> What? It's certainly not the business role to make any moral decisions
You forget that businesses don't make decisions at all. A business is not a person, it has no capability to make decisions. The employees that work for the company make the decisions, and they certainly have an obligation to behave ethically.
> Companies are not supposed to be a way by which you enforce your moral beliefs.
Says who? I don't know about your ethical system, but mine certainly doesn't demand that I confine ethics to one sphere and never let it touch the others. Indeed, such an ethical system sounds completely broken to me.
> How do they have the balls to do this kind of shit? Makes me want to vomit.
The larger the organization you join, the more divorced you are between decisions as a person and decisions as the organization. Sure, corporations may effectively be citizens, but they sure don't come with the ethical constraints and responsibilities that individuals do.
Not all ethical decisions are directly beneficial for the individual, but multiply that times hundreds of thousands of people? The good decisions get lost somewhere between the PR department and the accounting department.
> I completely agree that it’s a moral imperative to pay your bills on time and in full; what I’m saying here is that I’m not sure that moral imperatives are even the right framework for looking at these interactions between large companies (eg people have morality and ethics, companies have regulations and lawsuits).
Corporations are people, my friend. Any immorality committed by them is due to the immorality of their owners and executives.
It's easily possible to be an ethical businessperson; one just has to want to be ethical.
> I don’t really find the business, the profits or investment in the industry unethical
How can you not find the business unethical when they actively lobbied against actions to clean up their fucking mess, knowingly that they were creating a global crisis while doing it?
I understand you are looking for profits and you can be egotistical about that but not seeing the whole industry as unethical in their chase of said profits is actively trying to be blissfully ignorant.
>That strikes me as sociopathy, not actual kindness. Or at the very least, such an education in bullshit that they literally can no longer tell right from wrong.
No, it's more subtle than that.
Let's go back to my example of what makes business ethics so difficult. You have two groups with mutually opposing interests; your shareholders and your customers/suppliers. You have some responsibility to both groups, right? If you just gut feel it, well, I mean, that's one way to go about it, sure, and if you are far enough from the line, that's okay. But if you are pushing the line, as pg advocates? Gut feeling it is probably a bad idea.
For example, more than once, I've almost gone out of business. Many years ago I hit serious financial issues. I told all my VPS customers, and went through a lot of effort to find my co-lo customers a new home.
This was absolutely the right thing to do for my customers, but it also destroyed the company, when I could have made it
(I ended up re-launching the company very shortly thereafter, using money from my contracting gigs. In fact, I think I had a few customers stick with me the whole time.)
Now, if I had shareholders at the time, I mean, who were not me? From the perspective of the shareholders, I was not acting in their interest. I should have concealed the possibly impending shutdown, and just worked hard to prevent the impending shutdown from occurring. I am pretty sure that if there was money on the line and there were owners who weren't me, I would have gotten sued for acting in what I think was the most ethical manner.
Do you see what I'm getting at? If we remove the ridiculous cases of stuffing cash into your underpants and running, a reasonable person can argue both sides of most business ethics questions. Your gut can argue both sides, too.
> What if you were a couple weeks away from laying everyone off and a shady partner sidled up to you and suggested such a move. I believe it would be a moral crisis for any entrepreneur: shaft your customers or shaft your business, its investors and its employees.
That is the difference between ethical and unethical operators
> People really shouldn't orient their moral systems around money.
Neither do corporations, but whenever you hear anyone say "corporations shouldn't base their moral systems around money", then it's all about "free market", "profit" and "shareholder values".
I'm not saying I'd do the same in this case, but it's a bit of a stretch to assume people-people morals apply to people-corporate situations.
>>At the end of the day, if a business succeeds, then it is benefitting someone somewhere, regardless of my personal opinions. I will always say no if I say something I cannot stomach, but I speak out knowing that my role in the company is expendable, and I am owed nothing beyond the paycheck I receive for my contributions.
I don’t know how to say this un-offensively, so I’ll just say I think this is a morally bankrupt position that can be used to justify all kinds of fraud and crime because there was at least one benefactor. I think to make a utilitarian justification you need to take into account the negative impact on others too.
I don’t think you are morally bankrupt though, it sounds like you have another framework for determining what you personally will work on.
>That said companies care a lot about the legality of things and not necessarily the morality.
I worked for a fortune 100 company. We are humans, and our customers are humans. We absolutely have morals - at an individual level, and those morals influence how we work
> It would seem like it would be better for business to just not let people join the organization if they're relatively likely to one day go on a moral crusade
Oh man, do I hope my entrenched competitors do this. Give me your crazy ones.
> It's morally wrong and I just don't understand how people can defend this in the comments over at Linkedin. Why the fuck is the free market being used as a blanket argument against morals and ethics?
I bet it's because a lot of people over there would do the same given the chance
On what planet are "business decisions" not bound to moral judgements? That's one of the craziest things I've ever heard.
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