A company selectively interjecting itself into the political arena highlights its hypocrisy, but any company having a significant public impact should be getting called out regardless of their actions in other spheres. Ethics are not an opt-in.

My "loosely serves the public good" was meant to suggest that instead you could target carbon or sin taxes, but you couldn't (read: ought not) target a specific company, say Exxon-Mobil or Philip Morris.

IOW, broadly target the thing you want to reduce with policy, not the company that does the specific thing.

I can see based on my text how you reduced it to a vague "pass smart laws", but I was trying to make a specific recommendation on how to do that, but then further leaving the majority of control for ethics to the choice of the consumers in aggregate.

In the old days, in some countries, we had a device for changing the government when it did stuff you didn't want to be complicit in. I think they called it an "election" ;-). Now, admittedly, even if I take a very broad array of American political parties, from the Greens to the Libertarians, their spectrum on foreign policy still ranges from bloody-stupid to fucking appalling, so I don't entirely blame actively anti-war Americans for the anti-war movement's failure to stop the war.

But that's because the democratic system has decayed to the point where, if you don't want today's fresh new war of choice, you're left choosing between two irrelevant third parties, one of whom puts forth a candidate who doesn't know where Aleppo is, and the other of whom are outright tankies on foreign policy and may be paid by Vladimir Putin.

#MakeHNTechnicalAgain

Does Saudi Arabia have centuries of free enterprise, civil rights progress, government accountability, and not-a-monarchy?

> Corporate charters are granted by governments, from the people.

This is true for the USA, at least afaict as an European.

The same can't be said about Saudi Arabia, as sad as that might be.

Companies do seem to be taking more and more political stances, though, than they have in the past, and personally I think it's, at least in some cases, naive on their parts. I used to see more of "we'll donate 1% of our revenue to save pandas" type marketing, which is noble and universally applauded, but now it's replaced with taking political stances on things that are often hot-button issues.

If everyone started behaving this way, it wouldn't be pretty.

Plenty (most? all?) large businesses do this. It isn't good for the world.

Edit: You can downvote all you want, but politics are an outgrowth of human interaction at scale. The idea that you can get a couple thousand human beings running around with limited resources and various goals and not get politics is laughable.

That's exactly what ethical behaviour is.

> Why does every organization need a moral/ethical complex which caters to the issues of modern day?

Because joining a corporation does not remove you from human society.

If (for example) you thought that eating vegan was better ethically or environmentally, eating vegan only one day a week would still be "better" than not eating vegan at all. Eating non-vegan some of the time is not hypocritical, nor does it nullify the "good" you're doing.

Absolutely though, companies should be shamed (and not patronized) for their bad behavior and bad associations.

That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if you inject yourself as a moral arbiter into a debate, then the people you're marketing to with that stance are going to demand moral purity. You open yourself up to more criticism when you first criticize. I'm not really making a moral argument here at all actually. I'm more saying "those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" from a practical standpoint unless you're ready to abandon good business practices in the pursuit and constantly moving goal posts of moral purity.