I'm not sure what your argument is. Is it (a) that tax avoidance is morally justified, (b) morally justified only in the business context or (c) not of concern, because the business and the moral are two separate contexts?
The entity making the tax code (the government) and the entity that collects taxes (the government) are one in the same. If the government wants me, as an individual or business, to pay taxes at a certain rate X, they should write the tax code so that I need to pay taxes at X%.
I don't think it's anyone's moral responsibility to pay a certain percentage in taxes. From a moral perspective, people have different ideas about what percentage they should pay. If I'm a small business owner, I might believe that my contribution of providing employment to 50 people is enough, without having any moral obligation to pay taxes on top of that.
Or, I could be a hugely wealthy investment banker. I make $1mil a year. But I don't feel morally obligated to pay 30% in taxes because every year I give $300,000 dollars to charity instead. Or this one time I made a $500,000 endowment for the arts.
Taxes and morals are too separate to be linked so easily.
If you are a business and sell a product or service in my country, you need to pay X% in taxes on that sale.
If you live in my country, you need to pay Y% in income tax.
I agree that the hard part is coordination, but I stand by my belief that we will never see change on this issue unless a major multinational company decides to take it on for PR reasons. Which will only happen if there is pressure from the government, media and consumers.
Sir, in short, your moral arguments are non sequitur.
I don't think forcing people to pay any amount of money (taxes) is moral. Is it good for society? Yes. Is it moral? Who knows? How are you so easily making moral judgements when morality is so subjective?
I find the idea of forcing my morality on anyone else repugnant, except in the case where all parties have agreed to the moral code (laws).
But more broadly, laws are not always moral. If you equate laws with being moral (or equitable which is hopefully a subjunct matter), then personally I think your view of the world is far more black and white than reality.
In my view morality (and part of which is equality) should lead to legality not the other way around.
I personally do not believe in objective morality. I'm not religious and without believing in a prime mover I think that's a very hard claim to make.
For example, "the ends justify the means" vs "the ends do not justify the means".
Two people can believe in some ultimate social good (your version of "objective morality"). That doesn't mean they'll get there in the same way (my version of "objective morality").
Unfortunately, "participants" turns out to be decided by lobbying influence, not votes.
So yes, definitely an issue with this democracy.
Then why is murder wrong?
BTW, please don't troll. If you're just asking, "Who says murder is wrong?" to be rhetorical or make a point, don't. Instead, make your point explicitly in the first place, so that we can move forward in the discussion. I'm not interested in playing games, but I am interested in seriously discussing the topic.
So, either you think murder is wrong, or you don't--or you think that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, which boils down to isn't. So which is it?
Is killing in self-defense murder? If not why not?
If yes, how are they "objectively" wrong?
If you're a pacifist that believes all killing is wrong, fair enough. But that doesn't make your standards "objective". There are shades of grey to all morality, you pretending otherwise does you no service.
The same applies in this case. Having popular opinion on your side does not make your morality "objective". That's not how this works.
> There are shades of grey to all morality, you pretending otherwise does you no service.
I'm not pretending that. Please don't jump ahead in the discussion.
> Having popular opinion on your side does not make your morality "objective". That's not how this works.
Again, I haven't claimed this. It will be hard to discuss this if you ascribe to me positions I haven't taken.
fastball - Who says [murder] is wrong?
explainplease - Most people who aren't murderers, and a few who are. Are you saying that murder is not wrong?
It's very simple: do you think murder is wrong? Yes or no?
If your answer is yes, then we can talk about the definition of murder as opposed to war, justified homicide, etc.
If your answer is no, then we can talk about objective morality, and why it wouldn't be ok for me to kill you just because I feel like it--i.e. why there is objective morality, because if there isn't, then there is no moral reason for me not to kill you and take all your stuff whenever I feel like it.
> I'm sorry if I took your response of "many people think this" as a serious response. ... And if you can't answer my questions about murder, which apparently is such an easy moral issue for you.
You literally asked, "Who says murder is wrong?" I literally answered the question. Your question was obviously rhetorical, yet pointless, because you didn't make a point by asking it. So I then asked the relevant, next, serious question, to move the discussion forward. You then declined to answer it, instead making silly personal attacks, as if performing for an audience. Note, BTW, that I haven't said anything about taxation.
It seems to be you who is not interested in seriously discussing objective morality, yet it is you who raised the topic, and you obviously know that most people disagree. Therefore you seem to be trolling. A shame, because it could be an interesting conversation.
Please prove me wrong by taking the conversation seriously now.
"I don't believe in objective morality."
"HA! WHAT ABOUT MURDER?! GOTCHA!"
If you really want me to spell it my thinking for you: I have no reason to believe in an objective morality, because the only things I think are objective in this universe are related to physical laws of nature, which happened by random chance. From there, I see no reason to link these physical and random laws with our human understanding of morality. If there was a prime mover that created these physical laws and ordered the universe, and was therefore "above" my conception of the universe, presumably any moral code this prime mover laid down would be "objective". However, I do not believe in such a being.
If you have a logical argument for objective morality without a higher power, lay it on me. But "what about murder?" is not an argument. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but just to be clear: plenty of people and cultures have felt morally comfortable with what you probably think of as murder. Please stop wasting our time if that's all you have.
I agree with you: without a higher power, there is no logical reason for objective morality. The closest that one may come is a purely utilitarian argument that society benefits as a whole if people refrain from actions such as murder, and that such societal benefits then pass to an individual who chooses to refrain from them. But, of course, that does not necessarily preclude an individual committing murder in a certain case if he calculates the benefit to himself to exceed that of refraining, if he thinks he can get away with it.
So, then, my question is this: if a person wants to commit murder for purely selfish reasons (e.g. revenge, financial, power, etc), would it be acceptable to you? If you were the only witness, would you turn him in and testify against him?
Morality (let's call it CSR) is a corporate concern. All for that. UN-goals etc. I would mainly point to suppliers, environment, customers as options for corporations to act morally within their functioning as a business. Morality-via-tax argument is second order at best. Who knows if the taxes are justly spend?
For large public multinational corporations it is very easy to approximate how much they should pay in any country, when you just wouldn't accept the transfer pricing tricks that they use to move the profits around.
If countries want to stop missing out on these taxes, I think they should just stop accepting the whole argument. If companies really accept lower margins in some country, they can also afford to pay a bit more taxes.
The distinction has to be made between what is lawful and what is moral. The law is a system that we all have to comply to (which may or may not be perceived as moral), morals are subjective and built on experience, environment, etc. Laws are often made with current/major moral views in mind.
Tax evasion is clearly perceived as not moral, but it's lawful. We cannot expect companies (or individuals) to obey moral rules, since it's kinda unsolvable (morals being subjective). On the other hand, we can expect them to obey law.
Again, focusing on companies in this case is pointless and unproductive, no matter how shocking it is. Governments like to criticize tax evasion, but they are the only ones who could do something about it. We have to go after them.
Tax avoidance within the bounds of the law is not just morally justified - it's morally required.
(For the record, I think tax avoidance is a major problem, especially because large corporations end up being the only ones who can afford the accountants, lawyers, and international subsidiaries to facilitate it. Small business ends up getting shafted. But the way to solve it isn't to whine about Apple doing what Apple is supposed to do. The fix is to reform the tax code.)
The law is not the arbiter of morality.
But I do agree that the solution is to fix the tax code. And to implement better international tax treaties.
Does paying more taxes than required by law make you a more moral person or entity? That's a fine debate.