Putting effort into ethics

A pithy way of saying that it's important to put effort into living an ethical life:

"When easy doesn’t bring ease

Ease is a simple concept in theory. For example, we might put beeswax on the tracks of a dresser drawer that’s sticking, so the drawer slides with greater ease. Things are more aligned, so they’re easier.

But in modern industry, easier usually means something more like, “less thought is required.” In MarketingSpeak that’s pronounced “convenient”. Ironically these easier choices often don’t bring ease. They bring misalignment with core values. They bring dis-ease."

— B. Lorraine Smith, "Putting ease into easy," email newsletter, June 21, 2024

False "ease" leading to "dis-ease": What feels easy in the short-term won't be in the long-term. Ease eats itself, inverts itself.

It's hard to persuade someone that hurting people is wrong. A different approach we can take is to examine why a system "rewards bad decisions and punishes good ones":

A reader from the future may have a better perspective than I do about this, but my best guess is that people today are inoculated against moral critiques of social and technological systems—i.e., anything that points out that something is bad because it hurts people. There’s nothing wrong with moral arguments, but we exist in a world where it’s impossible to live a regular life (within the world’s rich countries) without relying on the exploitation of countless people and finite environmental resources; any coherent pro-social moral stance is instantly compromised upon contact with this society.

* * *

I’ve struggled to write something that would persuade my colleagues and friends to ditch AI and affirm their avowed beliefs about climate change, the trustworthiness of megacorporations, and our right to live and work with dignity. I accept that I’m not up to that task. So I wrote this instead for anyone who someday wonders what the hell is wrong with us. I can’t ask that reader to forgive us, only to understand that we’re not bad people. We’re regular people living in a situation that rewards bad decisions and punishes good ones.

— Eamon Caddigan, "Hating AI in 2026," Potentially Useful: Writing boring posts is okay, May 27, 2026