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Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

Companies are amoral, they literally can't be otherwise.

I'm not sure where that puts humans in an effort to defend ourselves. We must be moral, we are judged harshly otherwise.

A company uses psychology tricks against its customers(aka Ads/Marketing) making them feel status insecure or a group outsider, totally fine. Actually, those blue bubbles were a great idea, I made sooo much money on stocks. Really feel bad for teenagers though.

Boeing can replace their management and the company continues. These big companies are applauded for being amoral because their stock prices go up.

At the end of the day it seems there is some power sharing agreement between government, corporations, and to a significantly lesser extent workers/consumers. We only judge that latter group on morals.

Maybe we need to collectivize like the Physician Cartel does (American Medical Association), then workers/consumers can collectively be amoral.

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> Companies are amoral, they literally can't be otherwise.

If you were to make a Venn diagram of amoral and illegal (including civil malfeasance) have a pretty large overlap. Eventually, the illegal part gets people (even CEOs) sued, fired and/or jailed, but the company might continue if it can afford to pay the legal bills.

> These big companies are applauded for being amoral because their stock prices go up.

I don't think any investors are applauding the mismanagement at Boeing. I suspect the leadership team there is checking to make sure their "golden parachute" isn't an anvil. Being amoral works for a while, but it is a very poor long term strategy.

> Boeing can replace their management and the company continues.

Society has decided that closing down large employers is a cure worse than the disease. Closing a misbehaving company sure seems like justice, but to the 43,000 people who depend on that company for a livelihood, and the communities, even small manufacturing towns that the amoral company is keeping alive, well, the network effects are serious. So the consequences are usually in the form of inflicting financial pain to the company, or directly enforcing consequences against the people who do illegal/tortuous things.

> Society has decided that closing down large employers is a cure worse than the disease.

This sort of thinking is exactly why companies like Boeing get a free pass to do whatever it wants. Local govs protect them like the mob because "jobs" and then Congress panics every time they see the market only has 1-2 options for national security stuff and then reinforces monopolies that slowly eat away at the country's competitive advantage for short term relief. And all were left with is the same small group of untouchable, completely mediocre mega corporations living off past glory when there was actual real competition and risk.

Every time you kick the can you just delay getting the medicine you need. Then instead of having a wildly successful company making new products and dominating the global market - which is something employees and govs benefit from via salaries/taxes/local development, foreign competition takes those jobs or protectionism creepingly increases the cost of doing business because a dying corpse is propped up. Then employees get squeezed and suddenly the mega corporation is getting billions in welfare. And the public gets worse and worse products, which impact other industries that depend on them.

The 1-2 options is a big part of the problem. Government has been willfully asleep at the wheel allowing massive mergers to take place for decades. Then, oops, all of the few remaining companies are now too big to fail, so now what? This isn’t only a problem in the defense industry.

I think there are more options than just "disappearing" the company. Why not break them up into commercial and defense companies? Or even better, tell them: You need to figure out how to break your staff and assets up into four separate, competing companies that all produce airplanes. Go! Probably many other ways to skin the cat, but the US population (proxied through government) is just unwilling to do anything. We treat companies with kid gloves and just let them walk all over us.

Why not solve the "jobs" crisis of shutting down business in this situation by inverting liquidation preference and injecting employees to the front of the line? When the business liquidates as a result of close of business, creditors and investors become last in line and the preference adds employees (ICs first) with executives, creditors, and investors either completely cut out or left at the end of the line.

The folks who did the job on the floor walk away with a chunk of change that's runway for them to find a next job, or whatever they want to do. Creditors, investors, and execs are left holding the bag, as they should.

>If you were to make a Venn diagram of amoral and illegal (including civil malfeasance) have a pretty large overlap.

What is moral about the American Medical Association using Taxes to fund their artificially scarce residency programs which causes consumer prices to go up?

Okay, so that one falls outside the venn diagram.

With lobbyists writing the laws, I'm really wondering if there is as much overlap as you think.

I keep hearing this idea of artificially restricting residencies like some sort of opec cartel. The fact is no one wants to do primary care there are easy residency spots for family med, peds, internnal med and psych all across the country. 94% of residency spots filled in the country last year (nrmp)

But then again I am a decade out of all that stress of matching so I’m over it.

>I keep hearing this idea of artificially restricting residencies like some sort of opec cartel.

Yes this is real. Look up the ACGME.

Physician wages are non-market and artificial due to limited supply.

If we can import Physicians from other countries, I'll ease up a bit. But the reality is that Physicians are collectively doing immoral things.

> I don't think any investors are applauding the mismanagement at Boeing

Even with everything going on Boeing’s stock price is higher than it was ten years ago. Five years ago it was 4x, I’m sure it’ll recover a good amount from today’s number.

My cynical take is that a lot of investors don’t see what Boeing is doing as mismanagement. They’re in a hugely enviable market position: only one competitor that can’t scale quickly, customers are captive. Boeing management moved to reduce costs (i.e. get rid of expensive unionized workers) while still churning out a large number of planes: success. Some people have died as a result of that, sure, but did you see those profit and loss numbers? Wow-eee.

A year from now Boeing’s stock price will have rallied and they’ll continue on. Maybe an exec or two will take a golden parachute for PR purposes but it won’t mean anything.

The investors are simply seeing the reality of the situation.

But they do see the mismanagement and still want it to be better. Sure having a higher stock price is good, but an even higher one would be better.

I can understand wanting the executives to be held accountable. But why is it important to punish the stock holders of Boeing? Do you feel that they had a hand in these disasters?

I never said they should be punished but it's an interesting thought exercise. A long-time stock holder in Boeing has indirectly profited from the death of innocent airplane passengers, I certainly wouldn't object to them losing that profit. And if punishing executives is permissible... well, those execs serve at the pleasure of the stockholders. There's surely _some_ responsibility there. But no, I'm not saying we should lock up the stockholders.

If owning shares means having an, admittedly small when it comes to a firm the size of Boeing, part in the decision making process and a financial stake in the company, then yes, in principle. Shares aren't a vacuum-sealed number-go-up game, taking a share means an interest in supporting a company via investment or a desire to be involved in the decisions (which usually requires a substantial investment as a proof of stake).

It gets a bit murkier when it's all mashed and derived and packaged to death which results in things like the Church of England accidentally (or at least they divested when it was pointed out) having shares in things that it doesn't share philosophies with such as oil companies.

> illegal part gets people (even CEOs) sued, fired and/or jailed

This really doesn't seem to be true anymore to those wise enough to lawyer. Arbitration clauses maybe the biggest culprit but I mean, Tesla Supervised Full Self Driving? Sure that cross country zero intervention demo in 2017 was great but...

>Society has decided that closing down large employers is a cure worse than the disease.

Cure: Don't allow excessive consolidation/break up TBTF.

> Companies are amoral

It's a common refrain, but there are no companies acting--there are people within a larger organization who are acting. You say "[a] company uses psychology tricks." Well, no, people within the company have made decisions to do that. There's no way for the company to act on its own.

The same theory goes further, arguing that whatever consequences the CEO/management would suffer, there will always be others to step up and continue doing the same. My opinion is however that at some point the bad behavior will be deterred, if these consequences are real... so let's just do it asap, at least we can get a petty revenge on those evildoers. Ah, but we cannot do it because we are not lawmakers?

> Companies are amoral

This is a feature, not a bug.

We are system creators and let those systems do the work. We dislike getting our hands dirty and not just physically.

Companies are thinly veiled machines ran by grinding oiled up humans as cogs in intricate patterns that seem to produce useful results.

This is not a problem in and of itself, but we have to be honest about what we are doing and what the true endgame is.

“Powerful” people are just the top cogs in these machines and replaceable like all other cogs.

One day we will find out no one runs anything and we have slowly and inadvertently ceded total control to The Machine and have been ceding it for a long, long time already.

> "Powerful” people are just the top cogs in these machines and replaceable like all other cogs.

Maybe on a long enough timescale. In practice people at the top are much harder dislodge regardless of their function, because they wield the most power. Cases like Musk and Altman prove that even boards may be too weak to replace company heads; requiring absurd levels of effort like shareholder votes, legal action, political maneuvering, or all of the above. Worst case one must endure their reign until the CEO dies of old age, not unlike a king.

You don't need to be moral to not drive your business into the ground.

To me the whole Boeing debacle is just hilarious to watch from the outside. Like watching a known drug addict to pretend he's not and then pretend he's quitting. Then pretending everyone else is also on drugs because that's literally the only possible order of things.

> there is some power sharing agreement between government, corporations, and to a significantly lesser extent workers/consumers. We only judge that latter group on morals.

As in we don't judge government or corporation on morals? Of course people do that.

They are doing it in the first sentence of their comment so that can't be the argument!

Systems do not. People do, but those judgements have no impacts.

So who is the "we"?

We should however judge them on laws - which are missing at the moment.

If you’re going to bank on this view enough to harp on about “amoral companies” in your HN bio, I implore you to consider a more nuanced view. I am a company director. If I committed a “moral” act in this capacity, your absolutist claim is entirely false.

horseshit

Companies are their leadership.

I've worked places where I was actively encouraged to look the other way and I've worked places where I've been actively encouraged to do the right thing.

If someone's saying "they gotta be shady because shareholder value, yo" they're looking for an excuse.

It means regulators must work hader to ban this sort of harmful behaviour. In this particular case, Boeing stock is down 40% yoy. I’m sure the next management will think carefully before comitting the same mistakes.

The stock price didn't fall because of how badly they treated their workers it fell because planes started falling out of the sky.

> Companies are amoral, they literally can't be otherwise.

This is not true. Some company’s value proposition is explicitly moral virtue, eg organic food brands.

They tend to be family-owned SMO rather than international publicly traded corporations. The issue has more to do with scale and diffusion of responsibility.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the structure of a public corporation is inherently (and imo, intentionally) amoral? A defining characteristic of modern capitalism is the widespread laundering of responsibility.

Incidentally, this is also true for modern democracies.

Unless those organic food brands are structured as non-profits, they'll eventually need to make compromises on their value proposition, balanced in a way that shareholders/owners get profits while (hopefully) still provide a net-positive to society.

So far, not many for-profit companies have been successful long-term in balancing those two things, as net-positive for society is not strictly necessary for the ultimate goal, generating profits.

Citation needed.

Do you know what shareholders even are?

Are you in such a tech bubble that you can’t comprehend of an organisation delivering surplus value back to shareholders by just…doing something that people want, and charging for it? It sounds like you think that tech startup hypergrowth followed by enshitification is, like, a given, in every situation.

It isn’t. MOST businesses don’t work this way. Evidently just the ones that you read about.

Race to the bottom. At some point it becomes natural resource extraction.

How much do cotton shirts cost now? 1-3$?

In addition to what sibling commenter cqqxo4zV46cp says, you are assuming that either all these companies are publicly traded or a majority of their shareholders see themselves as investors rather than owners.

I know nothing particular about the ownership structure of organic food brands, but you cannot simply assume that these things are true. It is perfectly possible for such a brand to be wholly owned by its founders, who maintain an ethos of putting good food and the environment above maximum profit.

In the eternal words of Norm McDonald: "no offense but it sounds like some commie gobbledygook".

These kind of comments make me sad because I remember being younger and believing this stuff.

Companies are legal entities, they are amoral. What you are seeing is a leader. I really hope that leader that you believe in, and inspires you to believe and comment such things on HN never fails you.

> Companies are amoral

No they're not. They very much have a morality, it's just not ours. Some include:

Greed is good.

Profits first and foremost.

Externalities are not our responsibility.

> Companies are amoral, they literally can't be otherwise.

Can you elaborate on why you think this is the case?

Just 5 minutes ago I was reading this article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/24/in-the-...

I think they may be overly generalising from one kind of company to all kinds of companies

They are. Whenever anyone trots out this line it’s very clear that HN is in many ways a group of knowitall college guys sitting on beanbags and passing around the wizard bong.

Usually it’s followed by some misinterpretation of what “fiduciary responsibility” is, something about “shareholders”, and an implication that literally any software developer pulled off the streets of the Bay Area knows more about effectively running a business than literally anyone with an MBA.

Companies are organisations. Organisations are run by people. People are more than capable of acting ethically. I have never worked for an organisation that I haven’t seen do something that’s put something else ahead of the bottom line, and not in some silly CSR way. In fact, I routinely make these decisions on behalf of my employer, within the scope of my role, but these are on occasion quite material.

I’ve never been clear on how this can be reconciled with the utterly childish view that there’s some invisible hand that requires growth at all costs as soon as a “company” is involved.

It really speaks to how much of a bubble a lot of people here are in. I suppose if you paint all organisations with the same brush, it makes it easier to work for Meta or Palantir or whatever.

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