There’s also the concept of Structural Violence, which describes actions taken by (or directly embedded into) the state which are knowingly harmful, but not perpetrated by a specific individual against another specific individual. The person who coined the term described it as “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.”
It seems to be the modern approach to basically everything.
Killing someone is bad. You can’t kill someone even if it makes money for you. But you can definitely deny them life-saving care that they’ve already paid for.
Employing someone without granting them the standard rights all employees are entitled to is bad. You can’t do it, even if it’s profitable. But if you employ them as a “gig work platform”, that’s not really employment.
Taking someone else’s work without paying for it and selling it as your own is bad. You can’t do it, even if it’s profitable. But if you mix it together with a billion other people’s work and use server farms to chop it up and recombine it, that’s fine.
It’s the same pattern over and over: powerful people want to do bad shit, and they can’t do it directly, so they find ways to break it down into a billion little steps that are each individually so innocuous that you can’t prohibit them.
There’s also the concept of Structural Violence, which describes actions taken by (or directly embedded into) the state which are knowingly harmful, but not perpetrated by a specific individual against another specific individual. The person who coined the term described it as “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.”
It seems to be the modern approach to basically everything.
Killing someone is bad. You can’t kill someone even if it makes money for you. But you can definitely deny them life-saving care that they’ve already paid for.
Employing someone without granting them the standard rights all employees are entitled to is bad. You can’t do it, even if it’s profitable. But if you employ them as a “gig work platform”, that’s not really employment.
Taking someone else’s work without paying for it and selling it as your own is bad. You can’t do it, even if it’s profitable. But if you mix it together with a billion other people’s work and use server farms to chop it up and recombine it, that’s fine.
It’s the same pattern over and over: powerful people want to do bad shit, and they can’t do it directly, so they find ways to break it down into a billion little steps that are each individually so innocuous that you can’t prohibit them.
It is a weaponization of ambiguity on where to draw the line; sailing the Ship of Theseus all the way from one end of morality to another