That aside, the whole business of Amazon is dependent on oil. Logistics, packaging, ...
Maybe it is wrong not to protest, but it just feels... off.
Nothing is large enough by itself to alleviate climate change. We can all cleverly rationalise why this or that action has little effect and watch the world burn in our smart inaction. Or we can do our bit where we have some influence.
AWS is really only good for projects where the importance of the compute is not quite enough to justify setting up your own infrastructure, but important enough to be willing to throw money at to make the location part of your system go away by throwing more OPS people at it.
Once I understood this contemporary activism made much more sense.
Microsoft is delighted to announce we are the digital transformation partner of #IPTC2020, the International Petroleum Technology conference, that kicks off tomorrow in Dahran until the 15th of January
https://twitter.com/Microsoft_Saudi/status/12162861906530508...
Oil companies don't need to worry, MS will be happy to provide equivalent services for similar rates.
Maybe, if you only measure gain/loss for society in terms of money.
But if you care about leaving a habitable planet for the next generation, having oil and gas companies become pariahs that are expensive, so that people switch to carbon-friendly alternatives, would be a net gain for society.
1. Consequentialism requires us to model reality in order to predict consequences. Thus two consequentialists with different models of reality might prescribe different actions even if they have the same goals. From the outside, it's impossible to understand their model of reality entirely, so you can't assume that they aren't consequentialists just because they have different prescriptions from you.
2. Virtue ethics isn't always an ethical belief system in itself. Virtue ethics can be a strategy of using social pressure to reach consequentialist goals. From the outside, you can't tell whether they're using virtue ethics as the basis for there beliefs, or merely as a strategy for implementing a consequentialist ethic.
Combining these two, it's almost always premature to assume that people are virtue ethicists just because they prescribe different actions from what you would prescribe, on what appears to be a virtue ethics.
In a more general sense, that feeling of smug superiority I feel when I think someone is just virtual signaling is a sign of bias in my own thinking. To quote Scott Alexander[1]:
> I will make a confession. Every time someone talks about the stupidity of creationists, moon-hoaxers, and homeopaths, I cringe.
> It’s not that moon-hoaxers, homeopaths et al aren’t dumb. They are. It’s not even that these people don’t do real harm. They do.
> What annoys me about the people who harp on moon-hoaxing and homeopathy – without any interest in the rest of medicine or space history – is that it seems like an attempt to Other irrationality.
> It’s saying “Look, over here! It’s irrational people, believing things that we can instantly dismiss as dumb. Things we feel no temptation, not one bit, to believe. It must be that they are defective and we are rational.”
> But to me, the rationality movement is about Self-ing irrationality.
> It is about realizing that you, yes you, might be wrong about the things that you’re most certain of, and nothing can save you except maybe extreme epistemic paranoia.
TL;DR: Don't dismiss people because they appear to be implementing a virtue ethic; they may actually be implementing a consequentialist ethic.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/
The point is that these companies (more specifically: their operations related to fossil fuel extraction) are already, intrinsically, a net loss to society.
As such should they be shut down. It doesn't matter whose cloud their operations are running on.
More than "implementing a consequentialist ethic" that sounds as a cynic "the ends justify the means".
The only reason people view that phrase as cynical is that it is often used in a context where the complete ends aren't being considered.
This is what I dislike about activists. The whole "any action is better than in action" attitude. Actions are only good if the positive value they produce outweighs the damage they cause.
For example, if we were to shut down all of industry everywhere, we might reduce our fossil fuel usage to a minimum, but it will not help the millions of people who would die in the aftermath of such an action.
In this instance, insisting that Amazon kicks oil and gas companies off of its cloud services is an empty gesture. There are plenty of alternative services (Google and Microsoft come to mind and they are not the only ones) the infrastructure re-build cost will be absorbed into the pricing model and in the end nothing will be gained and you will pay for the change with your heating and gas bills. But hey, at least you can wear the "I did something" t-shirt or whatever
When I hear "consequentialism", I think in discarding absolutes and favouring frank discusion about practical measures. So exactly the opposite.
This is an example of exactly what I mean when I say "the complete ends aren't being considered". Perhaps your ends are "I want everyone to be fed" but if part of your means to get there is lying to everyone, then part of the ends that results from that is disfranchisement and a lack of informed participation by everyone (to use your terminology: a lack of truth).
> When I hear "consequentialism", I think in discarding absolutes and favouring frank discusion about practical measures. So exactly the opposite.
I think ultimately it's pretty hard to avoid absolutes. Consequentialism at some level requires you to have some target consequence. Look at your own post: you're concerned with "truth"--that's certainly an absolute value that you're targeting. I'm sure there are situations where you'd be okay with lying, but I'd venture that's only because there's some other absolute you value more. Consequentialism doesn't avoid absolutes, it just constrains the absolutes within a framework of result-oriented actions within reality, rather than actions for their own sake.
I'm concerned with hypocrisy and fanaticism. I've seen what a tyranny looks like: a mandatory mindset with strong social pressure to conform, free thinking as a public sin and people becoming hypocrites, the ones not dumb enough to be fanatics.
It sounds like you want to distance consequentialism from tyranny. As a consequentialist, I can see the draw, but I think that it's vital that we admit that consequentialism, improperly applied, can be used to justify tyranny. If we pretend that can't happen, then we won't "notice the skulls"[1]--that is, we won't notice when consequentialists are supporting tyranny in our midst, because we've been arguing all along that that can't happen. It's vital that we see where consequentialism can go wrong so that we can take steps to prevent it from going wrong.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-th...