Public companies have to put profit first. We need to solve this with regulations, we can't count on their goodwill.
> “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
More information: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
Coroporations need to prioritize profit because that's what they're for. Whenever it looks like a company is not prioritizing profit, what you're seeing is the employees and owners of a corporation using it as a tool to express their personalities and preferences. This is usually not good, it is corruption. There's no reason to think that the personalities and preferences of arbitrary employees and owners are good, or that they would tend to do good things.
The idea that companies have moralities, and that besides bringing in profit they also have some hazy duty to do things that I agree with personally is the myth. It's self-regulation propaganda. It's better to just have rules that keep companies from doing the things that we don't want them to do, instead of hoping that they will suddenly realize that money doesn't buy love, and that the only important things in life are health and family. That's not what they're for. That's what you're for. They're not real people.
I disagree. Corporations do things (e.g. provide goods and services): that's what they're for. The whole "money" thing is just a means-to-an-end: a system of accounting to allow the corporation to continue to do what it's supposed to do. Money, after all, is inherently valueless: it's only worth anything because it can be exchanged for goods and services.
If powerful entities exist solely for making money, we risk the economy becoming completely decoupled from anything that actually matters.
welcome to reality
As a CEO of a public company, if you're not ready to do what increases profit, you will get replaced by someone who will. The main reason why it won't be profit "above everything else" is when there is a risk that the "above everything else" reduce either of profit or market cap: potential legal ramifications, bad press, etc.
JD Vance has criticized EU during AI summit. Criticized to the point of threatening not to share "Americans" AI bandwagon to EU.
Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all.
Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies).
Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.
Is it because the dumb ruling that companies are supposed to have the single goal of making money? Even if at the expense of cautiously ignoring or disregarding the law where it essentially acts as a fee?
Yes. The appearance of a moral code is all that is necessary.
And btw, companies cannot be moral, any more than any other object (chair, house) can be. People however, can be moral.
Also, people at Google decided to drop their previous "don't be evil" motto, so perhaps that tells you something.
I don't buy this. Companies _are made_ of people. The ones that set the direction can be more or less detached from the outcomes of those decisions, but are people nonetheless. Shareholders? People as well.
Companies are legal paperwork that real people engage with to get money - such is the way our society is organised.
If you were to argue that some animals exhibit morality - I would see what you mean.
There is no company morality - as companies and groups cannot feel or register value. The value is entirely in the individual. Yes, one individual can affected and be affected by another. Yes, an individual can say 'We at Google blah blah' and mean what they are saying, and still be wrong.
The idea of a 'group' with feelings, morality etc is just an illusory projection.
This is why the AI world were, "sorry, computers says no" pretending to cut people off the loop is kind of scary, as people want to pretend this indirection frees them from accountability.
It'll be important for the law to reflect this, but ultimately just being lawfully right, but morally wrong can get you shot in the back anyways.
Shouldn’t? no
won’t? yes