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Comment by xenocyon | Hacker News Reader

> prevalence indicates the customers appreciate their presence

Focusing solely on consumers ignores negative externalities. There are many situations in which cost benefits from such externalities (slavery, pollution, human rights abuses, animal mistreatment) can lead to a favorable marketplace position vs competitors who do not exploit such externalities.

What is more, many of these exploits (slavery, pollution, human rights abuses, animal mistreatment) were or are legal at the time such exploitation occurred. Therefore using legality as sole criterion of propriety is insufficient. A moralistic/ethical take on business is, far from a negative thing, highly necessary.

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I think it's helpful to separate out pricing from product when talking about morality in business.

What a product should cost depends on how much people are willing to pay for it. Whether a product should be allowed to exist depends on whether it's morally acceptable.

The issue with slaves, and products that pollute the environment or mistreat living things isn't how much they cost - it's that they exist at all.

> I think it's helpful to separate out pricing from product when talking about morality in business.

I don't think the two are so easily separable. If you take for example, "a dozen eggs", most people would consider that an acceptable product. But if you said "a dozen eggs for ten cents", for those to be legitimate eggs, they must be stolen. If you could somehow inspect them and guarantee they were legitimate, I am sure plenty of people would accept those stolen eggs at that price, but their willingness to pay for it doesn't mean the existence of a market for "a dozen eggs for ten cents" is moral.

I'd argue that blaming the buyer is not appropriate though - the problem is the lack of regulation (preventing theft in this case) so you can blame the thieves and/or the police/government, but you can't expect the buyer (or anyone) to determine exactly what price is too good to be true. If you could, then we wouldn't need to have a market pricing system in the first place.

I'm reminded of how people would express outrage over products made in a low wage country being defective or toxic, and sometimes a response would be "well, people who demand ultra-cheap products deserve what they get". That's a denial of the fraudulent aspect of such a transaction, and the inability of the consumer to solve it.

This is such a beautiful answer. I never thought of that, what we consider today as the absurd was knife the norm, so challenging the quo is so important

I don't think the poster used legality as the moral compass, rather, consumer choice was the moral compass.

If consumers lack the moral conciousness on their day to day transactions, then how can we expect them to make the right moral choices when they vote?

What? You don’t think people give more thought to who they vote for than buying a burrito?

No, actually.

Everyday I'm more inclined to believe that it's about equal. You've heard of single issue voters yes?

I addressed consumer choice in my first paragraph. Let me expand on that:

There have in fact been successful consumer-led movements, but the most successful of these concern cases where the consumers also happened to be the same people being exploited (colonial India's rejection of dumped British textiles, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Boston tea party, etc).

Cases where consumers have acted en masse on behalf of another exploited class are a lot fewer and weaker. To some extent, one may point to the current growth of organic animal products as an example of this, but even in this case, this has been boosted by consumers seeing these choices (in some cases rightly, in some wrongly) as also healthier for human end consumers besides the question of animal cruelty.

History's guide suggests that while morally-minded consumers can and should vote with their wallets, such personal virtuous choices are largely useless without a larger movement to effect change.

Which of those apply here, exactly?

If consumers are not morally-minded enough to act on the behalf of another exploited class, then how can you expect them to vote on behalf of the exploited class?

And if history suggests that people's virtuous choices are largely useless, then how is their voting going to be any better?

That assumes consumers actually have a choice to make in the situation. For example let's say you disagreed with how Comcast throttles the internet or behaves in monopolistic behavior. Your only option to make the moral choice is to simply not have internet at all in certain regions.

A more topical one might be if you disagree with a company using sweatshop labor. Figuring out which companies engage in sweatshop labor and avoiding them is a remarkably difficult task, not in the least because companies do whatever they can in order to hide said actions. And even if you do manage to create a list of good/bad companies, there's no guarantee that you can purchase solely from the good companies without having to go through some other morally dubious medium such as Amazon.

The idea of shopping based on your moral conscious might've worked 50 years ago when the supply chain was far smaller, but nowadays it's so complex as to be almost unfathomable for one user to shop their moral compass without touching at least one thing they disagree with.

Comcast is in a position to throttle the internet because voters voted against the interests of the consumers. Specifically, the voters restricted other market participants from competing with Comcast. So the consumers are not acting in their own best interest as consumers and they're not acting in their own best interest as voters. Why is Comcast on the hook?

With regards to the sweatshop labor: if you care not to buy sweatshop clothes and you can't reasonably establish the origins of the clothes, then don't buy them. Only stick with manufacturers who have had their products verified by a trusted third party.

For your first argument: Isn't that argument absolving companies of all blame possible? If a company for example chooses to dump waste in a local river and there aren't any laws preventing that, is that because of the consumers failing to act in their own best interest? I just want to establish according to your logic at which point a company should be blamed for immoral behavior.

It's also overly reductive and ignores things like voter suppression, extralegal affairs and abusing the court system.

For your second argument, you seemed to ignore my original point which is that it's generally impossible to actually establish the origin of said clothing due to the complex supply chain behind the scenes. Even if it's a trusted third party, that clothing is still being delivered via companies that deliver sweatshop clothing and sold in stores which sell sweatshop clothing. At a certain point some percentage of what you pay will go to support said sweatshops whether directly or indirectly, so how can you expect a consumer to operate in a full moralistic behavior when all of their actions are losses? At that point the only winning move is to not play, which is also not possible because, well, Capitalism.

On the issue of moral responsibility, I'm not sure I follow the analogy with dumping waste. Comcast has monopoly status because the government gives them exclusive access to the market. The company should be blames for immoral behavior when it morally responsible for the situation at hand. Comcast didn't make the laws that give it monopoly status, the voters did through their representatives.

Given how many people actually don't even bother to vote, I doubt voter suppression is the problem. It seems like an issue of implementation and limitation of the current political system. In contrast, "voter" turnout by consumers is 100%. Every product you buy is a vote you cast.

With regards to tracing the origins of a product: you're trying to fix a problem that's even worse with government. If you're so concerned that you aren't able to identify the origins of a product with 100% certainty, then we ought to compare it with the baseline: what is the trust factor with government? At any rate, the traceability of a product can get as accurate as you want it to be... so long as you pay enough money to establish it. If you want, you can be flown to every part of the world and you can personally ensure that every fiber of your clothes is not coming from a sweatshop. Of course, that would be insanely expensive, but it is possible. 99.99999999999% of consumers don't want that much transparency.

> slavery, pollution

right, so if you get pizza delivery, you're probably Hitler running Deep Horizon. What a nice way to argue your point.

You're right externalities exist but I doubt there are any significant ones in food delivery.

Half of the examples given can easily apply to food delivery, namely pollution and human rights abuses.

Which human right is being abused here? People download the driver apps and work for them of their own free choice.

As for pollution, if that's immoral, then so is going to the restaurant to eat itself as well as driving in general.

> Which human right is being abused here? People download the driver apps and work for them of their own free choice.

Not counting of course the fact that in certain regions of the world, if they don't do that they'll starve to death.

I'm not aware of anyone running Uber, DoorDash, etc. where that's true. They require some sort of transport which prices the poor out of being able to provide that service in the poorest area I know of where such services are popular (Brazil).

It's not unusual for poor people who don't own cars to rent (with a Uber driver discount). Otherwise, they work using bicycles in the case of Uber Eats and other food delivery services. Source: I live in Brazil.

The argument recommends take out which also involves driving somewhere, and given that deliverers many times deliver to more than one household this is an argument for delivery over take out. Also it's not significant, even with a carbon tax to eliminate this externality that would be at most a dime or quarter of pollution.

And human rights abuse? I had a job delivering, and it was honestly one of my favorite jobs. The pay wasn't great but just cruising around listening to music all night was awesome.

"It can't possibly be happening because it never happened to me" is a pretty weak argument.

Original argument was "bad things happen"

then "humans right abuse is somehow related to delivery but I won't specify how"

then I replied "I was a deliverer and it was a fine job"

Of the three arguments mine is most relevant.

Maybe you can explain how subway delivery involves human rights abuse.

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