I believe that is the reason this is news, yes.

""" One of those employees, staff engineer Sophie Haskins, resigned Monday, stating in her resignation letter that she was leaving because the company did not cancel its contract with ICE and “shows no indication of canceling the contract,” which she wrote was “morally unacceptable.” """

Great. That's what should happen.

If all the employees with morals leave, GitHub will be left with no employees with morals. That is probably a worse situation.

Or some people don't feel that border control is incompatible with morality. Both opinions are valid.

I don't get the sense it's the abstract concept people are up in arms about, but the implementation.

The US has a long history of implementation pessimizing desired outcome at the Southern border. For example, the number of undocumented permanent residents in the US went up when border control was tightened in previous administrations. Under lax border control, people could border-hop for a day or a week, take care of some business (mostly quite legal with the one exception of the failure to go through the entire process of a temporary visa), and go back. But when inspection constraints were tightened and checkpoints and fences went up, lots of hoppers decided that if they had to choose, they'd rather be trapped in the US than in Mexico. The intended effect of lowering undocumented residency boosted the numbers on undocumented residency. Oops. :-p

This points to the heart of my internal debate on philosophical positioning: When is it the most moral option to not resign from companies that openly conflict with your moral compass but to fight from the inside and struggle day-by-day?

I haven't come to any definitive conclusion, but my basic thought is:

(A) If you and your allies have a decent opportunity to build a worthy competitor or work for one (ie: a similar company that aligns with your purpose), do it and shout about it from the rooftops.

(B) If you and your allies don't have enough resources to build something better, fight from the inside until you do.

Maybe the most moral thing to do would be, should you find yourself employed at an immoral company -- Fight to do everything in your power to change the company's course, while drawing your salary (and thus their resources), and not contributing towards the immoral actions at all? Basically you'd be forcing them to fire you at some point, but until then, you're fighting against it for as long as possible and thus hopefully maximizing the chance of changing course.

This might considerably lower the chance of you being employed ever again.

That is, employed in larger companies.

Aren't those who stay by definition are not moral people ? (provided they see the behavior of Github as immoral)?

Depends on whether they believe they are in a position to make the company more moral by their presence, and whether their particular branch of philosophy says that matters.

Trying to understand the opinion being communicated here. People shouldn't protest things they disagree with? People have a duty to be loyal to their employer's every decision?

Yet, strangely, these people curiously will often protest loudly about things they personally disagree with, rather than taking their own advice of shutting up and leaving.

It's really about disagreeing with the views being espoused by the employees in question, not their methodology.

> Yet, strangely, these people curiously will often ...

I don't think you have any data to back that up. I could just as easily see a lot of these people deferring to the "wisdom" of management.

I think the number of people who have left jobs when confronted with an ethical problem from their employer is quite small.

I think people just don't often get the chance to think about what principle or virtue first impulse drives them to say one thing or another when an issue comes up. I think it's a strong and productive to prompt ourselves/others to put those into words...

I've done it, several times.

No, people should leave situations they're uncomfortable with. Vote with your feet.

Flight is an option.

Fight's the other one. It really depends on whether you have more power to enact change by taking blood out of the system or diverting where it's pumped.

Why should they give up and run away instead of staying and fighting? Why is the former better than the latter? Personally I prefer to tackle challenges head-on rather than giving up.

To be fair this is a natural philosophical position to take in a country founded after a bunch of people left some tea crates where they were on a ship and just moved to another empire's colony

Whoop-de-do. If you don't like the company, fight to change what you don't like.