworks as well!). For example, consider the spheres of “indignation” and “friendliness.” It appears that the Trump administration was exhibiting counter-indignant sentiments since it was willing to unconstitutionally (?) monitor an entire demographic of citizens with no empirical evidence but rather just a rash decision made by virtue of their religion. The Trump administration also had a deficiency of friendliness for taking such a hardline and insensitive stance. With a reputation for being the leader of the FREE world, America having a head of government so set on unethical surveillance is pretty ironic.

We do not think it really matters which entity is responsible for the Muslim registry since its purpose and content will always be questionable to us. However one looks at it, at the end of the day it will always be an unjustifiable means to an end that can be approached in other ways. As we mentioned earlier, we understand that the bottom-line reason why the government is interested in such a surveillance is to keep America safe first and foremost. But it is unfair why certain groups of people would be targeted just based on their demographic information. There are perhaps other factors to choose from instead like those who already have criminal records or those who are at considerable risk of doing criminal activity.

If anything, we feel that a government entity would be held to a higher standard of ethics than a corporation. That is because a government is generally regarded as a core facet of civilization along with things like language whereas corporations emerged from modern renditions of civilization and thus are not as essential/important. Effective/fair governments have the responsibility to keep their citizens safe and to make them feel at home, not to make them feel like they should be afraid to be deported any second because of their religion. Governments also have the obligation to make sure everyone (or at least as many people as possible) are treated fairly and held to the same collection of laws whereas corporations are just for-profit entities that affect more limited numbers of people. For example, the U.S. government has to govern all 300+ million people within its borders and make sure they are safe whereas a company like Netflix just has to provide a software as a service for a fraction of that many Americans; clearly, these are very different roles in society and it should be apparent that a government’s role is more “serious.”

Interviews with Other Frameworks (Interviewed with representatives from Deontological and Utilitarian frameworks.)

From the Aristotelian viewpoint, our framework would not support the creation of a Muslim registry. Our entire framework is build on the ideas of virtuous actions and only performing an action if it represents a well-developed ethical virtue. Constantly monitoring and invading only Muslims’ privacy is not a virtuous action. It is an extreme (safety in excess) situation where the government breaks many people’s personal privacy, and they do it in an unfair way by only targeting a specific group of people. If the government was monitoring every US citizen in this way, Aristotelian’s may be able to see this as slightly virtuous because the government is trying to protect and monitor every citizen. However, even then, it could also be seen as still breaking people’s personal privacy and being too extreme in trying to “protect” citizens. Aristotelian’s would only support a registry that finds the golden mean between being safe and not invading others privacy, and by not targeting a specific group, but registering every American citizen.

Before interviewing the Deontological group, we believe that since their framework is based off of whether an action is right or wrong, and does not think of the consequence of the action at all, they will also not support the creation of a Muslim registry. The Deontologists will not be concerned with the fact that with the creation of this registry, it may be less likely for terrorist attacks and US citizens are “safer”. They will only be concerned with the fact that only monitoring certain people and breaking people’s personal privacy is not a moral action. The government only targeting specific people based on their religion for the “safety” of others is not moral and should not be allowed.

The Utilitarian framework group believes that an action is ethical when it brings the most happiness to the greatest amount of people and for the longest amount of time. Because the creation of the Muslim registry could potentially help the government identify potential terrorist threats, they might consider the creation of the registry as ethical. However, the creation of this registry might not actually help in lowering crime and it makes thousands of Muslims living in the US much less happy. The negative influences created having a Muslim registry on all the Muslim citizens and residents definitely would outweigh any potential happiness created from stopping a terrorist attack. Since there is no evidence that having a Muslim registry would actually make any people’s lives happier, but it definitely would make many Muslims lives uncomfortable and worse, Utilitarians would also not support the creation of this registry.

After interviewing representatives from the Deontological and Utilitarian frameworks, the deontologists agreed that a muslim registry would generally go against their virtues. Registering people based on religion and creating this registry is an immoral action. Additionally, their viewpoint would believe that having such a wealth of data for the government to use on a certain group of people is not a good thing. Deontologists also would not support companies (like Facebook) from sharing personal information with governments to generate this registry. The Utilitarians again have a similar viewpoint to what we originally thought they would. Their viewpoint is slightly more complicated because it relies on how effective the Muslim registry would be and the number of people potentially saved from the stopping of terrorist attacks vs the number of Muslims negatively affected by the registry. If the registry is actually proven to stop numerous terrorist attacks and save thousands of people, then it would be considered the best option to Utilitarians. However, if this registry did not actually stop any attacks and instead just made the lives of Muslims in the US worse, then the system would not be deemed moral.

In general, our initial thoughts on the view points for deontologists and utilitarians were overall accurate. Deontologists look directly at the action and see that targeting specific individuals for a registry is invading personal privacy. Specifically having a private company supply the information to the government to monitor people of specific religion or background would be invading their personal privacy and trust. Utilitarians look simply at which action would benefit the most number of people and for the longest time so they clearly would support whichever action would benefit the most people (this would depend on the number of Muslims negatively effected and what potential positive effects the registry could have on stopping attacks).