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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but so what?

What you're basically saying is that companies are acting in accordance with certain moral values, even though they don't intrinsically have those moral values. That's great news! That's downright fantastic! Instilling "true" morality is a difficult problem. We have bypassed that problem and gotten the same observable results by replacing it with a much simpler one.

Corporations are supposed to be automata that optimize an objective function. External pressure was applied, via both sanctions and public sentiment, and behold! Their behavior changed. The sanctions had the effect that was intended. That's better than you could say for many other policies.

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Yes. This is a perfect argument why society needs government regulations.

Without sanctions, corporations could be competing over who would supply the Russian army with uniforms if the ROI was there.

Yup, Corporations compete over supply of Arms to Saudi Arabia to indiscriminately bomb Yemen. This is a military intervention that's basically memory-holed in American media and is responsible for >10k casualties.

This is a very interesting comment, but this statement is concerning: "Corporations are supposed to be automata that optimize an objective function."

Of course, from the perspective of neoclassical economics, it is true, and of course, there are obligations to shareholders. But generally, I think it is great that corporations are not automata that optimize an objective function. Corporations are social organizations, and I think it roughly holds that the harder the problem is that a corporation is solving for some business purpose, the more space it needs to give for social aspects. It's not that all of management thinks about profit optimization from morning to evening.

corporations flip between being agents of morality and automata that optimize an objective function depending on what is currently politically and financially convenient for them.

I'd go a step further and suggest that the periods wherein they're "being agents of morality" are periods wherein they as automata determine that it is currently politically and financially convenient to be such.

I think it's problematic to think of companies as anything other than organizations maximizing profits.

If you have two companies A and B, where A maximizes profits, and B perhaps cares about profits but also has other goals, which company will grow faster, making the other less and less relevant?

Therefore I think a company's purpose is to maximize profits, and society's purpose is to make "good behavior" the most profitable.

This is not to say that it's impossible for a company to follow some moral goals and therefore become stronger due to the marketing power of such conduct, or high employee morale. What I want to say, that it would benefit our society if we worked out mechanisms that make it predictable and gather precedents to convince investors to such behaviors.

> Corporations are supposed to be automata that optimize an objective function.

Paperclips Inc will now extract the iron in your blood in order to maximize the number of paperclips it can produce. No hard feelings.

To extract iron from human blood, would de-optimize radically their objetive function.

>Corporations are supposed to be automata that optimize an objective function

I want a Venn diagram of people who endorse this kind of economic system and five minutes later tweet about how AI alignment risk is the biggest problem humanity faces

Yes, why kick at companies when they are trying to do the right thing.

But then again, maybe US is the most "moral" country in the world, since nobody ever pulls out of the US for US foreign policy/military aggression. /s

So nothing :)

Personally I read it as description of the mechanics behind corporate decision making and the possibility that for many companies this might be both ethically and financially a good move

If you don't actually have moral values then you're merely acting according to various pressures.

I don't think this decision is good (not selling to Russians) but we can imagine much worse decisions that follow from companies yielding to, say, social pressure.

A corporation is a legal simulacrum of a person. Personally I think the best you can hope for is a simulacrum of morality. I really do view them as automata, without an "internal personhood," and I think that influencing their behavior with external influences is a desirable and achievable goal.

Government sanctions are applied by a democratically-elected government, which has a variety of checks and balances in it. I agree that social pressure can go off the rails. In this particular case my gut is that social pressure is encouraging them to go along with the sanctions quickly and enthusiastically.

> Government sanctions are applied by a democratically-elected government, which has a variety of checks and balances in it. I agree that social pressure can go off the rails. In this particular case my gut is that social pressure is encouraging them to go along with the sanctions quickly and enthusiastically.

Is Red Hat responding to sanctions? I don't think so:

> (from the link) While relevant sanctions must guide many of our actions, we’ve taken additional measures as a company. Effective immediately, Red Hat is discontinuing sales and services in Russia and Belarus (for both organizations located in or headquartered in Russia or Belarus). This includes discontinuing partner relationships with organizations based in or headquartered in Russia or Belarus.

What we're seeing is the social outrage machine taking its turn at geopolitics. We'll see how that goes but I am not optimistic.

I don't think any of this helps Ukraine but I'm more worried about the precedent it sets.

So, for starters, they explicitly say that sanctions guide their actions, and they're also doing things in addition. As was already explained, it's the obvious play - why would you continue to pursue business in Russia right now? How are you going to get paid?

Second, "social outrage machine" is a pretty ridiculous characterization. You're painting this as if it's some Twitter mob upset about a minor grievance as opposed to the reality that a hostile country is committing war crimes.

> why would you continue to pursue business in Russia right now? How are you going to get paid?

Even if this is true, is it a good thing? Do we want sanctions that make it impossible to do business with a Russian citizen or company? Do we want companies to go beyond government sanctions?

> Second, "social outrage machine" is a pretty ridiculous characterization. You're painting this as if it's some Twitter mob upset about a minor grievance as opposed to the reality that a hostile country is committing war crimes.

It has not been established that Russia has committed war crimes. The social pressure brought to bear has the character of a twitter mob, it's as thoughtful, and I worry the consequences will be similar (bad).

There's something to be said for ratcheting up sanctions slowly. If you go all-in at once, the country being sanctioned has no incentive to change their behavior. There's also something undeniably weird about companies interfering in international relations.

> There's something to be said for ratcheting up sanctions slowly. If you go all-in at once, the country being sanctioned has no incentive to change their behavior.

I couldn't disagree more strongly. Russia is murdering thousands of people per day. Every day, including today. This is not the time for plodding deliberation. Quick action has the possibility of saving millions of homes and thousands of lives.

The cause of the sanctions is crystal clear. If Russia wants the sanctions to end they need to stop invading another country and murdering its citizens.

> There's also something undeniably weird about companies interfering in international relations.

Cutting off business relations is exactly how sanctions work. This happens both through explicit rules and implicit ones. Companies err on the side of leaving the sanctioned country to avoid compliance headaches, the risk of accidentally violating sanctions, and to avoid funding a murderous dictator.

All of this is a normal and expected part of how sanctions work.

> I couldn't disagree more strongly. Russia is murdering thousands of people per day. Every day, including today. This is not the time for plodding deliberation. Quick action has the possibility of saving millions of homes and thousands of lives.

In my experience this is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads to large mistakes.

This whole climate reminds me of post-9/11. Hope it goes better this time.

> Russia is murdering thousands of people per day

Hyperbole sounds good but what about sanctions on nations carrying out all the other military operations bombing people presently with US arms and even military assistance ? (Saudi bombing Yemen for some years now)

> It has not been established that Russia has committed war crimes.

They've been accused of multiple war crimes within a period of a few days.

Making people comply with moral values they wouldn't otherwise comply with is the super-glue holding society together. One can wish all day long that someone like Putin would be a decent human being, but otherwise social and financial pressures are the only non-lethal option for dealing with him. This extends down to your neighborhood or office level criminal as well.

fwiw I find this moral outrage quite selective. The Saudi's bomb civilians in yemen but everyone is good with that. I really can't imagine what the Ukranians are going through right now sitting at my cushy desk. But that's a horror all victims of war face. A few years ago there was a Hungarian journalist tripping fleeing Syrians and other victims of war and there was this huge debate as to why those refugees were not welcome. No debate now obviously.

The Saudis bomb Yemen with cluster bombs made in the US with US agreement while at the same time the US sits in the UN and declare cluster bombs an abomination when used by the Russians. The hypocrisy is mind blowing.

The purely sociopathic interpretation would be that moral values are themselves actions according to various pressures. Or do those pressures not count when they take forms like "treat others how you'd like to be treated" or "thou shalt not kill"?

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