The popularity of iOS around here, a consumer-centric platform blatantly hostile to tinkerers, makes clear we don't have such a consensus now if we ever did.
It's important to separate the ethical, technical, and business concerns and look at them one by one.
iOS offers me a few things. As a user, it offers me a smooth widget experience, no hard crashes, and a ginormous store full of toys and a few useful widgets. As an appliance, it is sterling. My music player works as reliably as my toaster. Exactly what I want, actually. I have no need to tinker with my appliances; they do exactly what I want, and I free my mental cycles to do things like work on my Master's without fiddling around with configuring my toaster. As a developer, it offers me a simple delivery platform, delivered to people with spare cash who have been trained to purchase software. It's a pretty sweet gig, in my opinion.
Apple really should open up the hood to tinkerers, in the ethical sense. It does us as a society no good to have a society of 'couch potatoes' and spectators. We need doers & thinkers, people who can get the job done and also reflect on their existence. I strongly believe that Apple should incorporate that awareness into product policies: there should be something like a 'enable tinkerer mode' in my iPod system settings. However, their corporate DNA goes against that, from the early 80s on. They really want to provide a unified and 'beautiful' experience for their customers. Tinkerers open up the hood and cause variety and divergence from the norm. (Think all the weird kludges in Windows because it has to support such a variety of hardware).
There is a big difference between the mentality of the creator and the consumer. This should not be news.
Hacker News, exists, in part, as a monument to creating.
At this point, I thought it was a forgone, forknown point, especially here, that being a creating being is better than a consuming being.