Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know why people keep expressing surprise at things like this.

Contrary to what the U.S. Supreme Court would have you believe, corporations are not people and do not have morals or values. They are organizations that seek to maximize profit and grow.

Any values a corporation projects are merely reflections of whatever the dominant moral force is in a given time and place.

American corporations in the U.S. in 2022 project values of wokeness because the woke left is presently the dominant cultural force in the U.S. In 1950's America, the dominant cultural force was cultural conservatism and patriotism so naturally corporations projected conservative and patriotic values. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that a large corporation operating in China in 2022 will reflect the values of the CCP.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, but expecting a corporation to have meaningful morals in the same way a human does is like expecting your dog to do the dishes. Based on what they are, they're simply not capable of the task.

>corporations are not people and do not have morals or values

The irony of this is that all corporations and all decisions and actions taken by corporations are made by people. If anything corporations are the most clear and unmistakable reflection of what it truly means to be human without the masks we wear in daily life.

Other than that, yeah I get what you're saying.

This isn't true when the people making the decisions are atypical humans in terms of morality. Consider two identical corporations where one has a normal morally conscious person and the other has a sociopath. If the second corp has an edge in business you could see how it could lead to non-average decision makers.

Attaching a term like "wokeness" to minority dissent over decades or centuries of systemic, cultural, economic, political discrimination, oppression, or abuse in an attempt to group every type of challenge that doesn't fit within a certain criteria of "conservatism and patriotism" is a false narrative. It seems that everyone is trying to find a scapegoat for their own failures or lack of mobility. Arguably, where and how you start in life makes a big impact on where you end up. Therefore, discrimination and oppression with historical basis, spanning generations, in one form or another, is very much more difficult to overcome or to endure.

Corporations ARE amoral entities; reacting to consumer sentiment that often shifts based on cultural or political trends. Their aim is to make a profit for shareholders and other stakeholders. During the times of "cultural conservatism and patriotism" it was enough to say "made in America", albeit unnecessary, since globalization's effects were not an issue. Company leadership being labelled as communist sympethizers may have stoked fears and anger. Being a former supporter of the Nazi party or the KKK (morally objectionable sentiments) meant little. So, was it corporations that were immoral or the lack of outrage from the majority conservative patriots that could explain this difference better?

The CEO is elected by a board and the board is chosen by shareholders. If the board and CEO don't perform they can be fired.

The threat of termination is what causes someone "typical" to act "atypically." Survival instincts kick in, and anything goes.

Or you could be right. The CEO in such a position refuses to act immorally and is than fired by the shareholders for not hitting performance metrics. They then hire another and another... until they find a CEO willing to throw away his morality to hit those performance numbers.

Do the shareholders care? No.

> corporations are not people and do not have morals or values. They are organizations that seek to maximize profit and grow.

They are however made up of people who make moral decisions based on their values, including in their businesses. Plenty of corporations choose to do or not do things based on their ethics and morals. And acting as an agent of a corporation doesn't free you from moral peril when making those decisions.

I don't expect Intel the Corporation to have values, but I do expect the people within Intel who choose where they manufacture or purchase manufactured goods to have qualms about using slave labor for it, supporting a genocide in doing so.

>I don't expect Intel the Corporation to have values, but I do expect the people within Intel who choose where they manufacture or purchase manufactured goods to have qualms about using slave labor for it, supporting a genocide in doing so.

Human behavior is remarkably different depending on whether or not I'm the sole person on stage responsible for an action or whether I'm a single anonymous vote.

> Human behavior is remarkably different depending on whether or not I'm the sole person on stage responsible for an action or whether I'm a single anonymous vote.

This is exactly it. In a large organization, everyone can mentally offload any responsibility to someone else.

The rank and file can say "It's not my decision, the execs told me to do this".

The executives can say, "It's the board pushing me to do xyz and if I don't do it then someone else will, so I might as well just keep my job".

And the board can say, "Well, we just told the execs to maximize shareholder value, we didn't tell them to do anything unethical."

So you end up with a situation where no one feels like they bear any responsibility for the actions of an enterprise and you have a group of individuals who, as individuals, are moral but are contributing to an organization that is acting immorally in the aggregate.

>are moral but are contributing to an organization that is acting immorally in the aggregate.

I would argue that the individuals are immoral and the corporations foster conditions that reveal this fundamental immorality that is usually hidden. We only act moral if there's a consequence detrimental to ourselves.

That's not the definition of morality. That's self-interest or self-preservation. Adhering to a set of guidelines or rules with empathy, regardless if it doesn't immediately register as detrimental to ourselves is more like it.

It's not the definition but it's interrelated. When survival directly contradicts morality. Survival takes priority and morality is overridden.

Hence people act immorally in the name of survival.

Granted. Nevertheless, "survival" might be subjective as well then. Anyway, I'll either have to come back to this at another point or leave it alone :D lest I go too far down the rabbit hole. Thanks

Doing the right thing morally and doing the right thing for business are not mutually exclusive. Actually, this case is a good example.

Please see these comments [0]. But essentially, Intel is in a medium and long term losing position in CCP China regardless of whether it glosses over slave concentration camps. It seems to have chosen to value CCP China supply chains. It will face a capricious CCP that will disrupt those supply chains sooner or later. It will face the creation of a CCP China national chip champion with a monopoly on local sales.

This will be bad for business. It is of course still bad to play semantic public relations games with slave concentration camps.

Had it maintained a moral position against Xinjiang slave concentration camps, it would have been pushed to look for alternative supply chains. This in turn would have put Intel in a better position to whether storms created by CCP when using trade policies as foreign policy instruments.

Good business and some basic moral decency go together. It is so sad for humanity to believe otherwise.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897791

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