I honestly don't know how to respond to this, it's too vague.

I can try to word it better?

You said when people look at moral situations, they use their own values to round their measurement. And I thought that was a good way to describe things.

Then for some reason you acted like "rounding" turns things into strawman-level black and white. The slightest blemish (not hiring a specific good person) qualifying as evil.

Let's say a scale of 0 to 10. If people disagree whether some issue is a 3 or 4, and a few people say 5, and that's 95% of responses, then that disagreement isn't a big deal. It doesn't matter that it's not well-defined, it's sufficiently-defined.

That would be rounding. Showing that the question is not nonsense.

If they disagree whether it's a 0 or a 10 that's a totally different thing that is not rounding.

Appreciate the explanation.

> Then for some reason you acted like "rounding" turns things into strawman-level black and white. The slightest blemish (not hiring a specific good person) qualifying as evil.

This was in direct response to the top-level comment making that very assertion (via a blog post). If I'm understanding you correctly, I think we're actually agreeing that it's absurd. The CEO of a "good" company indirectly, but unambiguously, called me a bad person for not leaving my job. I say, if it's so cut-and-dry, and I want to be a "good" person, why aren't they helping me get a better job? Of course, it's an absurd ask.

Somebody isn't only allowed to be "good" if they do every good thing possible to them. And I am sure said CEO does many acts others would consider "bad", such as eating industrial meat or flying, both of which participate in the generation of immeasurable harm.

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Also, with regard to your scale - you've given the question too much credit. The question doesn't ask "how much are you good or bad?", it asks and receives a binary answer. And the vast, vast majority of people can't be assigned one of those binary categories of "good" and "bad".

I'm saying that your argument is absurd, but the one in the blog post is not absurd. You made a strawman.

"A good person is obligated to quit a bad company." is a far more reasonable statement than "A good company is obligated to hire every good person."

> Also, with regard to your scale - you've given the question too much credit. The question doesn't ask "how much are you good or bad?", it asks and receives a binary answer. And the vast, vast majority of people can't be assigned one of those binary categories of "good" and "bad".

You can pick a threshold. Your strawman would categorize 99.9% of things as bad, which is obviously the wrong threshold, and very obviously not what the OP meant. The failure of that method doesn't make the entire idea of judging companies invalid.

I'm not giving it "too much credit" to take a sane and quite obvious interpretation.

Alright. I just don't agree with you then. "A good person is obligated to quit a bad company" is a bullshit statement, unless the bar for "bad company" is a lot higher than I see it. I already asserted at the very beginning of the comment chain, almost every company is bad. That went unchallenged, so if that's the context, almost every person is bad, no matter how much they do good in the world. That is absurd.

> unless the bar for "bad company" is a lot higher than I see it.

Yes, the bar is higher (higher means it's harder to qualify as bad, right?) when talking about needing to quit.

> I already asserted at the very beginning of the comment chain, almost every company is bad. That went unchallenged

Because you went on to say it didn't matter anyway, so I focused on the latter part of your post.

Though I'm confused. You showed an argument that sorting companies into good and bad results in absurdity, but it only results in absurdity when the bar is super low. Why is your conclusion that sorting is impossible, rather than "the bar is too low", if you were already seriously considering that the bar needs to be higher?

I don't think the bar should be higher for bad deeds! I prefer a lower bar. I see a lot of stuff happen in the world that I really don't want to happen (on topic: privacy invasions for profit), and it's not publicly called bad nearly enough.

I also thinks it's misleading and not very useful to call people good or bad, in general. I'm more comfortable with calling capitalist corporations "bad" as a blanket statements; resource-hoarding is their utmost priority, and I consider that an evil motivation.

My conclusion isn't that sorting is impossible, it's that people are too complex to be sorted into "good" and "bad", in general... and that it's shitty and incorrect to call ordinary people bad if they aren't willing to risk everything to work for a slightly less evil company in a world made of evil companies.

Well this just sounds like more reason to use a point scale rather than calling the entire idea a waste of time.

In particular 'slightly less evil' is not the goal.

> Well this just sounds like more reason to use a point scale rather than calling the entire idea a waste of time.

Again, I think we're kind of on the same page, but our solutions are different. The original question refused any kind of nuance, and we both seem to agree it's not a question that should ignore nuance. You choose to answer a binary question with a grading system, I choose to substitute a different question.

Well, I think the binary version still works, even if I see possible improvement. While you think the binary version doesn't work. So sort of the same page, sort of not. Shrug.