Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We need some more nuance here.

Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.

In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.

So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.

> If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good.

This is so naive.

People do not ask corporations to be evil and they certainly don't demand it. People ask for good value and convenience and corporations respond by doing by amorally pursuing that.

However, when you ask consumers if they want value and convenience at the cost of *evil*, they almost always say no.

Corporations have a demonstrated and well-documented history of actively hiding their evil actions because they know consumers are not aligned with them at all.

If consumers "demand" evil, as you say, then corporations wouldn't try to hide it.

Counterexample.

Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.

Also, while I consider organic food to be mostly (but not completely) a scam, most people don't buy organic. Which can be interpreted as "if it is cheaper with pesticides than without, I will go for pesticides".

In cars, emission control devices have to me made mandatory and almost no one would pay for them. And even with that, people sometimes break the law to remove them (ex: catalytic converter). It is common for all environmental laws.

Of course, if you talk to people face to face, most will tell you that they don't want value and convenience at the cost of evil, but in private, if can turn a blind eye, they will.

And most of these company evil practices are often not very well hidden. Sometimes, they are genuinely criminal, highly secret operations, but they are often not, as criminal lawsuits are costly, and secrets like that don't last long in big companies. But if it is legal and it brings value convenience to people, people usually don't want to look too much, even when some NGOs try to bring awareness.

I think "caged" is not "evil" in a lot of people's minds. This is NOT society saying "we will look the other way", it's society saying, "that's not evil"

Also, organic doesn't mean, "without pesticides" it means a lot MORE than that. For example, I have no problem buying genetically modified produce. If there was an option for "pesticide free, but not organic because of GMO" I would probably buy that.

Anyways, my point really being, you can't extrapolate that people are looking the other way because of price. All your examples are more of examples of society not being morally aligned to what you are considering evil.

> Even when eggs are clearly labeled "caged" and "free range", many people will buy the "caged" eggs despite the clear implications in terms of animal welfare.

Are many egg cartons actually labeled as "caged" around you? Where I am its either advertised as cage-free or its unlabeled. Its not like the options are "tiny torture chambers": $2.99, "unclean hellscape": $3.99, "rainbows and sunshine": $4.99. Its also hard to tell what these things mean, because "cage-free" can still be a pretty terrible existence for the birds as well.

But I do agree though, if there's a seemingly similar product with a much cheaper price tag a ton of people (myself included) will often reach for the cheaper product.

caged = tiny torture chambers

cage-free / some freeroam = unclean hellscape

good freeroam / organic = rainbows & sunshine

This is assuming that every consumers knows what evil goes into their consumption. They don't, and not by choice, but because nobody will tell them. Ever. In fact, everyone will spend billions to make sure they don't know.

The problem with simplistic free market dynamics views is that they rely on consumer choice. Consumer choice relies on consumer consent and free information flow.

As soon as EITHER of those two are chilled, even just a tiny bit, the free market dynamics thinking falls down like a house of cards. Now the situation is orders of magnitude more complex, and we actually have to think about what's going on, inatead of appealing to a model so bare-bones it's practically impossible to see in real life.

The issue is when companies try to hide their evil, manipulate public opinion, lobby (bribe) lawmakers to disable the democratic process, ...

All of which happens regularly, and especially in this case, as the person you responded to showed.

Don't seek nuance where there is none.

> Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand

How do you define evil? Profit motivation at the expense of human life is as evil as anything you're ever going to find outside of fantasy literature.

This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked hard to keep that information out of the public consciousness. Perhaps there could be nuance to producing the pesticide, weighing food prices against health impacts, but that’s no justification for lying about what it does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com