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Comment by augbog | Hacker News Reader

Damn... this hit me hard and makes me realize why corporations can be pretty evil :/... in the back of their minds, they're always thinking of how to please their "true" customers.

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Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.

Insomuch as they can be anthropomorphized they don't even truly care about whatever their 'customers' are or their well-being, so long as the bottom line is optimized across time.

The rank and file humans that make up the functions of a corporation might be moral and may influence the corporation to make 'irrational' choices due to human morality, but that is not the rule.

Remember when everyone was talking about how an amoral AI paperclip optimizer could destroy the planet? We have those, they're called corporations and they optimize dollars.

> Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.

I had a pretty spirited argument that was ongoing for about a week with my friend, who was my co-founder at the time, where my position was similar to yours. (Note: this is all in the context of U.S. Law and Government) His argument was that it's impossible for any entity to be amoral because whether a corporation or person, both are treated as persons or entities meaning that they can provide their will. So, once a corporation reaches a point it indeed can be moral because it goes beyond a legal instrument and is dictated by a collective staff, leadership, and/or stakeholders. He would have said that in the case of a solo entrepreneur's company, it would just be an abstracted will of the entrepreneur. I eventually got to the point where I couldn't argue against the legal precedence of Corporate personhood. [0] I think there is a point when a corporation outgrows their founder and becomes self-sustaining where it's corporate culture dictates it's "morals".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

I agree that a corporation can make what would be perceived as moral actions, exactly due to the human staff running it, but that does not erase that morals does not factor into the objective function that a corporation is meant to optimize. This is exacerbated as the morals of its actions become difficult to analyze for the individual and the moral actions of employees becomes less individually significant. The concerted effort, on which the fitness of the corporation is ultimately measured, will still amount to the optimization of the bottom line.

This is especially true when the corporation outgrows the control of its original founders who may have had a moral vision.

In the end the analogy I am making is that a corporation has reins, and as it grows it becomes increasingly unwieldy for the handlers (= staff) to direct it where it does not want to go (away from profit).

It is of course easy to have a corporation act moral when this objective overlaps with optimization of its objective function. I don't consider such a happy occurrence to qualify as truly moral, however.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane...

- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

For that to be always true, the customers would have to be amoral too. Many companies find success in differentiating themselves to appeal to morally conscious consumers, and even more companies find themselves having to react to them from time to time.

But that is not moral, is it? The company is still not beholden to a willful idea of morality, but rather sociopathically concerned with appearance. For companies where this matters little this concern for appearance is quickly shed.

You could say the same about any social contract. The criticism applies to any person as much as it applies to any company. It’s the same as saying that altruism doesn’t exist because it’s logically impossible to conceive a scenario where an altruistic act doesn’t benefit the actor.

A vital difference is that companies do not have a sapient capacity for emotion and empathy.

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