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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

>It's the difference between a Walmart, which everyone expects to be pretty low ethically, and Blizzard,

The only ethics corporations have are making sure their share holders maximize profit as much as possible, any other ethics they pretend to have exists because they think it will lead to that or they're forced to. Corporations are mandated to do this. If it's a choice between ethics and shareholder profits for a corporation, the latter will always come first because that's why corporations exist. Corporations never have and never will have ethics as long as they exist in their current form where their entire purpose is maximizing profits. I have no idea why people seem to forget this these days.

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One reason is that it's not true. Corporations are limited in their ability to say "screw the shareholders", but they aren't required to be unethical whenever they stand to make a profit from it.

Even apart from that, it just seems like an overly reductionist perspective. Why couldn't an honest commitment to act ethically help the bottom line?

>Why couldn't an honest commitment to act ethically help the bottom line?

Well if it did you'd think corporations would act ethically, whereas reality says otherwise and they don't unless forced by government or public pressure. The world's totally fucked right now because of corporate greed.

Every day I read a new story about how some corporation is acting completely and utterly unethically. It

https://www.hoover.org/research/what-purpose-corporation

>There are two levels of corporate duties to shareholders. First, corporate boards and officers deal at arm’s length with outsiders, and here, their responsibility is governed by the so-called business judgment rule, which protects them against suits by shareholders so long as they follow appropriate procedures in reaching a decision and act in good faith to maximize shareholder value. This rule both constrains corporate insiders but also protects them from liability if their good faith efforts turn out less well financially than expected. Indeed, if officers had to make good on every loss that occurs when deals go sour, no one would take on such roles. And second, whenever corporate officials enter into any kind of self-dealing transaction, the standard of care is much higher, given the conflict of interest. For such transactions, insiders must analyze whether corporate shareholders received “fair value” from the transaction.

I'm not sure I understand the response. Certainly many corporations do behave unethically, but I don't see why that means we should never believe any company will be ethical.

Why should I trust entities that regularly prove they give zero fucks about anything other than the bottom line? Why should I give them the benefit of the doubt? That's like believing an abusive spouse will change.

Corporations regularly flout environmental protection laws, they regularly flout human rights, they spy on us, they do skirt any and all laws they can, they abuse tax systems, they're responsible for large environmental disasters and end up throwing money at things to make everyone shut up about it, they lobby governments to get laws changed in their favour, they exploit children and impoverished people, they go after drinking water, healthcare and the basic necessities of a modern civilization in search of more profit at the expense.of people. Fuck corporations.

There is no legal doctrine for corporations to maximize profits. This is largely think-tank idealogy that has successfully won over the public mind. "Legal or moral duty to maximize profits" was a rarely uttered phrase in the 60s and one would hardly call the United States "not as capitalist" back then.

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