I'll try my hand at an answer.
First, what is legal and what is ethical are not the same. New York City's pre-Uber taxi industry was racist, exploitative and ripe with fraud. Uber disrupted that cesspool. As recently as 2015, Uber was popular enough among average New Yorkers that it could mobilize grassroots support to rival the mayor [1].
Second, there are degrees of lawbreaking. Jaywalking is lawbreaking. Civil municipal regulation violation, which encompasses most of Uber and Airbnb's early mischievousness, is lawbreaking. Sexual harassment and fraud, on the other hand, are criminally illegal. We have different bands of consequences for different bands of infractions for a reason. Lumping together fraud and jaywalking is facile.
When Uber was busting taxi trusts, they were popular and powerful. When it abused that trust with their god mode and promotion of workplace harassment and overrunning of drivers' rights, their CEO got axed. Society innately and politically recognizes ethics, particularly if the public (e.g. activists, journalists, et cetera) document gross violations.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90237321/the-inside-story-of-how...
You should go back to it, as those are examples of why ethics are needed more than ever.
As someone in the "trenches" and who sees the damage done by them everyday, I'd suggest you can point to the trail of damage they left in their wake and the real lives that have been negatively effected.
In the case of Uber I would simply start with highlighting the number of drivers who now have criminal records as a result of doing nothing more than driving for Uber. How Uber as a matter of policy would fire drivers who were charged criminally for illegally operating rides for hire for Uber. Perhaps most shockingly for these students perhaps informing them of the reality they are far more likely to become an Uber driver than the founder of the next Uber.
Some things I've actually seen on those subreddits:
* Give three-star ratings (or worse, one-star) to any passenger who has a wheelchair or a service animal to make sure you're never matched with them again. Straight-up ADA violation.
* When you mark that you've arrived, keep your doors locked until the destination shows up, and if it's a "sketchy" (read: majority black) neighborhood, keep your doors locked, wait five minutes, call them, immediately hang up, report them as a no-show, and collect a $5 no-show fee from them (waiting five minutes and calling is a requirement to collect the no-show fee). Redlining is illegal, and this is straight-up fraud.
* If you get a request to pick someone up at a supermarket, drive just close enough to the supermarket that the "arrive" button becomes pressable, then do the above and collect your no-show fee. Again, straight-up fraud.
* One-star every passenger who doesn't tip. Retaliating against people who don't tip would get you fired from any other service job.
* One-star every passenger who orders a shared ride, no matter what. Again, that kind of retaliation would get a real employee fired. (Yes, shared rides suck for everyone involved, but retaliating against a customer for ordering the most annoying thing on the menu wouldn't be tolerated at a restaurant, yet Uber and Lyft are a-OK with it.)
* One time, a woman complained about how a Lyft driver kicked her out of his car in the middle of the ride because she just nodded along to his stories and didn't engage him in conversation, and he told her "if you don't want to talk, order an Uber instead". The response on the subreddit was universal: he's an independent contractor, so he has every right to kick her out for any reason, and Lyft isn't even allowed to fire him for it because that would count as interference in how an independent contractor does their job. At any other job, flipping out on a customer for not making enough conversation with you would get you in huge trouble, and advertising your employer's biggest competitor would get you fired in a heartbeat.
* This came from the Rideshare Guy blog and not Reddit: since repeatedly cancelling rides after accepting it will get you in trouble, drivers used cancel rides by putting their phones in airplane mode because a loss of connectivity would auto-cancel without penalties. When Uber started detecting that a few years ago (2014-5 maybe?) and counting it against a driver's cancellation rate, drivers started picketing Uber's local hubs over it. In the rest of the service industry, lying to your employer over this would get you in huge hot water, and publicly complaining about it even more so.
Every single one of these was justified by saying "we're independent contractors, we can refuse service to anyone for any reason". Again, a few of these are straight-up illegal, but since only the contractor is liable and not Uber/Lyft, enforcement is exceedingly difficult, and for the ones that aren't illegal, they're still unethical, and any reputable employer would fire an employee engaging in that kind of behavior, but Uber/Lyft drivers get to hide behind "we're contractors and not employees, so Uber/Lyft firing us for how we treat customers would violate our rights".
Unethical behavior is actively harmful to customers.
I guess you never used taxis before Uber was invented! The whole industry has been a huge racket for decades.
>Redlining is illegal, and this is straight-up fraud.
I guess you were never black and trying to get a taxi in NYC to go to the Bronx. There were countless complaints from black people about this practice with the cabs.
Basically, while your complaints are justified, though they definitely seem like cherry-picking the worst horror stories, the situation wasn't actually any better before these services existed. People didn't have any recourse when cab drivers treated them poorly, or made up bogus fares, turned off the taximeter and made up numbers, drove them around in circles to make more money, etc. It didn't matter that the drivers were technically employees; the cab companies had an oligopoly enforced by law, and didn't have to worry about customer service or reputation. And there certainly was no way for customers to inform each other about lousy drivers.
The real problem here is a lack of decent government regulation, and worse, when the (local) government does try to regulate, it just results in cronyism and high prices rather than better service and experience for the taxpayer.
I'll also point out that Uber doesn't have much presence in Japan, because their taxi drivers are actually highly professional and aren't a bunch of lying crooks like the ones in America, so people don't feel the need to flock to it. The fundamental problem is obviously the culture and the people in America, and that's why Uber is successful there.
Do you have a link? I found nothing of the kind on google.
https://www.newsherald.com/article/20150309/Business/3030999...
However, there are additional facts not included that are pretty egregious, including Uber being aware of the law and local law enforcement's position (I think they previously operated there and stopped), then in anticipation of spring break Uber recruited drivers from outside the county (including monetary payments for drivers to do this), they never disclosed the status of the law to the drivers, and within a day the first driver was arrested.
Ethics are important, because they change the criteria for decisions from being only dollars matter to "what's the right thing to do." A society full of ethically challenged dollar maximizers is not that good a place to be in.
A much more interesting debate is directly between Uber and Lyft, because most people (even many investors) would argue the main difference was that the founders of Lyft weren't as morally reprehensible as Kalanick.
The sad reality is it seems like poor ethics is rewarded by those who know how to exploit it properly. What most people are really interested in is where is the line? Because let's be honest - most people aren't studying ethics in entrepreneurship because they care about ethics. Most people want to know what they can get away with and still get rich.
Do we still need to strive for ethics in government?
Perhaps your response should have been for accountability for unethical behavior.
And "move fast and break things" was about code, not about the world at large. It's a coding "philosophy" for getting shit done, that worked very well for Facebook and did not actually harm people.
Yes, that seems to be the Silicon Valley Culture.
"Move fast and break things"
"Its better to apologize and seek forgiveness, than ask for permission"
"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."