For money, my dear, for money. Is there any other reason for a company to exist? The stuff like "do no evil" or "we are green" is just a smoke screen. At the end they will do everything for money.
A overused rhetoric that does not hold much ground when you realize that poverty is decreasing fast everywhere around, and faster than we expected it to.
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...
We consider that a villager living from subsistence farming and therefore having almost no use for money to be part of the very poor, less than 1$/day crowd.
Take this same peasant and send it working for some multinational company harvesting cocoa or sugar cane, under horrible, exploitative conditions for 2$ a day, and bam! poverty has been halved!
Ditto if you send him and his family in some shanty town collecting plastic on a rubbish pile, feeding on refuse : he's now making 3$ a day, poverty decreased again!
What is called "lifting out of poverty" is actually "making them a cog of a worldwide, money-based economy". That's a mixed blessing, to say the least.
They weren't actually subsistence farmers, but they did live without money before this was done to them. They were incredibly bitter.
And people forced to become cogs don't automatically gain meaningful access to things like healthcare and education, plus the education of the city people can involve horrible prejudice that is actively harmful to them for various reasons.
Half of the worlds population lives in poverty, and ~650m live in extreme poverty [1][2].
[1] https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-p...
Meanwhile in most developed countries, inequality is grotesque and the consequent poverty is on the rise.
*Absolute poverty would decrease much faster if we exploited and expropriated from developing countries a little less.
If I live aboard a ship, I am not in poverty because I do not own a car, because in my society, you do not need a car. But if I live in a city with no public transport where you need a car to get around, but I can't afford one, I absolutely am.
Poverty apologists always bring up TV as an example, as if poverty is about optional extras rather than basic dignity, respect and participation.
It's about feeling inferior, it's about being treated inferior, often violently so.
For instance, what happens when you try and retrieve groceries from a supermarket when you cannot afford to pay for them.
There's a running joke in my country that US poverty is our middle class - only two cars and a small house.
It is still plenty good enough but employee want to be paid in the currency their employers uses.
If you trust your employer to do things for the greater good, you can accept less money, or even no money at all like with the charities. If your employer is simply pursuing the highest profit, employee want the biggest amount of money.
Banking never could claim a "Moral High Ground", so they compensated with cold hard cash. SV is loosing its and needs to align its salaries accordingly.
But what about climat change? We've improved so much across so many areas, surely that'll offset a few more degrees across the globe? It's just one metric among so many where we're doing great.
What if it doesn't? How will we cope in 50 years with hundreds of millions of landless refugees? Right now we can't. Are we doing so great that in 50 years we will?
* Literally every piece of lab equipment that uses any kind of controller/control board (most of them)... has needed programming of one sort of another. Hmmm, with the exception of older analog gear maybe (decades ago?).
* Every single piece of data collection, storage, analysis, and control software is created through programming.
* Even communication of results among team members, to management, to the public, often requires programming.
Imagine there are two paths from A to B (the left and right path). 100 people walk from A to B. Half take the left and half the right, and none of them have any information not in this paragraph.
There are wolves on the left path. Everyone who travels it gets eaten. Now, at B, we have 50 people. They all chose the right path voluntarily, they all made a choice. None of them knew about the wolves though. How do we catagorise this situation in term of having and not having made a "real" choice? I argue that in practice, whatever the people were thinking when they chose B was irrelevant, because they didn't know the thing that actually mattered and they didn't have a proxy variable for it.
With that setup, I'd argue companies that "help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit" are a lot like my right path, in that the people may not have been focused on maximising profits, but if they didn't achieve them they wouldn't have lasted long. By evolution, there will be a decided drift towards companies maximising profits even if all the individuals actually making the choices think they are doing something real (or I suppose, the converse where they think that their job is meaningless).
If anything, the drive for profit is a little less now.
This is one of the reasons among many I regard the decline in proper journalism as so worrying.
A corporation could be chartered for any reason. What is true is that in the early 19th century there was a legal pretense that corporations had to justify their charter to the government in order to be approved and renewed.
One of the very first corporations in USA was Alexander Hamilton's bank, that ran a water utility as a front operation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company
The old days weren't as honorable as the stories whitewash.
But not-just-for-profit corporations have existed for a long time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification... is a modern trend.
You might want to have a look at an history book then. Companies had slaves, got kids working in mines, got to use the government to shout their workers who rebelled because they had no rights whatsoever, or just straight up used private armies. It was all pre 20th century already. If all this was not solely to make a profit, I don't know what it was.
Furthermore the great majority of big ventures were family driven. There were not formal associations between "people with similar goals" who weren't blood related.
Tactics, when it came to dealing with competition, were far beyond anything you see today. There were few regulations in the US, so companies were free to devise all manners of schemes to best their competitors. The treatment of labor in the pursuit of profit, was similarly far more brutal (there's really no comparison, Amazon's warehouse workers are treated like kings compared to sweatshop workers back then).
If that is the case, is it moral to refuse to work on the Manhattan Project if asked?
(I also agree that working on the next generation of the atomic bomb or the next revision of the M16/AK47 does not hold the same promise of saving lives, of course...)
Modern society has already made the choice though. We sacrifice a few for the many all the time, and they are called heros and duly celebrated.
It's really an argument that can't be made because the other event never happened. The weapon killed people, that's it. I don't know if there's a moral side at all?
Do you know of any text, interviews or discussions with any of the scientists on the Manhattan project on the morality of their work?
Let it grow from being just your vision to become a small group's vision.
Guys join the army for what? Loose their lives for what?
They are people who are signing up for a job whose work benefits are medium probability of making their spouses widows and single parents overnight
I am not saying that they did not sign up for the other reasons as well, and by saying this I don’t think I am undermining their commitment to serve or their intent, but in a volunteer force it is also about money, and we’re going to have to pay a lot more to meet recruitment targets.
Making money for shareholders is an instrument to secure long term/regular investment. It's not the "end goal", and almost no company's mission is "to make money". Money is just the blood stream that enables everything else.
Sure seems that way, when every decision is optimized towards making money short-term. I think the more correct model of most companies would be money-focused entities that through path dependence ended up in the market sector they're in. That is, the actual thing they're doing is an artifact of history and is abstracted away for actual operations.