This wasn't a bad list. However, one factor I'd consider is the individual role's role and options.<p>For instance, I've read (I think it was in "Fast food nation") that factory farms in the US are often staffed by people who are not legally permitted to work or reside in the US and who are at constant risk. They generally don't have much education or options, and have no recourse if they are mistreated on the job or denied pay. I'd also be disinclined to hold a burger flipper at macky d's responsible for, well, macky d's.<p>A patent troll, on the other hand, is a well educated person, almost certainly a US citizen or someone with legal rights and options, who had every opportunity to choose a different path in life, and indeed still does.<p>By the way, there's this job where you collect vast amounts of personal information about people, who may be unaware or only semi-aware of what is being collected, and then using sophisticated machine learning to get them to click on ads... where does that fall in the spectrum of harmful jobs?
Christ. Has it ever occurred to these hipsters that factory farming feeds people? It's simple science that conventional farming is the only way to feed 7+ billion (soon to be 9+ billion) people. And referring to slaughtered chickens as "contributed deaths"... This makes me sad because I once had a little faith in this project.
Obviously any such list will be colored by the ethical system of the author.<p>Many people see zero harm in slaughtering animals for food. A large fraction of those also see a net positive in causing pain to those animals if it reduces costs.<p>Some libertarians would see little to no harm done by those marketing harmful products, and instead ascribe the moral weight of the harm to the consumers.<p>I'd be interested in seeing any empirical data on the weapons research angle. My understanding is that wars have been approximately equally deadly to the participants for much of recorded history. With the exception of weapons that are a risk for near-extinction level events, my intuition is that opposing sides in a war kill each other, regardless of how they are armed.
I was really hoping this would be something about jobs that are occupationally-hazardous, rather than an opinion piece judging various careers based on subjective notions of "good" and "bad" without any real qualification. Not that the points are <i>wrong</i>, but the authors could have delved further into <i>why</i> those careers are immoral ones to have.<p>Also.<p>> [raising animals for food] involves killing, which is both painful and perhaps immoral in itself.<p>Not if done properly. There are numerous ways to kill an animal painlessly and quickly; the most high-tech I've personally seen is the use of a high-voltage electric current through the cranium of an animal (usually when working with cows), which pretty much immediately shuts down the brain and any consciousness the animal might have. Sedation/anaesthesia also helps significantly. Smaller livestock can be decapitated (which, while likely not painless per se, is quick if done properly) or a probe can be jammed into the cranium to "stir" the brain and quickly shut it down (this is something you may have very well experienced firsthand in your run-of-the-mill frog dissection from grade school).<p>I personally disagree with the immorality (humans are naturally predators; I don't judge my dog for eating meat, nor do I judge some guy walking down the street with a bucket of fried chicken), but I realize that not everyone feels the same, and I do agree with the immorality of <i>factory</i> farming.
This comments section reads like a bad joke. How many times do Rob and Ben have to cite the overwhelming empirical evidence that 1) factory farming really does harm animals (how does <i>anyone</i> doubt this?), and 2) factory farming is not preventing anyone from starving to death, before someone admits they were wrong?
Factory farming considered worse than weapons research? Unless it refers to a specific kind of farming of which I'm not aware, I think the author led their own views cloud their judgement.