Mozilla Challenges Educators To Integrate Ethics Into STEM (fastcompany.com) 161
Today, Mozilla, along with Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, is launching a competition for professors and educators to effectively integrate ethics into computer science education at the undergraduate level. From a report: The context, called the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, will award up to $3.5 million over the next two years to proposals focused on how to make ethics relevant to young technologists. "You can't take an ethics course from 50 or even 25 years ago and drop it in the middle of a computer science program and expect it to grab people or be particularly applicable," Mitchell Baker, the founder and chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, said. "We are looking to encourage ways of teaching ethics that make sense in a computer science program, that make sense today, and that make sense in understanding questions of data."
Who's Ethics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's Ethics are we going to integrate into STEM?
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Hopefully not MBA ethics.
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Pretty much what I came here to post
When I completed my MBA all focus was on Milton Friedman, who claimed that the only social responsibility of corporations is to increase its profits, while staying within "the rules of the game" .
Of course we have all seen how this played out over the past few decades where wealthy businesses have bought politicians to change the rules of the game (in their favor), eliminated any actual enforcement of remaining rules (Friedman said rules should be followed ONLY if the cos
Re: Who's Ethics? (Score:2)
There's nothing wrong with that approach to corporate ethics, as long as corporations don't participate in defining or enforcing the rules of the game. If they are, then in effect there are no rules.
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Well, it's not literally "psychopathy" because corporations aren't real people; that's just a legal fiction. But let's run with that analogy for a moment. It's not a perfect analogy because psychopaths are not very punishment sensitive. Corporations will avoid punishments if they're sufficiently large, which they seldom are, and sufficiently certain, which they seldom are.
There are promising treatment programs for young psychopaths that are predicated on the unique characteristics of psychopaths; they are
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The teacher [nypost.com]'s, of course. And that of the teachers of teachers [biography.com].
Rule #1: it is unethical to vote for RethugliKKKunt$...
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Re:Who's Ethics? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mozilla Foundation raises money from donors who believe they are funding free software development. Then Mozilla spends that money instead on this ideological crusade, and other nonsense such as sponsoring a surfing contest [mozilla.org].
Is this money diversion and mission creep ethical?
My opinion:
1. Mozilla has way more money than they need for their core mission.
2. Mozilla should not be lecturing anyone on ethics.
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Considering that Mozilla has a long history of supporting social/community projects and was in fact built on the idea of being an active member of the open source community, it seems unlikely that they are duping investors.
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I haven't heard of this attempted inclusion before. While it's seems bizarre to add the arts to that grouping, I strongly believe that those fields should include some arts education. Art is basically a form of communication or expression and that's a skill many STEM focused people could use more of.
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Ethics are morals. The ONLY difference is that when people want to shame or punish your for not sharing their morals, they call them ethics instead.
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Ethics are morals.
Ethics are values set by a society or organization.
Morals are your own internal values.
You can be simultaneously ethical and immoral, or moral but unethical.
I have found that it is best to be flexible in both ethics and morality. Life is more fun that way.
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Ethics are morals.
Ethics are values set by a society or organization.
Morals are your own internal values.
That's the common bullshit. Look at what that really means, though. If YOUR values don't match up with society's, then it's nothing more than someone forcing their values on you, as society's values don't reflect your own. My statement above stands correct and true.
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If YOUR values don't match up with society's, then it's nothing more than someone forcing their values on you
Correct. That is exactly what it is.
My statement above stands correct and true.
Wrong. Ethics and morals are not the same. Morals means following your heart. Ethics means following the rules.
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Ethics implies that the rules were agreed on, either by society generally, or by some group you're a part of such as an industry, company, etc.
Following arbitrary or dictatorial rules are not a part of ethics, except when there is an ethical agreement to do so under certain conditions. For example, a lawyer might be ethically obligated to follow dictatorial rules during the process of challenging them, while a random person on the street might only be risking an imposed consequence, not any ethical failing.
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I strongly disagree from this: there's no "who" for ethics...
You realizes that you are doing exactly this, no?
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I strongly disagree from this: there's no "who" for ethics...
Of course there is. They're a human construct and open to human interpretation.
You realizes that you are doing exactly this, no?
No, I'm not. I'm pointing out the fact that when someone cries about ethics they're really crying about their own morals (or worse, just their own interests) and how someone did something that doesn't align with them. I'm not making a judgment on anyone's morals. I'm merely pointing out that "ethics" are nothing more than widely established (even if not actually widely accepted or held) morals. The term itself is nothing but
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It remains unethical to let a sucker keep his money.
Re: Who's Ethics? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Ethics" is just morality in a wig, dressed up for atheists who aren't honest enough and strong enough to embrace the nihilism that is the inescapable consequence of their faith.
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Riiiiight. You realize that anyone who uses this line of reasoning is saying the only thing that's keeping them from murdering, robbing and raping is a belief in invisible sky gods? And you think this speaks well of you?
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Even putting aside your childish disparagement of traditional conceptions of deity - you seem to have missed the point. Many things may prevent a person from murdering, robbing, & raping. Faith in a God or gods is one of them. Faith in a false god like "science(tm)" or "ethics". Social instincts, social conformity. Fear of retaliation or fear of police. Laziness.
My point is simple and humble. It makes no claims about sociology or mass behavior. It is simply that there is no morality, no right
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I've never been aware of any ethics in IT/Software develoment. I also know of no board of ethics which can pull a programmer's or administrator's license to operate.
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I've never been aware of any ethics in IT/Software develoment. I also know of no board of ethics which can pull a programmer's or administrator's license to operate.
If you know you don't have access to the file, don't try to access the file.
Follow the intent of security procedures, don't try to bypass them just because there wasn't an electric fence keeping you out.
When your employment relationship ends, cease all access to company resources. Turn over passwords/keys. Destroy backups after verifying they are not needed. This all applies to clients accounts, too, not just employment.
Don't include software you didn't write in your work product without permission. Even if
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Thank you for not being a grammar Nazi. :-)
There can be global rules for ethics, the question is, is mandating them ethical? :-D
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> Ethics is 100% relative, but it can be taught critically and in a scientific way.
Uh, Science is amoral by definition
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That depends on your morals, I see willful ignorance and blind faith as very amoral. Science opposes those, so to me, the pursuit of science is a moral endeavor.
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> willful ignorance and blind faith as very amoral. Science opposes those,
Science progresses one funeral at a time -- Max Planck
Re: Who's Ethics? (Score:3)
A foundation in ethics would necessarily include the critical study of a number of philosophical approaches to ethics (rights/duties, consequentialism, character-based ethics etc.) Although these approaches are fundamentally different, they each correspond in certain situations to common intuitive notions of right and wrong, and in other cases they may challenge our assumptions, which is actually a good thing if you don't enjoy being blindsided.
If you are looking for an oracle or a simple algorithm that giv
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That's getting a little bit ahead of things. Most courses in engineering ethics focus on understanding how engineering affects people and the world. Just thinking about the wider implications beyond "hay we can do this" is the point.
An oft cited example is leaded petrol. The goal was to reduce engine knocking, and it worked. But it had some really bad consequences too. Consequences that were hard to predict at the time, and which some argue were worth accepting for the benefits we got in return. The goal of
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You are talking about ethics like someone who's never actually studied it. Ethics is a subject is hard. You study it by examining dilemmas, many of which have no known unambiguously good solution.
The point isn't necessarily to shape students' beliefs, it is to sharpen their thinking. In a way it's a lot like math: if you believe certain things, then you must logically believe other things. This is actually about curtailing the effects of emotion on decision-making.
Feelings as a guide to behavior work f
Re:Who's Ethics? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure a lot of people won't accept my ethical values. They might agree with some, and not others. I can assure you that my ethics and morals are relatively tame, but none the less, I'm pretty sure many wouldn't want me teaching my version of ethics to young adults.
It is much easier to scream about Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Bigotry than it is to form a coherent code of ethics that has deliberative rational thought behind it (even if you disagree with my rationale).
The issue remains whose ethics are we talking about? I'm sure that plenty of people thought Nazism was ethical, or thinking socialism is ethical today. I happen to despise leftist ethics, because they are almost universally opposed to individual liberty in some degree. Lefitsts think they are ethical as they groupthink their way towards tyranny.
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It's very rare that a single person builds any kind of complex system and then promotes/sells it on their own. More likely there will be a team of people with somewhat diverse views on ethics, so at least there might be a debate.
It's much easier to scream about Leftists and groupthink, but in reality most things are a group effort and ethics are a matter for discussion.
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Nobody starts with Socrates, everybody starts with Plato who uses a character named Socrates.
Socrates himself only got as far as knowing he didn't have any wisdom, and the discovery that neither did anybody else and most of them didn't even know it. Pretty much everything else that he is known to have said were various versions of "You're wrong!" If he bothered to elaborate, it was probably to point out that everybody else was wrong, too.
It is important, but doesn't really contribute much to ethics. Informa
Engineering ethics vs Attorney ethics (Score:3)
Engineering ethics demands that you sacrifice career, family, and livelihood to turn "whistleblower" if management ignores your pleas that their proposed cost-saving measure will threaten public safety and despoil the environment.
Attorney ethics demands that you refrain from stealing from your clients.
Ethics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like what happened to Brendan Eich?
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Re:Ethics? (Score:5, Insightful)
no, the guy who lost his job because he had a different opinion.
It didn't have anything to do with his job, he just happened to have other likes and dislikes when he got home.
and to top that, we watch all day long those SJW idiots on twitter explicitly saying "opinions my own, not my employer's",
guess what, if your opinion doesn't fit their mentality, your opinion gets dragged into your work environment, either you like it or not.
The best part about this shit show is that mozzarella won't exist in a few years.
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FTBSFY
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people don't want to associate with arseholes
Apparently the gays do.
Re: Ethics? (Score:1)
Many, many people do not want to associate with the kind of degenerates who ganged up in a lynch mob against Mr Eich.
The pendulum is swinging. The assholes behind the recent witch hunts and purges may soon find themselves witch hunted and purged.
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Brendan supported the wrong ethics.
Re:Ethics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Brendan supported the wrong ethics.
Well not if you actually believe in evolution instead of just hating people that don't. Which is the problem with so much of the SJW agenda, it isn't positive or reasoned it's just people that have a desperate need to give the middle finger to anyone that resembles their parents.
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So much willful, bigoted dumbfuckery.
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So much willful, bigoted dumbfuckery.
Thanks, my point was that SJWs didn't have a rational or reasoned approach to ethics, and you come here and show you don't have anything beyond name calling.
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Problem with your storyline: I trash SJW's all the time. If only you could take your self and all your bigoted dumbfuck friends and move out to an island with SJW's, so you can righteously throw your own excrement at each other while engaging in delusions of moral superiority.
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Problem with your storyline: I trash SJW's all the time. If only you could take your self and all your bigoted dumbfuck friends and move out to an island with SJW's, so you can righteously throw your own excrement at each other while engaging in delusions of moral superiority.
Unh hunh. You're pretty big on projection aren't you ?
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Yes, getting rid of a bigoted POS was upholding ethics. Any more questions?
3.5M for something that already exists? (Score:2, Funny)
I did this during my CS undergrad back in 2006. It was called "Legal, Ethical and Social Issues in computing". I thought it was interesting and definitely more useful to my career than "algorithms and data structures" ever was.
Everything Relative (Score:5, Insightful)
The depressing thing about our current times, is that people are speaking past each other so much there's little that's agreed on.
Teaching (or at least reminding people of) ethics in technology is a noble goal... One of my favorite courses as an undergrad (despite the textbook [amazon.com] itself being rather poorly written) was an Ethics in Computing course, and I'm sure there's a lot more to be said now.
"All science, no philosophy [imdb.com]" leads to bad outcomes, I think we can agree. The problem is that I don't know that I trust any of Silicon Valley to do so in any sort of neutral manner.... Mozilla's Ethics are that Brendan Eich should have been fired. Can't say I agree with that.
Ethics isn't a fad (Score:1)
In my program there were to ethics classes. One the typical intro, and the other applied ethics in technology focusing on lawful compliance. Once my initial degrees were completed I moved on to studying ethics in more depth.
My problem with this effort is an assumption that ethics from 25 years ago does not make sense. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is still the most read ethical treatise and one of the oldest. Ethics does not change based on buzzwords, quarterly reports, or technologies. Ethics has nothing
Rule 1: Don't Fire People for Political Donations (Score:2)
Rule 2: Don't participate in mass censoring/tracking projects in totalitarian regimes.
Rule 3: Don't infringe on people's religious freedoms in your home country while doing business with oppressive religious states in the Middle East.
Rule 4: Don't replace your local workers with visa workers.
There's more, of course, but that seems like a good starting set.
Rule 1: If you absolutely have to be a bigoted... (Score:1)
...POS, keep it to yourself, Eich.
Future U.S. History Students: 'It's Pretty Embarrassing How Long You Guys Took To Legalize Gay Marriage' [theonion.com]
Honesty, Openess, and Truthfulness (Score:1)
Very simple rules on how to be ethical is to be
1) open (transparency)
2) honest (don't tell lies)
3) truthful ( actively making known all the full truth of a matter).
Following these simple and objective rules, you inform users of your software whether you plan on (or are reserving the potentiality of) exploiting them now and/or in the future. So for example, you can write exploitative software that mines users' data and then sell that data to the highest bidder, just so long as you inform your users about it
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I can't play poker under those rules.
Life is more poker than chess. Accept it.
If software is free, you are not the customer, you are the product. Everybody knows that.
If you expect the things you ask for, you are a sucker.
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I guess I'm a product of GCC then
he meant free as gratis not libre
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As far as life is concerned, everyone who plays knows up front that deception, manipulation, lying, and opaqueness are apart of the game.
Ethics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, you know, all those ethics courses managers take (the people who make all the decisions) are working out great!
That's one of the silliest things of today. Sexual harassment surveys. Domestic abuse billboards and NFL commercials. "Code of conduct" seminars.
It's GREAT to want to make the world a better place. However, what we're lacking is ANY SCIENTIFIC PROOF whatsoever that doing these things actually solves the problem they're trying to solve.
In fact, there WAS a study that showed the opposite. That women who were told of all the "unconscious" ways that men oppress women, the women were less likely to engage and integrate into the workplace because they were "primed" and constantly looking for harassment and were more likely to assume it was harassment even when it wasn't. Likewise, the men in the study after going to these seminars? Simply __stopped interacting with women__. [1]
Which is GREAT way to get women to powerful positions in STEM. Take all the guys currently in power, and make sure they never interact and see hardworking, intelligent women and give them raises.
You see how "feeling like your helping" doesn't actually equate to "helping"? Kind of like how like 90% of all the funds for Bono's 1985 Live Aid charity concert to help stop Ethopia famine, ended up FUNDING AN WARLORD'S ARMY.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
[2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Li... [wikiwand.com]
If "ethics" courses worked, then why the hell is basically every major business scandal the result of managers... who already take ethics courses? #VWDidNothingWrong
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I agree with most of what you say, but you can demand scientific evidence that ethics questions cause people to think about ethics and change their behaviour, as opposed to ethics classes causing people being better able to justify the behaviour they would have done anyway.
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On a related note, Aristotle held that the study of ethics was not useful for those who were not already habituated to behaving ethically.
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If "ethics" courses worked, then why the hell is basically every major business scandal the result of managers... who already take ethics courses? #VWDidNothingWrong
Because we want things like money, power, sex and so on. You're stupid if you think an ethics course on corruption will end all corruption, it'll still happen if the benefits exceed the risk. Conversely when something is seen as having risk but no gain it's easy to avoid it, particularly if somebody is looking to set an example and show their zero tolerance policy. The course itself is mostly just awareness, this is the different forms and shapes it can take, this is our policy, these kinds of behaviors are
People keep challenging Mozilla (Score:2)
to put a web browser in their software, but we're still waiting all these years later.
You can talk all you want, but either someone understands ethics and ethical behavior, or they don't. If they do, you're wasting your breath. If they respond with some claptrap about how stealing music, videos, or software without compensating the owner/producer for their work is fine, or come up with excuse after excuse why ethics work on a sliding scale, you're wasting your breath.
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to put a web browser in their software, but we're still waiting all these years later.
You can talk all you want, but either someone understands ethics and ethical behavior, or they don't. If they do, you're wasting your breath. If they respond with some claptrap about how stealing music, videos, or software without compensating the owner/producer for their work is fine, or come up with excuse after excuse why ethics work on a sliding scale, you're wasting your breath.
This should be at +5 insightful.
Ethics. How on earth can you teach ethics to adults?How on earth can people wish to have ethics when it is obvious that at the highest positions, sociopathy is apparently ethics?
But somehow, we are going to take one niche of STEM, and demand that they must act ethically.
I see. This seems like a training program to firmly seat the sociopaths that control these "ethical programmers".
In the big picture, ethics is simple. The golden rule. Or even Bill and Ted's "Be exce
Actual Link? (Score:3)
Don't copy that floppy! (Score:1)
You wouldn't steal a car would you?
Don't they put ethics in the dumbed down AP courses in the code camps for young un's?
Politics for tech workers (Score:2)
The time it takes US brand to sit down with its workers and work out how to start work again will allow global competitors to have the same project ready on time.
The next project is given to any english speaking global company that can do the same work for the same price on time.
Who is going to risk US workers if they stop work to reques
Race to the bottom! (Score:2)
Shut up and perform, monkey.
US workers do not have the best reputation already; more of a last resort when higher level of skills are required. Higher ethics also helps but that is fading with time as well... Too high and you become too difficult too low and they can't afford to trust you. Actually, a level of ethics does exist which helps the employers... they only want ethics that HELPS THEM and none of the others. A perfect balance of hypocrisy. (So then don't really teach critical thinking! only problem
Linked article has nothing about the competition (Score:2)
Here's a link with some actual info: https://foundation.mozilla.org... [mozilla.org]
Old joke (Score:2)
Back in Soviet times, every curriculum included a lot of Marxism/Leninism, leading to this joke:
Him: Ok, you've been trying to learn cooking for about a year now, how far did you get with your class?
Her: Well, about to the fifth Party Convention.
In other words, stop stuffing degrees with bullshit.
Mozilla for Ethics? Right.... (Score:2)
Whose ethics ? (Score:2)
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Science and technology do not have ethical value per se
IMHO, the scientific method does have several elements which can be regarded as ethics:
Of course, real science doesn't often work in this ideal way. And there's no ethics on how the results of science can be used. But these ideas go a long way when considering the bigger picture -- for example, science progresses better by international collaboration than
Mozilla Management needs to change! (Score:2)
SJW have taken over. They put more effort into this crap than keeping users happy and then they'll do stuff like TV show promo add-ons we didn't ask for and removing old features instead of enhancing them because $$ is being wasted on this or further depreciating their browser. It's like the tech department just tries to stay out of their way and has gone a bit too far the other way. Sure Rust sounds good... but it was going extreme to attempt to re-invent the C programming language; that sounds like mana
"Ethics" means "Bolshevism" (Score:1)
i.e. being gay is 'normal', (sure, we believe you, that's why you have to put people in PRISON or sack them from their jobs, if they dare to talk about what gays actually DO to each other - which is, of course, disgusting to just about everybody...)
i.e. mass immigration is wonderful, and somehow white people, and ONLY white people, are expected to just give up our countries to millions of invaders who, for some strange reason, can't stand living around their OWN kind, and can't "get a better life" in their
Google (Score:1)
STEEM? (Score:2)
What about business? (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
People are dying right now in the worst storm since Andrew and Camille and you are posting about some STEM nonsense.
So?
Talking about nerd stuff on a nerd board doesn't in any way prevent talking, or doing something, about such a storm and the people in harm's way.
Even on the same site.
Meanwhile, just because, for the people in the storm, everything else stops while they work on staying alive, doesn't mean that everything stops for everybody else. Quite the contrary: If we let it make everything else stop
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May the Lord have mercy on your soul
If one wants freedom one must ignore the petty totalitarians who would manipulate via social pressure.
My soul and The Lord's mercy on it are an issue between the two of us. Third parties need not bother meddling.
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SO why are you hanging out here instead of rushing to volunteer to help those in need? Seems your violating your ethics