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Comment by SantalBlush | Hacker News Reader

I don't shoplift, but I'm appalled at the double standards that are often applied to consumers and workers compared with large companies.

Amazon is selling counterfeit products to unwitting shoppers across the United States. Large firms like this do not subject themselves to any code of ethics like we do; there is only the risk of getting penalized. Yet their business models are reliant on us acting ethically. It is one big scam that preys on human decency, so I really don't blame someone for taking extra fruit at the self-checkout after doing a cost-benefit analysis and making the profitable choice.

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Two wrongs don't make a right. Trying to not leave the world a worse place at the end of the day means not taking extra fruit at the self-checkout.

If you believe a corporation to be evil, then every possible act against them might be justifiable.

This is a question of ethics. What is the right behavior to resist evil?

For example, you could follow our own governments guide :) https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...

So Amazon profiting from knockoffs means you can steal bananas from Kroger’s?

The problem seems to be a general lack of morals... regardless of some perceived justification.

If Amazon is not held accountable for fraudulent business practices, is it ethical to hold a shoplifter accountable? The answer, in my mind, is that it is not only not ethical to do so, but it is grossly unethical to do so.

It's not fair but we shouldn't conflate the judgement of other's actions with choosing how we ourselves act.

If Amazon is not held accountable for fraudulent business practices should I then steal? No. They've no relevance to each other, I am responsible for my actions.

Applying a double standard between people is in itself unethical; that is my entire point. We can all choose to live by Amazon's rules, where maximizing profit without regard to ethics is acceptable, or we can live by our conventional sense of morality (which is what I want.) But insofar as we hold ordinary people to a different standard than Amazon, we are behaving unethically. The shoplifting is not central to my point.

Your whole point hinges on the claim that Amazon routinely and deliberately acts fraudulently and is never held to account.

But Amazon and companies like them are absolutely held accountable for legal breaches all the time. Here's just one recent example: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2017/05/...

Companies are under constant scrutiny by various bodies and agents including regulators, consumer protection groups, media outlets, unions, review sites, consumer word of mouth - not to the simple market reality that if too many customers feel defrauded, they'll soon stop being customers.

It's a huge leap to argue that since some counterfeit goods have been sold via their platform, blatant theft from them or other companies is therefore justifiable, particularly when you don't mention that those counterfeit goods were sold by third parties, and that Amazon has a formal process to refund customers who have been sold counterfeit goods and to bar such sellers from their platform: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/201165970

We all learned as children that theft and dishonesty is wrong, because in families and societies alike, things quickly break down if it becomes widespread.

It's pretty simple.

Your example is comical. By my reading, Amazon stole (and was ordered to return) $70 million from Americans by offering their children fake playmoney for their real money. Where are the punitive damages? $70 million is piss to Amazon.

Here's another comical example from recent:

Facebook is fined $5B for privacy violations. Their stock goes up for the day.

Nowhere did I say the conduct of the big tech companies is anything resembling perfect, nor that the regulation of them is perfect.

The point was that none of this justifies property theft from other big companies, and that we all learned this as children.

But sure, petty theft can be a powerful form of protest I guess, so if that's important to you, knock yourself out.

The claim was big corporations get to rip off and exploit little people virtually at will, and your refutation was that they are punished (or at least get slapped in the wrist as evidenced), everything is at balance in the moral realm, and a hostile personal orientation against them is unwarranted.

You've now updated your argument to Big Tech may be evil but that doesn't mean we should assume Big Grocery is too. That could be right, but if we look closely I'm sure we could find some tremendously nasty things happening there too. The incentives are making Big Money, not doing good. This is an issue of our (Post-)Industrial society.

I'd started writing a longer reply, then thought "you know what, it's Sunday night here, I've just started drinking a really nice glass of wine and my partner is about to serve up the home-made pasta we've spent the past couple of hours preparing... life's too short for this" and wrote a low-effort reply. As your previous comment began with "your example is comical" didn't exactly make me feel like a good-faith effort at serious discussion was likely to be worth the investment, and you came right though and asserted that I'd said things that I did't say at all. So here we are.

For what it's worth, I don't think "big tech" or "big grocery" is "evil" or "not evil" in any binary sense. People and organisations respond to incentives and societal standards. Sometimes those incentives and standards are healthy and lead to broadly beneficial outcomes and sometimes they are perverse and lead to negative outcomes. Countless economists over several centuries have explored these topics far more deeply than I can in an HN comment late on a Sunday evening.

For some people it's really important to think that the big tech companies are evil and to blame for all society's ills, and now people are claiming that means it's really important to go easy on people who shoplift. OK then, they're welcome to that view.

I still think society is better if people - both individuals and corporates of all sizes - act ethically and morally and don't steal or defraud, and I don't think individuals can expect politicians and corporations to act ethically if we're not willing to act ethically in our personal lives.

That said, I'm not a law-and-order hardliner, and I have actually shoplifted in my life, at a young age, though not for any reasons to do with waging any just war against supposedly evil corporations. I was just in a bad place in life. So I have plenty of compassion for people who end up doing wrong due to being in bad circumstances.

Anyway, like I said, it's late on a pleasant Sunday evening and life is too short to spend any more time talking about this, so I'm out.

Isn't life too short for spending several hours to make pasta lol lol

I said couple, not several!

My partner is of half-Italian background, and today was the first time she used the chitarra [1] she recently received as a gift from her family.

So yep, making the dough, waiting for it to rise, making the sauce, then pushing the dough through the chitarra to make the spaghetti all takes a bit of time.

It's not an every-day thing, but as a couple's thing to do on a quiet Sunday afternoon, it was great.

And it tasted incredible. Worth every second.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_chitarra

all I get to eat today is milk lol that's supposed to be used with coffee (kwa-fee lol lol) but I just drink it lol lol, not super ethical but life is too short lol. Hope you enjoy pasta with fine partner lol and enjoy life bruh

It sounds like you're living the life, man. I apologize if I goaded you into an unproductive argument; sometimes I get like that. Cheers.

Thanks for the kind comment. I did still learn a thing or two from the discussion so thanks for your part in that too :)

>It's a huge leap to argue that since some counterfeit goods have been sold via their platform, blatant theft from them or other companies is therefore justifiable, particularly when you don't mention that those counterfeit goods were sold by third parties, and that Amazon has a formal process to refund customers who have been sold counterfeit goods and to bar such sellers from their platform: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/201165970

You are giving Amazon a pass to engage in unethical behavior. Whether or not the products are sold from a third party is entirely irrelevant; Amazon is profiting from defrauding shoppers, plain and simple. And in spite of their meager penalties, they continue to do it. Why? Because they make money from it.

>We all learned as children that theft and dishonesty is wrong, because in families and societies alike, things quickly break down if it becomes widespread.

This is a platitude that people here are saying to make themselves look good. If they are not enforcing their morals among all members of our group equally, then I do not believe that they care about their system of ethics as much as they let on; they are virtue signalling.

There exist a different set of morals in our society depending on whether you run a business or not. Everyone decided to fixate on the shoplifting aspect of my comment and intentionally avoid the thrust of my point. I don't actually want people to shoplift; I am calling out the hypocrites who shrug at behavior like Amazon's then proceed to hop on a soapbox about shoplifting. It's disgusting.

I regret getting involved in this discussion. It's not even relevant. Amazon wasn't mentioned in the article and nobody was talking about them until you brought them up. Nobody in this discussion was saying that big companies should be held to lower ethical standards than individuals. I accept you have an axe to grind about big company conduct and regulation, as do many people. That's fine. I'm done here.

Maybe you should steal, and still be responsible for your actions or inaction (I am not recommending this). If you consider them evil, then sabotage is justifiable.

Do we have an objective set of morals that are above the law? Was the Soviet government evil? What about any corporation that is not carbon negative?

Sounds like you are just trying to justify whatever logic allows you to benefit. Amazon resold a fake charger so you should be allowed to steal that guy's bananas, got it.

His argument is "I live in a low-trust society, in which large and powerful institutions are only out for themselves, carelessly fuck me, nobody cares, and so it is my moral obligation to protect my personal interests by whatever means possible."

It's a very sour mindset, but it's also very common in third world countries and American inner-city ghettos where affairs are quite nasty.

If a wealthy, influential person is not convicted of a murder they clearly committed, does that mean it's grossly unethical to hold anyone else accountable for murder?

If that's the norm, yes. If the rich can kill my people with protection from the state, we have a moral obligation to war with them.

I think that phrase is used a little more freely than it should be. It is wrong to imprison people against their will; yet we do it because those people do/will do wrong things. Two wrongs don't make a right in that case either, but we feel the second wrong is justified because of the first.

It's not wrong to imprison people against their will. It's part of the societal contract.

Not imprisoning someone when you should is, however, wrong.

if, instead of saying "is, however, wrong" you say "is wrong, however" you can save a comma. Just some LFP offered in a kindly spirit.

>> Yet their business models are reliant on us acting ethically.

The way I understand it, every structure in an organised society relies on people acting ethically, or in any case not going out of their way to harm each other without a very good reason.

For example. If I go to the doctor I trust that she won't suggest treatments I don't need because she wants to take my money. That sort of thing.

For me anyway at least one practical purpose served by morality is that it ensures a society remains functional and does not degenerate into chaos.

This is the foundation of his complaint that large firms are not ethical.

I've had multiple people try to explain to me why morals are necessary for society, as if I'm arguing against them. I'm not even advocating for shoplifting (though perhaps I could have phrased it better), but I think a lot of people may have intentionally misread my overall point.

We are in agreement that a common sense of morality is necessary for the proper functioning of society. My issue is precisely that powerful people in our society often do not share our sense of morality, they do not live by it, and they are not adequately punished for it. They use our system of ethics against us, and that is what I find frustrating.

I agree- I too think that financially or politically powerful people don't live by the same rules as the rest of us.

The answer of course is to band together and form units with more power than those people. Another benefit of living in a society, I guess.

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