is there moral obligation to do your job well instead of let's say watching youtube and doing bare minimum not to get fired?
It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people but not from companies made of these people. Somehow it's fine for companies to be jerks.
Do we though? We expect people to not break the rules, e.g murder or steal. We don't expect people to stop eating meat, polluting the earth, or generally to stop being extremely selfish. If we expected everyone to be moral you and I wouldn't be spending money on vacations and buying computer games but on trying to save poor kids in Africa and Bangladesh.
Maybe I'm hanging around the wrong people (I often wonder where all the "right" ones are), but that's how it is. And if I don't play the same game, I'll keep getting fucked until I die. It's really depressing.
Empirical evidence says otherwise (about altruism): see the work of Daniel Batson - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Batson
As for good people, there are many. There are thousands who give at least 10% of their income to the most cost-effective charity they can find - https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
There are thousands of people working very hard on the most effective solutions to the world's most important problems - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
There is plenty of hope. Find better people, work to improve yourself, the world, and others.
At any rate, for smaller things, my experience is that most folks will not throw you under the bus. At high stakes, it really just depends on whether the relationship with you (and folks you might complain to) and/or relationship to whatever intrinsic value system matters more or less than the stakes.
Once you learn about the horrors of the animal abuse happening thanks to the money with which you buy meat, I think it's the right thing to stop. And similarly, to encourage others to decrease their meat consumption by letting them know that by buying meat, they are very likely going against their values (just ask them if they would pay to torture a dog, for example).
Instilling better norms in a society is hard work, but it's a good thing. Thanks to the efforts of our predecessors, we now look down on beating one's wife, for example. Let's join together, and make it the norm to give 10% of our income to the most cost-effective charities we can find (see https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ )
Well, people know. Maybe they don't KNOW know, in the sense of actually visiting a slaughter house and smelling the blood, but I'm sure most people know about animal shipments, tiny cages, and that gassing or slashing animals throats isn't a picnic. Personally I donate money to an animal protection program (probably don't donate enough). Conversations I have with people in my life about this are overwhelmingly futile and people become quite hostile when you talk to them about this.
I encourage people to see a wide continuum between eating 100% meat and eating 0% animal products. I express that I understand the challenges in decreasing one's meat consumption. I point out that it's not all or nothing - you can be "mostly vegan" (while still consuming animal products sometimes).
It's best to have conversations like this when the person is asking, not because you "caught" them eating an animal product.
Because of how grim the reality is for animals raised for food, most people are reluctant to be exposed to what it means. They will hope that (and not look for evidence against their belief that) the meat they buy comes from a better place (it's worth pointing out that in the US about 99% of meat comes from factory farms).
As I said - people's values are likely aligned. Polls consistently show that people do not approve of animal abuse.
The final argument that made me drastically decrease my meat consumption was the empirical fact that individual choices matter:while supermarkets are not 100% responsive (buying 1 item less decreases their next order by 1 item), they are responsive to demand. And if they buy in batches (which they likely do), you have a chance of triggering a "next-larger" batch order. On average it all works out to an (economic) elasticity of less than 1, but a far cry from 0 (depends on type of meat, but rough figure of 0.5 is a sensible underestimate).
I am not under the illusion that I was the person who caused that change. Change rarely works this way. Our decisions to do something (especially this drastic) are composed of numerous influences.
Part of change is about what people expect to be the new normal. If all your friends are ok with homosexual marriages, you'll likely change your point of view soon enough anyway. If many of your friends at least mention that they are concerned about factory farm abuses of animals, you might one day decide to eat one less hamburger.
Change is much easier when younger; I changed during college years. I'm now 35 and I'm sure to have nudged at least some of my friends to eat less meat in the last decade. Much of it probably was just my consistency. If your friend tries a fad diet, you can ignore it. If their diet lasts 5 years, you'll at least want to learn more about why and how.
It's an important issue to change others' opinions on. A great book about this subject is "Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change" by Nick Cooney
Morality is a complicated thing to define[citation needed] but I would posit we actually generally have a high moral standard for each other in the west. We expect each other to not lie pathologically, push others away when they take advantage of those around them (e.g. scammers, con artists) enforce the rules of monogamous relationships (for the vast majority), return lost belongings to each other, encourage food safety, and so on.
And you can find secular explanations for all of those, but most people are just taught that those are the right things and stick to it. Sure, some of the integrity of those areas are eroding over time, but generally speaking society is still held together with morals.
In America we pretty much all get a pass for buying clothes, for instance, which has some considerable moral strings attached to it. We could make our own, but that’s just not a reasonable way to live life here. You would have no company if that was the way you chose to spend your time, so it would be a sad existence, and as humans we are wired to want to behave like those around us.
Bottom line is that while there may be morality inflation, i.e. when you judge the modern lifestyle on an absolute scale, it looks bad, that there is still a range of acceptability, and if you venture outside of it, that’s no bueno. That doesn’t mean we don’t expect people to be moral (100% would be “perfect”).
No
You can choose to do well to avoid being fired.
You can choose to do well to chase a promotion.
You can choose to do well because the work interests you.
But you are not morally obligated to do anything, and if your employer is not very good at evaluating your work, then — like a man who buys a gym membership and never goes — that's on them.
Both you and GP seem to be talking from an amoral perspective. To many people there is certainly a moral obligation to put in an honest effort and pay fair wages.
It's immoral to exploit your employees, lie to them, not keep to a contract, deny them the growth opportunities they were lead to believe they have etc. But to negotiate a lower pay, that's not immoral. As an employee, take it or leave it.
To be clear, I'd love to get a SF salary and live in an Alpine valley in Italy or France. Maybe the world will come to that arrangement. But if not, I wouldn't call it immoral.
of course not. I do that all the time and don't think I'm doing something imoral. it's up to the employer to figure out that I could do more tickets. I'm not stupid to say: hey, I finished my tickets, give me more work :))
Look at many of the products we make together. Why would we hide behind laws that protect bad practices and think those same companies take a moral high ground on this issue. It is, and always will be, due in part to fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, about the money.
The duty of a business is to keep the business healthy. This whole "profit at any cost" is a fairly new development.
You're not morally obligated to agree to literally anything, but you are morally obligated to uphold your end of an agreement.
We expect different behavior from a beehive than we expect from the bees, don't we?
Obviously you wouldn’t have suggested this if my expectation was correct, but it would’ve been my guess if I didn’t use meta-reasoning about why you might be giving that example.
How can I be not wrong? "Entrepreneur" is not an answer.