Some meta-notes on ethics.

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+# Undirected Musings about Ethics
+
+## Further reading
+
+* [The Fantasy and Abuse of the Manipulable User](http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-fantasy-and-abuse-of-the-manipulable-user)
+* [Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere](https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2005/11/ethics-for-programmers-primum-non.html)
+* [The Internet with a Human Face](http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm)
+* [Ethics vs Morals](http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals)
+* [Yes means Yes](http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com)
+
+## Why bother?
+
+Everyone _thinks_ they're doing good most of the time. Ethical codes help
+guide that sense into alignment with the surrounding social and political
+context: doing good for whom, why, and with what kinds of caveats.
+
+## It's not about engineering, it's about people
+
+An ethical code for software development should not waste too much space
+talking about _engineering practices_. Certainly there is value in getting
+more developers and systems people to follow good engineering practice, but
+an ethical code should focus on the interaction between trustworthiness, the
+greater good, the personal good of _all_ the participants in the system, and
+software itself.
+
+(This comes up in Ethics for Programmers, above.)
+
+It's no good to build a wonderfully-engineered system that is cheap to run
+and easy to integrate with if it systematically disenfranchises and abuses
+its users for the benefit of its owners, and that's a problem we actually
+have via Facebook, Github, Twitter, and numerous others.
+
+## Ethical codes are fundamentally extrinsic
+
+Ethical codes exist so that others can judge our behaviour, not so that we
+can judge our own behaviour.
+
+## Ethical codes must be constraining
+
+Ethical codes do not exist in a vacuum. A code that authorizes its adherents
+to behave in any way they see fit, subject only to their own judgement, is no
+ethical code at all. We already have that and the results have not been great.
+
+_This is important_ - a meaningful ethical code for software would probably
+cripple most software business models. An ethical code that prioritizes
+active consent, for example, completely cripples advertising and analytics,
+and puts a big roadblock in buyouts like Instagram's. This may well be good
+for society.
+
+## Integrity is not about contracts or legislation
+
+Ethics, personal integrity, and group integrity are tangled together, but
+modern Western conceptions of group integrity tend to revolve around "does
+this group break the law or engender lawsuits," not "does this group act in
+the best interests of people outside of it."
+
+## Assumptions
+
+I've embedded some of my personal morality into the "ethics" articles in this
+section, in the absence of a published moral code. Those, obviously, aren't
+absolute, but you can reason about their validity if you assume that I
+believe the "end user's" privacy and active consent take priority over the
+technical cleverness or business value of a software system.
+
+### Consent and social software
+
+This has some complicated downstream effects: "active consent" means
+something you can't handwave away by putting implied consent (for example, to
+future changes) in an EULA or privacy statement. I haven't written much that
+calls out this pattern because it's _pervasive_.
+
+The "end user is the real product" business model most social networks
+operate on is fundamentally unethical under this code. It will always be more
+valuable to the "real customers" (advertisers, analytics platforms, law
+enforcement, and intelligence agencies) for users to be opted into new
+measurements by default, _assuming_ consent rather than obtaining it.