I hate how despite all the rhetoric on HN surrounding how much better ethics companies in the EU must have to comply with regulation, as soon as that regulation slips, they turn out to be equally scummy as the rest of the world.
This is bullshit, plenty companies have plenty of ethics.
I don't disagree that laws are important, but to claim that companies can't behave ethically removes responsibility from the people who are, primarily, responsible. To behave as scummy as Lieferando has been doing here is a choice and plenty similarly successful companies have not done things this bad. People make up a company and when these people behave badly, we should call them out and not only say "it's the government's fault for not making/enforcing laws about this!"
> but to claim that companies can't behave ethically removes responsibility from the people who are, primarily, responsible.
That's literally what happens today everywhere. Companies are downright evil everywhere and nobody's held responsible.
But what I think GP means is that companies don't inherently have any ethics since they are not people.
If a company behaves ethically it's because its owners and employees are doing so, but the company can't have any ethics of its own.
Regular people doing their day to day jobs on these criminal health insurance companies, for example, will perform acts that are extremely unethical as an individual, but since they're representing "the company" all that goes out of the window.
> we should call them out and not only say "it's the government's fault for not making/enforcing laws about this!"
We can call them out but we, the people, can't enforce anything. Maybe we could collectively try to sue them, but at best that's a civil lawsuit and they'll have to pay a bit of money (likely an already accounted cost for businesses that use shady tactics). But to make that criminal, as many times it should, then only the government is empowered to.
But we should never forget that we are the ones that keep the government accountable. If they don't do their job and we let them, it's all of our faults.
I mean, one of the reasons companies exist in the first place is to allow individuals to behave unethically IMO. Anyone can do bat shit crazy things that they would never get away with when they're behind the protection of a company.
As the co-owner of a small company I'm more than a little offended. We're not evil at all, we try our best to do right by our customers, our people, and our community.
The idea that no company can ever be held responsible for anything is a weird ultracapitalist pipe dream (and consequently a marxist straw man). Companies are groups of people. Yes we need laws to restrain badly behaving companies but that does not mean people running badly behaving companies get a pass until an inevitably slow and imperfect government gets their shit together.
> The idea that no company can ever be held responsible for anything is a weird ultracapitalist pipe dream (and consequently a marxist straw man).
I never said that. What I said is merely what we see in today's capitalism: barring a few exceptions, companies are almost never held responsible.
Probably one of the most egregious examples of this is the health care industry in the US but we often forget how banks ruined millions of people's lives in 2008 and almost nobody from the big banks went to jail. We bailed those criminals out and they felt zero consequences. They got a pass.
I agree with you that nobody should get a pass, but I'd be naive if I said they don't.
> until an inevitably slow and imperfect government gets their shit together.
How else are we going to do anything? Aside from taking justice into our own hands like Luigi Mangione, the best we can do is try to sue them and spend huge amounts of money to maybe get them to pay a small fine. Or perhaps employees inside of these companies can be whistleblowers and blow up their own lives trying to get some sort of justice.
I hate that this is the reality we live in but we can't pretend it's not.
An ethical company will pay fairer wages, will not exploit users, apply dark patterns, stifle competition, etc. and non-ethical companies will do all of the above to generate more profits than the ethical one.
In the utopian world where there's endless competition, perhaps people could choose the ethical companies and they'd win fair and square. But the second you add reality back in, you add monopolies, oligopolies, geographical restrictions, etc. into the mix and these companies can get away with whatever behavior they want since consumers don't have a choice.
That's not even accounting for the fact that many people couldn't give a single f** to ethics, as long as they can buy their products for cheaper. Many would love to care, but simply cannot afford it, since all companies optimize to compress salaries.
I could go on, but hopefully my point is clear. Traditional companies will eventually become evil in their pursuit for profits even if they don't intentionally do so.
Ethics is not part of the equation at all.
It's bleak but until I see proof that this is incorrect, my point stands. Both the logical conclusion of capitalist theory and the real world we live in right now agree. Small and medium businesses are not yet big enough to optimize themselves to become evil (although it doesn't stop them from being evil for other reasons). Since the end game of competition is monopoly, we can see how big conglomerates are straight up buying up the competition which will eventually tip the scales to being a majority of big companies.
The reality is that the only businesses that stay small are the ones that don't scale. Otherwise big players would've already swooped in and enshitified them.
I'd love to imagine when I grow my company I'll be ethical, fair and structure it in a way that the goal is to make everyone in it rich while producing something good. But the most likely outcome is that it'll get crushed by competition that will not care or if I hit big, it'll grow enough and become evil.
My local bakery pays workers that actually do everything to run the bakery as little as possible while the owner has a mansion, sports car and a boat.
It's more likely our definitions of "fair" are very different. Besides, I already wrote why small companies may not yet be evil, which you seem to completely ignore, so whatever, there's no point in arguing anymore if it's not in good faith.
Frankly I'm baffled that you think I'm not arguing in good faith for skipping over an argument as weak as that, and instead choosing to address your general point (which I think is a lot less more sensible, even though I disagree with it).
I agreed with you that small companies are many times not yet taking this to the extreme and might not be as evil as a mega corporation, but they are still evil by default.
We've definitely normalized this, but being normal doesn't make it good.
I didn't mean to skip over that but since it's the entire base of capitalism so I thought it would be implied.
If you had said things like "inherently exploitative" or something like that, then we might've gotten a lot closer. I think I might actually concur with that (but then argue that it's possible for businesses to also do good, eg provide a service that people need and a compelling job and bread on the table etc, that may offset the badness of the "inherently exploitative" part, so that below the line it's a net positive for society). We'd then have an IMO much more interesting argument about how bad it is for companies to, by definition, be at least slightly exploitative, and whether it's possible to offset that or not. By just calling me "evil" instead (for running a business), you removed all nuance.
Or, to be less charitable, a cat-and-mouse game.
Also, nobody is saying companies are more ethical in the EU. In many cases the existing legislation forces unethical companies to comply with ethical regulations, but they don't do it because they're nicer than companies outside of the EU.