> I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case. Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism.
Please, point out where I did any of that sort.
And I asked for an example of a system that is more ethical, and got nothing but dodging and bitching. I don't think you have any ground to stand on to demand examples (certainly from me, who if you care to read again I'm not disputing your position that business can't be ethical, so it makes zero sense to ask me for an example). It seems unreasonable to expect of others what you aren't willing to give yourself. Dare I say that's ... unethical?
If you want to complain about the real world, then offer solutions that work in the real world. We can then consider and debate them and maybe get somewhere. If you just want to make philosophical contemplations, I'm actually up for that, but not if you aren't going to even bother getting your arguments straight. You just look like a troll in that case.
Actually I changed my mind. I am disputing your contention and here is my example. Please point out where the unethical parts are.
Person a and person b are stranded on an island in the South Pacific. There are no other humans around. Person A gets pretty good at catching fish, while person b gets pretty good at harvesting coconuts. Individually, person a can catch six fish and harvest two coconuts. Person b can catch one fish and harvest eight coconuts. Person b is concerned about not getting enough protein, so they approach person a and offer to trade two coconuts for one fish. Person a Agrees, and a mutually agreeable business transaction has taken place. Both parties are better off than they were before. What part of this is unethical?
By the way, please don't take offense by any of this. You seem to have thick enough skin to trade barbs, and honestly this has been an interesting discussion (minus some unneeded name calling but that's a minor detail between friends like us)
> 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.
> 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.
> Outsourcing ethics to Government regulation is just plain wrong.
This is a category error. Companies have an existential incentive to chase profits (and their managers can be sued by the shareholders for doing anything less). Their incentive to avoid violating laws, morals, and ethics is far lower.
> is just plain wrong
What is the consequence? Does anyone in the USA strictly avoid buying anything from any company with dubious ethics?
We all have knee-jerk reactions to outrage, but where we either (1) don't have enough transparency to know or (2) don't have reasonable alternatives, there is no ability for individual non-governmental entities to shape those incentives. The closest we get are internet mobs organizing boycotts, but lots of people reject that method for completely rational reasons.
> My complaint is that, to my eyes, you are criticizing them as if we moderns have some power over their actions.
We moderns have power over our own actions, and those actions are informed by the past.
In this thread we're talking about risk/reward analyses and for some reason, you and other people here seem oddly insistent that we not discuss the ethical implications of the actions on question.
And all-too-often, that's what happens today: companies look at the risk/reward in financial terms and ignore any ethical concerns. I would characterize the corporate approach to ethics as "complete disregard". The business ethics classes I took in college were, frankly, reprehensible; most of the material was geared toward rebranding various corporate misdeeds as miscalculated risk/reward tradeoffs, similar to what is being done in this thread. This is a huge problem, and it's pervasive in this thread, in HN as a whole, and in corporate culture.
Your complaint is rather hypocritical: given we have no power over their actions, why defend them? Your complaint applies as much to your own position as it does to mine. What problem are you addressing?
> Consider the question of why someone would want to teach you this subject, when you are combative at every turn.
i do not post opinions as invitations or expectations to lecture. only to discuss.
if i disagree with you, it is a mistake to interpret that as combative.
> I did not assert corporations are moral agents.
my OP was saying that companies have no morals. your initial response was to tell me i'm ignorant of the field of business ethics (a statement not entirely without merit, i concede). i did not interpret that as an agreement, just a rude disagreement. and if you disagree with the statement "corporations are not moral agents" this implies (to me) that you are asserting the opposite, i.e, they are.
> This is not a debate beyond an invitation to adopt intellectual humility on this subject, about which you do not claim to know anything.
at the risk of sounding rude (and i have no intention of sounding that way), you're suggesting i adopt intellectual humility - i have already claimed to know little, all i have asked is that you justify why you disagree with what i am saying. if you are suggesting that you are a field expert, and that i should agree with you for that reason alone, well, that's essentially a "proof" by authority[1].
>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.
come on, there's no need to be disingenuous - of course i cannot prove that.
> Honestly, I wouldn't blame someone for stopping to read at that point.
why? i don't believe that it's unreasonable to believe that another company would pick up a contract like that.
> If (a) IBM is a company made up of people, and (b) people have morality, on what basis are you claiming IBM doesn't (read: can't) have morals? A collection of people acting on behalf of a corporation does not absolve that corporation from any moral corruption it causes.
it's simple, being immoral allows more profits to be made. companies do this all the time. how many companies have token offices in remote islands? it's legal. if they don't do it, they're literally leaving money on the table. why would they not do it?
> You speak about this as if you've never read any of the comprehensive literature on business ethics.
you're correct, i haven't. i don't claim to know anything.
> I think you're being downvoted because you're coming off arrogant in a topic (business ethics) you don't project knowing much about.
most text does, i don't mean to come across as arrogant. but if people don't make an effort to correct me (and linking to an incredibly long article doesn't exactly help), how else might my opinion be changed? i don't feel that people owe me an explanation, but saying "you're wrong" and downvoting isn't.. well, it's not how i'd treat someone else, so i don't appreciate it when i am treated that way.
> How can you convince people that what they did was legally and ethically wrong? They intentionally ran the company into the ground to increase the short term profits so they could parachute away with a nice bonus at the cost of the lower level employees.
I feel like you've answered your own question immediately after asking it. As a sibling commenter said, you can't convince someone this is legally wrong because it isn't, but any ethical system that places personal wealth creation over the well-being other humans isn't one I can respect.
> Ethics are a social contract that Starbucks won't participate in.
Really? This is a really strong assumption. So people as a group cant act in an ethical manner?
> Also, I don't believe I'm generalizing at all.
But you are. Here are your generalizations:
* Ethics are a social contract that Starbucks won't participate in. (What proof do you have?)
* But at some point they [ALL corporations] abandon humanity and are literally incapable of making an ethical choice independent of business value.
> Also, I didn't say it gives anyone a blank check. There are obviously legal consequences, and the law increasingly vastly favors entities like Starbucks, because money buys law in the US
yes might equals right and the ends always justify the means /s
> That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.
FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse, just describing the reality.
In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically, and as such it's a reasonable assumption that corporations will always trend towards unethical behavior (read: any behavior that pushes costs onto some other entity, while bringing profits to the company), because that can be a competitive advantage.
Acknowledging this is a first step in fixing the problem. We need to incentivize companies to do do the "right thing" - where the "right thing" is something other than simply maximizing profits - because we can't rely on "good people making moral choices" when they are incentivized not to do so.
> Really? This is a really strong assumption. So people as a group cant act in an ethical manner?
I'm not sure, but I don't see any evidence that large corporate organizations do. I think at some point distributing responsibility for ethics craves a system for them and the system that ends up depended on is market reaction, and law. Corporations like Starbucks pour enormous amounts of energy manipulating both to serve their interest (profit), so I don't see any evidence of actual ethical behavior except when it lines up conveniently with consumer appreciation. You could argue that's the system working (the ethics of a large enough corporation become a perfect proxy of the ethics of it's consumers) but that argument falls down unless there's complete transparency and an attempt to share truth about company behavior with consumers as opposed using misdirection and marketing, or outright lies to manipulate public opinion.
> * Ethics are a social contract that Starbucks won't participate in. (What proof do you have?)
This isn't a generalization, it's specific to one corporation. I don't have any proof, I have an (admittedly unpopular) model for thinking about companies at this scale that makes it impossible for them to participate in. Per my above corporation, Starbucks' ethics are the ethics of it's consumers (informed beyond Starbucks' interest) and applied through patronage (or lack of it). It's a machine that will behave only if we stop feeding it when it doesn't (which depends on us knowing about it's behavior). I don't think this is as radical an idea as I'm making it sound.
> * But at some point they [ALL corporations] abandon humanity and are literally incapable of making an ethical choice independent of business value.
Fair, yeah. A generalization. One I stand behind unless we turn up any counter examples.
> yes might equals right and the ends always justify the means /s
If you're suggesting that my thoughts lead to this idea then I'm being misunderstood. I certainly don't think either of those things are true. Law != Righteousness (though proponents of existing law love to use this fallacy to demonize critics and offenders), and the idea that money buys law can't possibly be controversial. Hopefully I didn't imply that I think our legal system ought to work that way, I don't.
> Does a company indulging in non-coerced commerce (i.e. voluntary) make it virtuous?
No, the reward is money/resources and the person wasn't implying the polar opposite of the article. You are creating a false dichotomy here by trying to split things into good or bad. There is a neutral position that you don't have to be invested in.
> Why is questioning the efficacy, for society, of the economic models of any company considered immoral?
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethically challenged
Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
> Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma
Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.
> Every time someone trots out the false claim that it is a CEOs legal responsibility to maximize profits, I have to wonder about their ethical framework, as if maximizing profits is an inherent good.
The problem is that you're talking about how good people are, when other people are talking about how well things work, and about figuring out how to make them work better. Your ethical framework seems to be that people should be good and do good things, but with no reference to what things are good and what things aren't other than the intuition and improvisation of good people, and no reference to what we do if they don't do what we think are good things.
If you're relying on the CEO to be a good person, you've dismissed governance as a possibility and anointed kings. In general, I don't think that kings work in my best interest, so I prefer regulations.
> 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
Please, point out where I did any of that sort.
And I asked for an example of a system that is more ethical, and got nothing but dodging and bitching. I don't think you have any ground to stand on to demand examples (certainly from me, who if you care to read again I'm not disputing your position that business can't be ethical, so it makes zero sense to ask me for an example). It seems unreasonable to expect of others what you aren't willing to give yourself. Dare I say that's ... unethical?
If you want to complain about the real world, then offer solutions that work in the real world. We can then consider and debate them and maybe get somewhere. If you just want to make philosophical contemplations, I'm actually up for that, but not if you aren't going to even bother getting your arguments straight. You just look like a troll in that case.
Actually I changed my mind. I am disputing your contention and here is my example. Please point out where the unethical parts are.
Person a and person b are stranded on an island in the South Pacific. There are no other humans around. Person A gets pretty good at catching fish, while person b gets pretty good at harvesting coconuts. Individually, person a can catch six fish and harvest two coconuts. Person b can catch one fish and harvest eight coconuts. Person b is concerned about not getting enough protein, so they approach person a and offer to trade two coconuts for one fish. Person a Agrees, and a mutually agreeable business transaction has taken place. Both parties are better off than they were before. What part of this is unethical?
By the way, please don't take offense by any of this. You seem to have thick enough skin to trade barbs, and honestly this has been an interesting discussion (minus some unneeded name calling but that's a minor detail between friends like us)
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