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Comment by appsonify | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the pushback....you signed up to work for a for-profit publicly traded corporation. You received your benefits and compensation. Now suddenly, you have a problem with your employer trying to do its job which is continue to please wall street that impacts the share price?

it's kinda like that pushback from MS that was puzzling too....whether you like it or not, the very work you are doing in university to where you end up workiung, directly or indirectly contributes to somebody on the other side of the planet not having the things you have so you can keep the stuff you have....

the entitlement, and the blatant ignorance is just mind boggling...where does this mentality come from? This type of shit is now encroaching even video games... in Battlefield V, the game has been completely neutered of its historic accuracy....Redheaded cutie with a robot arm in WW2?

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People often have some amount of morals that go into which job they have. This typically plays into the choice of jobs. Taking a job that has military contracts is a moral stance, as is taking a job that does not. Taking a job that supports dictatorships is a moral stance, as is taking a job that does not. When a company changes their moral stances, this acts against the previous choices of the employees who work there. Of course it is reasonable to protest these changes.

Corporations are composed of people. To imply that this relieves people of any moral responsibility for the actions of corporations is absurd.

Corporations are made up of people but the corporation itself is NOT the sum of its people, it is its own entity, hell US corporations have the same human rights and social number.

The difference is a corporation is void of moral conscience, so you can't really expect to bring your own Judeo-Christian ethics here

I agree that corporations are not just the sum of its parts. It is entirely valid to model a corporation as an artificial intelligence that happens to use human brains as hardware. Taking a job at a corporation can then be seen either as joining it, or as interacting with it.

If one is joining a corporation, the individual's choices are part of the AI that drives the corporation. In this case, it is essential for individuals to act morally, in order to predispose the corporation to act morally.

If one is interacting with a corporation, there is no expectation that it will behave morally. Therefore, to increase the likelihood that it will perform moral actions, it should be painful for the corporation to perform immoral actions. That punishment can be inflicted by bringing negative PR, by negotiating contracts that avoid immoral actions, or by quitting and thereby forcing the company to pay higher wages to attract the same talent.

There's no reason why a worker can't seek to influence the company that they work for, on behalf of their own self interest, which could include their moral sensibilities.

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