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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

You're pulling this moral relativism play. The point is that Blizzard is an American company, with a largely liberal employee base and has explicitly shown support for certain causes.

They should take a stand. You can't please everyone, so it might as well be those with the right values. And people who think that Muslims should be interred or that HK should cede all political freedom are wrong.

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> with a largely liberal employee base

Corporations are chartered to act on behalf of the interests of their shareholders, not, insofar as the two groups are different, their employees.

1) Corporations and their boards are not blood-bound to do everything in their power to maximize value. They can act ethically, and it is easily (and morally) defensible that acting with values is in the long term interest of the company.

2) The article specifically references employees, so I also added that angle.

> Corporations and their boards are not blood-bound to do everything in their power to maximize value. They can act ethically, and it is easily (and morally) defensible that acting with values is in the long term interest of the company.

Sure, but literally anything can be “acting with values”, depending on the value system chosen. There's no particular reason that would be determined by the political preferences of employees. It would be more natural for a corporation interested in sacrificing near term returns for some kind of ethics to do so based on the shareholders preferences than employers (or, if the gesture at ethics was intended as a long term business health approach, to do so based on what it was expected potential future customers would respond well to in the corporate story.)

This is a myth. There is no fiduciary duty to maximize profits. There is the duty of loyalty, which mostly means you can't embezzle from the company, and there is duty of care, which means you can't do anything grossly incompetent that ends up harming the company. Duty of care is a VERY high bar (e.g. neglect safety standards and end up shopping e coli tainted food) and is nowhere close to being able to justify the "shareholder primacy" idealogy parroted by conservative think-tanks.

>so it might as well be those with the right values.

By 'right', you mean of course YOUR right.

You can't please everybody, so you should please ME.

Yes! What values do you hold? Aren't you disappointed when an organization goes against them? Much less, when they have previously stated they agree with you?

Fascism and the removal of political freedom should not be taken lightly. This should not be controversial.

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