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Comment by Grimm1 | Hacker News Reader

Amoral is the word you're looking for and Joel Bakan is clearly mistaken -- corporations are tabula rasa with a single directive, "grow" they then go on to embody the qualities of the leadership and the regulatory climate under which they exist.

It's up to the government and the people to limit their scope, or not if they choose. The mistake America made was legalizing corporate lobbying of the government which enabled regulatory capture, but that is an old mistake and there is no real will to change that other than the normal handwaving and guffawing.

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Corporate lobbying is not the only means by which regulators are captured. The revolving door between industry and regulatory agency is another and removal of that suggests a problem: do you want the regulations governing an industry to be made by people with no relevant experience? No, then they will hire people from the industry they are expected to regulate and those regulations will benefit established companies.

> corporations are tabula rasa with a single directive, "grow" they then go on to embody the qualities of the leadership and the regulatory climate under which they exist.

Compare with:

"viruses are tabula rasa with a single directive, "grow" they then go on to embody the qualities of the climate under which they exist."

Is the coronavirus a psychopath? It seems pretty obvious to me that it too, is amoral rather than immoral.

Note that I was capitalizing on the amorality for the purpose of the comparison.

I think that there's a reasonable argument to be made that we can place an expectation of agency and intent upon corporate executives that we can't place on a virus. So the coronavirus might not be expected to be a psychopath, just inconvenient.

> corporations are tabula rasa with a single directive, "grow"

Perpetual growth without moral bounds is a recipe for paperclip maximization, and effective net evil. See: climate change.

An amoral entity optimising for growth is a cancer. You may view this differently, but I see that as strictly evil.

Well, there was will to change that and a bipartisan piece of legislation did -- McCain Feingold. What happened is that the undemocratic supreme court struck down with bullshit justification.

But if they are people they can also lobby in their interests. I have 24 hours a day to do everything in my life. How many hours does Exxon have a day to lobby the government with?

>It's up to the government and the people to limit their scope, or not if they choose.

That sounds a lot like victim blaming, tbh, particularly given the influence corporations have on eg pollution.

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