Pilate's Hand-Washing Routine

Consider some moral dilemmas--is a person excusable if they:

• order a homicidal hit and supply a soon-to-be-murderer with the weapon.
• out of neglect, leave a weapon where it is accessible to a young child who accidentally killed someone with it.

In neither case is the subject in question directly hurting anyone, though in both cases the subject was a necessary factor for the events to have occurred. The two scenarios serve as endpoints for what might be an infinite spectrum of scenarios: toward one end are events in which the subject facilitates, even anticipates the harm; toward the other end is an accident in which a similar consequence was completely unintended. When considering this spectrum, there are only a few possible stances to take:

• The entirety of the spectrum is inexcusable (the consequentialist)
• There is a point within the spectrum, on one side of which the subject is excusable (the virtue ethicist)
• The entirety of the spectrum is excusable (the deontologist)

The consequentialist will point out that the outcome is the primary interest in any case. However, it serves no purpose to place blame indiscriminately by citing that outcome, as the underlying "cause" of the problem is that the subject is human and may err (as in the second hypothetical posed above). In other words, the outcome was fixed by the time the subject was involved, and so the determining cause must necessarily reside within a prior influence. There is a paradox, which is that the inevitability of these subjects being implicated would find itself justifying the deontological opinion as easily, since the inability to effect a different outcome would indicate absence of a deontological moral action.

The virtue ethicist will recognize that the intent of a person is pertinent to placing blame, but since the spectrum is infinite, determining a discriminating point of reference arbitrarily will fail to justify two scenarios relative to each other--there may be two infinitely similar incidents where one is deemed as guilty, another as innocent, with the only justification being where the line is drawn. Virtue ethics suffers from black-and-white reasoning, where the primary concern is betrayed to be in splitting personas, to maintain constructs of good guys and bad guys. Virtue ethics is threatened by experiments which suggest circumstance to be the overwhelming determinant of outcome.

The deontologist will observe that the subject did not commit the act of killing in any case, and so their actions are excusable. This requires some assumption is made to distinguish one's actions from the effects of one's action, which suffers from the same infinite-spectrum dilemma as virtue ethics--on the one end is an event which is inseparably coupled to a cause, such as the effort to move one's own hand directly resulting in the translation of one's hand from one point to another; on the other end is the effectively immeasurable influence one contributes to real observed outcomes, a butterfly effect, the impact every car contributes in emissions toward global climate change.

These dilemmas extend to Computer Science, where software has the potential to cause a huge amount of irreparable harm to others, whether that be due to malice, jest or neglect. Software products are necessarily accompanied by Terms of Use, End-User License Agreements and Codes of Conduct with clauses to excuse the producer of the software from repercussions for illegal activities performed, the company "washing their hands" of the harm they may be enabling.

We observe incontestably negative consequences of software, with the full spectrum of its producers' orientations toward those problems, from naiveté to premeditation. We cope with the ethical dilemmas by framing the condition with narratives of good guys chasing bad guys--The Cuckoo's Egg concludes by scapegoating an employee--but this is less a sorry attempt to bandage a gaping wound than it is a maladaptive practice of scratching at the scabs that form around the edge. Those we convict as criminals are just a symptom of a deeper, systemic disease.

I will not propose a solution here, I resign myself to exposing the issue alone. The raising of awareness of an issue has value independent of the subsequent search for its resolution. It seems inappropriate to dissuade readers from contemplating the issue altogether by my compounding the matter with the challenging topic of determining its cure. Perhaps another day, or another post, but perhaps more impactfully from another commentator on this topic....