Hate to be cliche, but reminds me of the opening scene in Fight Club where Edward Norton's character describes how insurance adjusters(?) determine if a recall is cheaper than the lawsuits from dead/injured people, they do it, otherwise... they don't.
Why would Amazon behave less profitably? Simply because we perceive it to be more moral?
Yes. Why is this so controversial? Why are we okay with profits being more important than ethics?
No, to really drive the point corporate officers need to go to jail.
"Why?" aside, there are a few mechanisms behind your question-begging.
Capital itself is amoral. Money doesn't want anything, is not constrained or affected by ethics or morality, and can be used for kittens and torture in exactly the same ways and in the same form.
Companies are created by people, so they can have principles under which the company is guided (by people), and people in turn have ethics (good or bad). Either through weakness or avarice, despite any personal feelings, all public benefit takes a back seat to profits. This is the morality of most capitalist companies: whatever it takes.
It's a cop-out in favor of capital. "Welp, the company doesn't allow me to act according to my ethics because [something about the primacy of shareholders]," say those with power in the company. Any criticism of the morality of capitalist companies is ridiculed as reducing profits, often called "leaving money on the table" and seen nearly-universally in Western societies as a fireable offense for any businessperson hewing to the idea. It's a reason to reduce a person's control over any part of the capital flows that comprise day to day business and finance.
It's a morality of bigotry in favor of capital, and part of "growing up" is learning how to be a "team player" and suppressing one's own preferences in order to perpetuate this bigotry. Comes now Amazon into the picture...
Both are continuums, with profits being accurately quantified, and ethics being quite vague, subject to culture and people and history - it's no surprise not every actor comes to the same actions given the same situation.
I say this as a capitalist, but the answer is capitalism.
Our greed-based system incentivizes hoarding and profit above all else, with the logic being, an unrepentant search for profit will, as a side effect, produce the best living conditions and wealthiest people.
It is what it is, but it's a form of "scrub logic" or "loser logic" to run a business in a capitalist system which puts morals above profits. Generally, you will never be successful on a large scale, and all large actors will dominate you easily. There are very, very few exceptions.
The question is at that point what do you do? And to boot the amount of money being saved by this will be peanuts.
I would say something to the effect of “stop I don’t want a part in that please follow the correct process and investigate properly.” That’s what should happen when faced with incidents like this.
The notion that we can design a perfect legal system that will always coerce prosocial behavior from sociopaths is absurd. One of the founding assumptions of a democracy is that most people, being humans, will behave humanely. In some circumstances, they need guidance and modest incentives, which is why we have things like building codes, health codes, and workplace safety standards. In rarer circumstances, some people are so awful that we need criminal sanctions to remove bad apples from the ability to cause harm.
We should not expect people to give up their moral sense just because they are cashing a paycheck. And we must not excuse leaders for being monsters just because they get a bigger slice of the pie.
If the former, I'm super disappointed but not surprised. It is no secret that anyone who remotely questions the criticism of Amazon is downvoted on this forum.
And I say that as someone who avoids spending a dollar out of protest against that company. I really find their practices terrible.
Lots of folks on HN are in management. I'll assume that none of them have killed any employees recently... Was that because the proper government agencies have regularly informed them of their duty not to kill employees? Or was it rather that many of us are human beings and don't want to regularly kill people just to save few dollars on e.g. sufficient training programs?
I would argue the actual cover up is much worse, as if it were successful it would allow behavior to continue unimpeded.
This is why whistleblowers deserve protection above and beyond normal lawsuit situations, because there's almost always a big incumbent on the other end of the deal who still wants the story squashed.
More calls for transparency, more calls for public offices to be held accountable, will always be needed to push back against the tide of influence from all the money floating around.
Good for Stallone for quitting and reporting, and I hope this gets way broader coverage along with every other story like this.
And the reason this isn't a "well-run country"... is what, exactly?
Might the influence of companies like Amazon have something to do with it?