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Comment by rmrfstar | Hacker News Reader

Because we live in a society with social norms and a moral code. If anything, we should expect more morality from institutions that avail themselves of limited liability legal forms.

This "corporations should be cynical sociopaths" idea is even newer than the limited liability corporate form, which is itself a modern invention.

Before the current era of hyper-institutionalization and hyper-legalism there was a concept called "natural law". It basically meant morality, as understood at the time.

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Often, society is wrong and capitalism is right.

When society is prejudiced against a group (not the fake prejudice that society complains about - major broadcasters like Fox and CNN are both probably championing groups who have plenty of support from society, but maybe other groups are actually marginalised but it wouldn't be broadly OK to say it if they were) then it's not society's moral code that helps them (if anything it hurts them), it's businesses that only care about money who will still deal with them.

Examples?

Latinos and people with mental illness (and fat people) are kinda still acceptable targets. Poor whites. Men in some contexts. Asians in some contexts. One of the biggest issues with the whole anti-discrimination movement now is that it is inherently reductionist - it has to be some grand intersectional operatic fight with clear goodies and baddies who are always winners or losers in some deep conspiratorial structure of society, they can't appreciate that discrimination isn't always so black and white and that often context can matter because for the "theory" to work it always has to be about some imagined power struggle.

What? That isn't the argument most anti-discrimination people make.

Most argue that subconscious bias and wealth inequality due to historical reasons are a significant part of discrimination. I've not met someone 'anti-discrimination' who believes there is a deep conspiracy of people working to instill discrimination across society.

In modern times in the western world, conspiratorial sort of discrimination seems to me to occur more in pockets or if the culture of an organisation goes bad and festers. But it's rarely overt or widespread. More subtle and nuanced forms of discrimination are still everpresent of course, but everyone I discuss and work with in these issues knows this all too well.

Oh I've definitely encountered rhetoric that suggests middle class white-appearing males have intentionally and in bad faith created discriminatory structures because their power complex is what gets them off at night. I did go to a very liberal college though. I hope that stance is not becoming mainstream...

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