what's the ethical alternative? everybody must produce everything they want/need without any sort of trading, and without owning any land? or does the government just force people to work and distribute everything anybody needs?
You can use resources, invent stuff, and organise people to work on it, but you only get to do it if Reality-Based Accounting rates the project as a net positive for the planet, and you have to share some of the benefits.
And if you can't make it happen without being consistently cruel and exploitative to some individuals, groups, or locations, you don't get to do it again.
This is not trivial to organise. But it's far more likely to lead to an R&D explosion than the current myopic and manic-depressive comic book version of "the economy" we're all supposed to have irrational faith in.
aside from global consensus on ideas like 'the planet', it'd require mass labor force control and government assignment, two ideas i'm not thrilled about.
I could see it working in a sci-fi novel, but I have a hard time closing the gaps between them and us.
What will come of it will most likely be analogous to the Communist system where just a central committee was in charge of making all the decisions. and to be quite clear: this system failed utterly and completely. Without the capitalist west there would have been famines in DDR and the east.
On what I agree is, that we need a strong state factoring in stuff like ecological consequences via taxation- so the decision to buy or make stuff is distributed.
If we agree that nothing can be fully "ethical," there still should be some continuum on which to place the current system, unless you contend that every system and/or action is ethically equal, which I would further contend erases any meaning of the word rendering the premise moot.
So that said, is there any system that is more ethical than the current?
I made a simple assertion: business cannot be ethical, but it is inherently exploitative.
I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case.
Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism. People would rather bury their head in the sand and think they're acting virtuously in this world. The cognitive dissonance here is frankly alarming, if it weren't so expected for entitled first-world engineers.
Please, point out where I did any of that sort.
And I asked for an example of a system that is more ethical, and got nothing but dodging and bitching. I don't think you have any ground to stand on to demand examples (certainly from me, who if you care to read again I'm not disputing your position that business can't be ethical, so it makes zero sense to ask me for an example). It seems unreasonable to expect of others what you aren't willing to give yourself. Dare I say that's ... unethical?
If you want to complain about the real world, then offer solutions that work in the real world. We can then consider and debate them and maybe get somewhere. If you just want to make philosophical contemplations, I'm actually up for that, but not if you aren't going to even bother getting your arguments straight. You just look like a troll in that case.
Actually I changed my mind. I am disputing your contention and here is my example. Please point out where the unethical parts are.
Person a and person b are stranded on an island in the South Pacific. There are no other humans around. Person A gets pretty good at catching fish, while person b gets pretty good at harvesting coconuts. Individually, person a can catch six fish and harvest two coconuts. Person b can catch one fish and harvest eight coconuts. Person b is concerned about not getting enough protein, so they approach person a and offer to trade two coconuts for one fish. Person a Agrees, and a mutually agreeable business transaction has taken place. Both parties are better off than they were before. What part of this is unethical?
By the way, please don't take offense by any of this. You seem to have thick enough skin to trade barbs, and honestly this has been an interesting discussion (minus some unneeded name calling but that's a minor detail between friends like us)
What makes it epically hilarious is it is also based on a completely false assertion "person b" needs protein from fish, because they cannot get it from coconut. Be sure to check the following links before you start clamoring about amino acids, too.
https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/170169/n...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234922/table/ttt00008/...
Not too long ago my neighbor cleaned the carburetor on my lawn mower, and I fixed his router config in exchange. He would have had to spend tons of time figuring out how to do it himself, but it took me 5 minutes. I could have cleaned my own carburetor, but he already had the cleaner and had freshly done one, so it took him 5 minutes but would have taken me 30 minutes plus a trip to the store. The same principles from the example are at play here.
And whether Person B can get enough protein from coconuts is entirely irrelevant. All that matters in this scenario is that Person B was concerned about it and wanted to trade.
What? This is just silly. You don't know the difference between hypothetical fantasy and real life, or are you just being hyperbolic?
> Secondly, the principles that underpin this scenario are highly active in the world today
Still, it is irrelevant since I asked for a real world example.
> Not too long ago my neighbor cleaned the carburetor on my lawn mower, and I fixed his router config in exchange
Another contrived example which excludes the entire world. Who made the lawn mower? Who made the router? Literal slaves in a third world country. Surely you are not so ignorant you know this?
> whether Person B can get enough protein from coconuts is entirely irrelevant
It is not irrelevant; it is hilarious you don't know this simple nutritional fact.
> I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case.
It doesn't work that way. You made the assertion, so the burden of proof is on you.
> All business [...] relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery.
Are you aware of a business which does not have any externalized costs of production which have a negative impact on someone or something?
Yes, the part where you made the unsupported assertion.
> not the proof
Nonsense. Your "proof" relies on a non-standard definition which you have pulled straight out of your ass.
Language and values should be useful for us to make decisions on. Saying everything is bad and there’s no alternative can be true in a sense but it is not useful, and in most discussions just sounds inane.
Not to mention it’s absurd a conversation this long hasn’t pointed out the relativity of ethical judgments or event attempted to define what ethical even means.
I did, but GP dodged it by switching to ad hominem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38960797
The majory of people are idiots, so this part is almost certainly expected and acceptable.
> If everything is unethical then nothing matters, but people don’t want nothing to matter so they construct shades of grey to make choices and judgements on. Your “um actually everything is unethical” is irrelevant to the game they’re playing.
Where did I say everything is unethical? Where did I say nothing matters? This is the way people want to re-frame the conversation because it is too difficult for them to break through their conditioning to apprehend how the world works.
It’s like you’re walking onto a baseball field trying to play football. You should either surrender the field or undertake a much more in depth education session on the rules of the game you want to switch to. Else it’s just madness.