Comment by jniedrauer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jniedrauer | Hacker News Reader

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We don't even have to go back very far to find examples of American companies exploiting people to the point of knowingly killing them.[0]

> any solution that requires foregoing independent corporate decision making would be foolish

Whether you think less regulation or more regulation is better, you can't in good faith advocate for no regulation. Corporations have demonstrated many times over the years that they are profit maximizing algorithms with no regard for human life.

> For those who have been tasked with building tools that support authoritarian regimes, grow a spine, make your voice heard, and quit if necessary.

Once again, this makes very little sense in the context of history. Individual people are largely powerless when standing up to large organizations. Corporations do not self regulate and individuals cannot stop them. They are effectively a form of "very slow rogue AI" and the only way we seem to be able to control them, at least for a little while, is with central governments.

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

I made no such argument for no regulation. My argument is that we have a set of rules, and we should not interfere with decision making if rules have not been broken. If in response to some exploitation of the rules which you deem as unhealthy to society you may pass new rules to deal with that behavior. You can't just mess with someone because you don't like them.

I take issue with the spineless bit. If a corporation is undermining basic human rights that's a problem. You also can't expect exployees to stand up to a corporation because they may need the job desperately. There are certain things a government must do. I'd say protecting human rights is the role of government.

> You also can't expect exployees to stand up to a corporation because they may need the job desperately.

If an employee thinks their job security is more important than the human rights of the population of China then I personally have no problem with that. This is because we have a lot of evidence about how much the average employee values human rights and anybody who expects great things from them is going to be disappointed, so I don't.

But to say the government must be responsible for the moral aspects is profoundly irresponsible. "Just following orders" got a lot of Nazis hanged at Nuremberg. If an employee does something they have a personal moral responsibility. Maybe don't bring the law in because it is happening in a foreign country, but claiming that moral responsibility doesn't factor in because people like money is not how we want to run our values system.

That's a bit paradox, isn't it?

If the only allowed way to change the rules is in response to behavior you deem unhealthy to society, how can we should not interfere if the rules have not been broken?

And deeming something as being unhealthy to society is a sort of process of dislike in a subjective notion since there is no objective way for a society to be unhealthy.

Well we can talk about making a rule, and covering future cases but we don't have to castigate people for actions they took in the past where no such rule existed.

We can go back even less far to find examples of the US Federal Government doing arguably far worse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

There's this narrative that the major cause of improvement in conditions (civil rights, workers rights, child rights etc.) comes from government regulation. This is called legal prescriptivism. Another narrative is that things generally improve as the economy does, and are then codified into law. This is legal descriptivism.

Typically history moves forward with a mixture of both, but it should not be taken for granted that prescriptivism is always the only way progress happens, nor that prescriptive progress always positive.

I wonder if—as a culture—we're limiting ourselves by habitually thinking in terms of public government and private enterprise; as if we need to find new concepts for grouping together people trying to solve problems.

I know I'm not adding much to the discussion with such vague notions, but I'd like to crack this vagueness a little beyond binary options that I, too, seem to habitually trap myself within.

The existing regulatory framework waits for bad behavior to surface and then outlaws it specifically, which is fine. That’s a far cry from a regulatory framework designed to “rein in” corporations more generally, i.e. with regulatory review and approval steps for R&D allocation and product launches.

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