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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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>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

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