Hacker News Reader

Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how this can be in question, if the employees chose their employer freely. How can one seriously oppose a corporate entity if one may not oppose the people who comprise the corporate entity.

"Corporations are people, my friend".

View on HN

If employees choose their employers freely, what are interviews for?

If people choose their spouses freely, what is dating for?

Exactly?

Well, they are partly for helping you choose your employer. Job interviews are 2 sided and I personally take the attitude that any employer who thinks otherwise has failed the interview process and is therefore ineligible for the position of employing me.

I like your choice of metasyntactic variables.

I bet you say that to all the boys.

Any chance you could stop asking silly questions? The employees choose freely to apply for work there was (very obviously) what I meant.

It may be what you meant, but it wasn't what I read. Anyway, fine.

If I apply to companies A and B, where A is ethical and B is unethical, but only B offers me a job, which I accept, have I freely chosen my employer? Let's assume these are the only companies available.

Yes you freely applied to work for a company you believed to be unethical. But if there are only two companies available to work for and one is unethical you should probably move elsewhere. Just to be clear, my statement was aimed at educated people in countries with some choice of employment. It wasn't intended as an arch right-wing statement. If poverty or political circumstances remove your freedom to choose then that would invalidate what I said.

There is truth to the fact that we can't completely choose who we work for. But none the less, you are responsible for the choices you make. If a man is repeatedly raped and abused as a child we still hold him accountable as a man who rapes someone.

I basically am against discrimination on the basis of one's employer for the same principles behind any individual freedom. I might not like your work, but I respect that you are a taxpayer in the same state as me and as such contribute to our ability to meet in relative peace in the first place, and I won't condone organized discrimination against you on the basis of your legal work. If anything, I will petition the state to make your work illegal.

I disagree. It's dangerous to let people slide because "they're just doing their job". People "just doing their job" are the enablers. Without them, none of the really serious man-made tragedies of history would have been possible.

I have no problem with protesting the work people do. I just have a problem with locking them out of the protest.

No one is locking them out of protesting in general. Just our protest.

Well, it seems we have incompatible ethics. Either you violate mine or I violate yours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com