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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

> No company cares about anything

It's a common misconception that corporations are amoral incentive-driven machines impervious to ethics, morals or mission.

Corporations are run by leaders.

Many leaders choose to pursue unethical and immoral activities to maximize profit. They justify their actions by saying "it's just business", or "we have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders to maximize earnings per share by whatever means necessary".

Other leaders realize that an ethical purpose can often deliver outsized profits over the long term. Leaders with a moral mission make decisions that sometimes sacrifice short-term profits with the intent to build an organization and a brand for long term.

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>t's a common misconception that corporations are amoral incentive-driven machines impervious to ethics, morals or mission.

Not really, those leaders are pretty quick to hide behind the corporate veil when it's convenient for dodging questions of moral (or even legal) responsibility.

The whole point of corporate legal structure is to create an entity that is _separate_ from the humans that occupy offices. That entity is not a person.

OK, but isn't this largely semantics? Saying Apple doesn't care about customers may technically be true, but that is taking it quite literally. The statement can also be meant to imply the people in Apple care, of course no one would speculate that a non human corporate entity would care.

I also largely agree that the Apple meme of privacy being trotted out lately doesn't quite jive with this news, but at the same time surely there are people who care about it at Apple, and maybe as a whole they even prioritize it more than others.

But I also don't know how much I really disagree with the FBI's position. In general I have seen this kind of access to be used in the right situations (IE collecting communications of criminals). I understand this can be a slippery slope, but should we trade that for leaving clear evidence against criminals unturned in the name of "privacy"?

The people at Apple who write the code usually do care about privacy. Their bosses and execs? It is harder to tell.

From the information I have, the majority of Apple employees do care about values such as privacy and ethical business practices, as well as product quality and usability, but those values can sometimes be undermined by executive decisions based on business and monetary motives.

That doesn't matter one bit if they continue to work there when their ethics and values are not aligned.

> "That entity is not a person."

the (current) supreme court doesn't agree, and their opinion carries a tad more weight. corporations are basically super-persons in the eyes of the court, since corporations intrinsically funnel the resources of its many consituents, unlike individuals.

instead, any entity exerting outsized power, like corporations, should be held to higher standards of duty and transparency. that's an inherent value embedded in the US constitution that is absolutely being trampled over by power-seekers (commercial, political, or otherwise).

From a distance, to me it's interesting to read about fears of the FBI snooping in our phones and email, and see how quickly the discussion jolts to how immoral (or amoral) corporations are because one of them is not completely defying government.

(part of) how we mitigate unfettered power is pitting powerful entities against each other. the answer isn't "government!" or "law enforcement!" or "corporations!" but rather more even distributions of power, and lacking that, powerful entities in opposition.

that we also rationalize the actions of a corporation (to understand them) doesn't necessarily imply complicity. lacking more evenly distributed power, we should want apple to be pitted against google, the fbi, and the chinese government to funnel apple towards a privacy-oriented stance that it might not otherwise have.

incidentally, (many) americans vehemently support 2nd amendment rights as a way to have some semblance of power in an otherwise overwhelming power structure.

>Leaders with a moral mission make decisions that sometimes sacrifice short-term profits with the intent to build an organization and a brand for long term.

Shortly before being dragged off the stage by the stockholders. Careers have been ruined over not over-performing enough, let alone leading multi-million dollar enterprises off into the desert.

Worth noting that there are benefit corporations, or B-Corps, which get around this 'profits and nothing else' ideology. Some examples include Patagonia, Kickstarter, and Allbirds.

Thinking about long-term profits instead of short ones, and sacrificing profits for some greater moral purpose, are not at all the same thing.

It's entirely possible to do immoral things for the sake of profit while still being prudent about your company's future.

As for sacrificing profits to a moral end: private companies may do this occasionally. Not often, but sometimes. But the CEO of a publicly-traded company expressly does not have the option of sacrificing profits for any higher purpose, unless that directive comes from his shareholders. And in today's world, the shareholders of most major companies are of such a large number and have so many layers of detachment between themselves and the actual company (I don't even know what companies Betterment has me invested in; they can change every day) that the only common goal they can agree on is almost always profits.

An interesting exception to the norm is Facebook: despite being publicly-traded, Zuckerberg maintains both a majority holding and the position of CEO, and is therefore free to go on his crusade of "connecting the world", mostly ignoring what the other shareholders might want.

>> But the CEO of a publicly-traded company expressly does not have the option of sacrificing profits for any higher purpose, unless that directive comes from his shareholders.

This is not true AFAICT. In practice it might be.

to go a little deeper, corporate charters set out the values and goals of the company, as amended by the board from time to time, so it's whatever the (amended) charter says (it doesn't have to be solely profit-seeking). executives are judged by their ability to deliver on the goals of the charter.

baords are largely controlled by the various (professional) shareholders, and most, if not all, of them explicity seek profits above all else. that's one way markets get dominated by profit-seeking companies.

the other common argument is that in capital-oriented markets, not-primarily-profit-seeking corporations are at a competitive disadvantage over time, as the extra profits of greedy corporations can push them faster/further along the technology adoption/innovation curve (or economies of scale/scope).

so it's hard for such companies to survive. i don't think in practice that this is a dominant factor in competitive markets, but it's an argument often made (in business schools, for example).

If the CEO goes against the shareholders' wishes, he or she will simply be fired. The CEO works for shareholders and has no independent authority.

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