I worked as a data scientist trying to figure out how to raise gas prices to the maximum price the market would bear (experimentation mainly). Began to feel really uncomfortable when I realized this wasn't improving society in any meaningful way so I noped out of there once I found a new job.
Higher gas prices == more efficient usage of gas. And more incentive to move away from gasoline. Isn't that good for the environment and for society in general?
High prices always disproportionally affect the lower classes which are also the most dependant on motor transport to get to their jobs (tend to live outside cities too). As such you're pricing a lot of people out of being afford to drive to work while giving them alternatives that are only affordable to the most wealthy (Teslas are still a luxury product only affordable to a low % of population).
In the short term expensive gas does hurt the lower classes. In the long term, the need for every household to own and maintain at least one automobile is a much bigger drag on the finances of the poor than the well-off.
If higher gas prices lead to more efficient vehicles, and a shift to less driving and personal car ownership, it's a bigger win financially for poorer households than some cheap gas in the here and now. I also acknowledge that it's easy for me to say this because higher gas prices don't affect me much personally - I might feel differently if they did.
I think we as an industry need to stop stretching for excuses for why greedy behavior might unintentionally do something good. It's not a worthwhile cause and it doesn't justify the behavior if the "good" is a theoretical and unintended side effect. The "good" being theorycrafted on the nature of this product is indeed both highly speculative, oversimplifying of the human cost of changes to this economic model, and is obviously not the purpose of the product. That "good" is contingent on and integrated with a number of factors too complicated to boil down to a single sentence: it's something that looks good when oversimplified and makes ourselves feel better if we try not to think too hard about it.
When we ask ourselves whether a product we work on is ethical or not, we have to account for the intent of the product, and not merely stretch to find theoretical ways to justify it to ourselves. We do need to think about unintended side effects - particularly when they could harm others - but we shouldn't be using our theoretical and simplified best-case scenario of unintended side effects as a way to justify the intention and practical use cases of the products we make.
We should ask ourselves: if the "good" of an unintended side effect could be cut out of a product and we'd still make it, is it actually the good of a product? Or is it an excuse we're making to ourselves to make us feel better?
Of course maybe if we can figure out how to raise & be ok with higher gas prices, maybe we can finally get out of the Middle East... Though I'm sure that's not quite what you were doing :)
