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Comment by qyv | Hacker News Reader

"I was only following orders."

Edit to add: If you are being asked to perform illegal or unethical acts as part of your employment, then perhaps termination is an ideal course of action? Unless of course your personal enrichment outweighs legalities or ethics in your worldview?

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And I wasn't implying engineers should be entirely blameless. Everyone has a limited understanding of legal systems too complex for one person to fully grasp. And workers far below the level of decision makers should be judged according to evidence of their knowledge and responsibility. Likewise those who give orders should bear more responsibly.

All these "companies take on a life of their own" arguments sound a lot like executives priming the pump of potential jurors with excuses. If decision makers cannot bear responsibility because of a company size or organizational structure then we can make some sizes and structures illegal before they stumble/march into devastating incompetence.

It may be fine in some countries, but saying that you’ll make some organization sizes and structures illegal, barring other criminal activity, smells like a violation of the freedom of association.

Why is that a good freedom?

Because it allows people to associate with whom they choose to. Remove that and you’ve opened the gate to legal racism, legally institutionalized homophobia, banning of religion; the list is endless. The five freedoms are the pillars of our Constitution. Without them, we are no better than China or Russia or even any third-world hellhole you care to mention.

I’m under the impression we already don’t have freedom of association if it’s inconvenient enough. (Please see Portland moms.)

I don't see that even a little bit, your cause effect isn't explained.

I should phrase it differently. Why is an absolute freedom of association more important then the freedom from being harmed by large associations with amoral machinations. The original argument asks that if large corporations inherently obscure moral outcomes, maybe they are immoral, which is an argument that puts these two moral axioms in conflict. Simply stating that one side wins is thought terminating; its important to argue for why its better.

Morality is highly variable, depending on the observers beif system. Legality is the only framework that we can establish in common. Ethics comes in second as it can be established by a group and does not bind those outside the group.

It doesn't matter if it's a good freedom, the chances of the US repealing the 1st Amendment any time soon are basically nil. You'd have a better chance of getting Apple/Amazon/Google to voluntarily split up their own companies out of the goodness of their own hearts -- it just isn't going to happen.

The only argument that actually matters here is whether or not restrictions on corporate structure actually do violate freedom of association or not.

I'm reasonably skeptical that they do, given that the 1st Amendment hasn't stopped us from enforcing antitrust and monopoly legislation in the past. Yeah yeah, Citizens United and all that, but we regulate companies all the time.

But I'd still want an actual lawyer to weigh in on that, I wouldn't feel confident saying that there aren't limits on how far we can go in that direction.

Antitrust doesn't violate the first amendment, so clearly limits on corporate scale aren't unconstitutional, so the legal defense is insufficient and the moral question stands.

Like I wrote:

> I'm reasonably skeptical that they do, given that the 1st Amendment hasn't stopped us from enforcing antitrust and monopoly legislation in the past. Yeah yeah, Citizens United and all that, but we regulate companies all the time.

> But I'd still want an actual lawyer to weigh in on that, I wouldn't feel confident saying that there aren't limits on how far we can go in that direction.

It doesn't necessarily hold that because one thing is legal, everything is legal. For example, we have 1st Amendment restrictions on threats and libel, but in the US hate speech is still protected speech. 1st Amendment exceptions are generally pretty narrow and specific in the US.

In the same way, clearly some corporate regulation is OK. It does not follow that there's literally no limit on what the government can dictate about how a company can operate. I would prefer to get input from a lawyer before asserting that so confidently.

If a person is skirting responsibility at the expense of a structure, it isn't he fault of the structure but the one skirting responsibility.

Structures can and should be changed in this case. But shouldn't be outlawed.

> ...then we can make some sizes and structures illegal before they stumble/march into devastating incompetence.

Was with you until this part. Just hold them personally liable if someone gets hurt should they create an uncontrollable system and predictably fail to control it.

Right. My point was in response to excuses being made elsewhere that the nature of large companies mean these executives cannot be personally liable. So if we accept that the nature of huge companies is no one can be liable (I'm not convinced yet) then it would be time for capping sizes or outlawing structures.

Keep in mind the US already has laws around corporate structures and conflicts of interest. (Even if they're selectively applied.)

The nature of any size corporation is to have one person in charge. In terms of assigning responsibility I'd think that works better than the alternative you'd get by breaking it up. Namely a bunch of cooperating smaller firms only doing part of the job each, and able to point the blame at each other.

We heard the "too complex to understand" excuse a lot regarding the pricing of subprime debt. Except a lot of people did understand it was a problem. It's basically the "I'm too stupid to know what I was doing" defense. If we accept that defense and try to make regulation to protect them from failing (as was done in finance back then), we basically allow stupid people to continue to be in charge rather than being replaced as they need to.

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