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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

This enthusiasm to profit from borderline poison is unsettling. Not sure I could look my kids in the face if heavily invested in these industries.

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It is curious that political action is not first and foremost in our minds, if at all. We take it for granted that all manner of immoral production and consumption will be permitted.

Instead passive and voluntary actions like simply not investing in companies and not buying their products - possibly framed as something more principled like divestment - is our default setting.

Yeah, a scenario where everyone's "default setting" is trying to ban everything they consider "immoral" sounds pretty terrible.

Indeed, the first solution to every problem should be one size fits all and involve the implicit or explicit threat of imprisonment or death.

Well political action is being taken in different parts of the world. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audi...

Would you do the same for someone working at Facebook? Someone who makes alcohol?

It’s a moral stance and those are personal, not societal.

> Would you do the same for someone working at Facebook? Someone who makes alcohol?

This is about nicotine so these examples strike me as off topic.

> It’s a moral stance and those are personal, not societal.

Society level, moral choices are made all the time. Just ask some Supreme Court justices. And governments profit from nicotine consumption through sin taxes. Whose taxes should be solely devoted to paying for the externalities consumption causes.

Do you work on ad-tech or social media sites?

A lot of people worship at the altar of the almighty dollar. I mean shit, the head of the FDA goes to work for a giant tobacco company. Money talks.

It’s gross but it’s the world we live in and the culture we’ve largely cultivated.

I do not though and will not invest in tobacco companies for this reason.

If you have a pension fund, target date fund, market index, or many variety of diversified products in an IRA, 401k, or similar retirement account, you almost assuredly have money invested in tobacco.

If you look at history, nicotine has been nearly unstoppable. If one cigarette company stops selling them, they will simply cede market share to another. If all stop selling, it would inevitably create a massive black market - there are specific markets that attempt prohibition, you can see what happened historically.

Instead, isn't it rational to be realistic and aim for harm reduction? If Consumers can receive a satisfactory nicotine experience from a product that is going to be far less harmful, isn't that still a net positive?

There will always be many things in this world. I don’t have to directly support them though. Tobacco companies do not care about harm reduction, they care about money. The way they make money is to sell a product which is objectively harmful.

I’m not saying they won’t exist, I am choosing to not support them though. I am realistic. But I’m not going to compromise what I believe in to ride on the back of their success in hurting millions of people on the plant, many of whom are not making an informed choice. Every child in a smoking household did not get a choice. Pets too.

You make your choices and I’ll make mine.

If 50% of people avoid investing in industries that are profitable and hurt/kill people, that means people with no such reservation take the profit. You essentially pass the gains to people OK with causing cancer.

I don’t think the avoid investments you don’t believe in changes anything except making others money.

You could use the same type of logic to argue that voting is meaningless. And indeed investment is also a form of voting. One individual usually changes very little(except in this case one individual could make a tremendous difference depending on their net worth), but that's not necessarily a justification for doing nothing. Look up Kant for relevant philosophy.

> You could use the same type of logic to argue that voting is meaningless

Wouldn’t it be more apt to compare it to not voting? If morally principled people opt not to vote then the leader is chosen by those who are not morally principled, and the parent comment argues that if morally principled people opt to divest from tobacco then only the morally unprincipled remain as the shareholders in the industry.

That distinction doesn't really matter here. The point is that no matter whether I vote or not, the size of the effect of my decision is roughly the same, namely 1 vote. Therefore the fact that I'm only 1 vote is not in itself an argument for deciding either way.

Buying and owning shares sustains what the company does. That's the vote. Shareholder voting is another more fine grained dimension, and one that requires compromising ones integrity.

And that's OK. Invading neighbouring countries in order to make use of their resources is a "good deal" for the invader. Just because some states might do that doesn't mean other states should say "hey, we're missing out here !".

and that's OK? oof you strongely need to readjust your moral compass.

OK my post was ambiguous. What I was trying to convey was that just because others are making money from it doesn't mean that morally it's fine to do so oneself. Everyone has to make their own decisions, clearly supporting the production of one of the greatest poisons of the last hundred years is unsupportable but there will be some who do that.

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