You seem to be conflating blameworthiness and predictability. True story: I know a guy who's a real scumbag, just constantly taking advantage of people who don't know better and abusing those who do know better. I fully expect this person to do a lot of contemptible things. My ability to anticipate his behavior doesn't make me like him any more for it. And the fact that the law doesn't punish a particular misbehavior doesn't shift the blame for his behavior onto the law.

In short: It is not ethical to do whatever you can get away with. You can choose to ignore questions of ethics, but if that's how you choose to live your life, expect to have a lot of people hate your guts. People treating you like a monster is a predictable consequence of living like a monster. This doesn't stop being true just because the choices are being made by multiple people under the banner of a corporation.

A case can be made that making profitable misconduct legal DOES force businesses to misbehave because those that don't take full advantage of the law will be at a disadvantage to those who do.

Furthermore, shaming one company to change its practices voluntarily does little to help workers at other companies subjected to the same thing.

So we really should push to change the law with more urgency than we use to push any give single employer.

First, I agree with your conclusion. The way to address this is to change the law, pushing individual corporation is ineffective.

However, you DON'T have to maximize your profits above all other corporations. There's no such actual fiduciary duty and there never could be. That's the point the poster is trying to make - something being legal doesn't make it ethical and acting in a unethical, but legal, manner does not absolve you of contempt.

If you have no competition, you do have the luxury to choose between profitable and ethical. But if you have fierce competition, there isn't always a choice - market forces will drive out the more principled operators of business in favor of those that are more ruthless.

If you are in a position of power, why should you care whether people hate your guts? And only people that don't depend on you or that don't benefit from a good relationship with you will treat you like a monster.

There is quite the discrepancy for example in European history between royals acting like monsters and people treating them as such. Sure, eventually you'll have the people grab the pitchforks and roll out the guillotine, but you might not want to wait that long.

How much true accountability is there for those people making the choices under the banner of the corporations?

In my opinion, big part of what law should be, whoever is in charge of enforcing it, is a set of rules based on societies ethical compass. If someone can get away taking advantage and abusing others, this begs the question if those acts are in fact unethical, or if the the law needs updating.

It is not about shifting blame for behavior onto the law, but how you decide what behavior is blameworthy and should be punished. And I much prefer having a at least a somewhat transparent formalized system for this over Mob justice.

Lynching slaves was immoral, unethical and "blameworthy" before it became illegal.

And did it stop because people felt bad about themselves doing so or because some people were pointing fingers at them?

Look, I absolutely agree that something can be and often is immoral, unethical and "blameworthy" before it is illegal, and maybe my non-native English is a bit clunky.

But I do not care about having the moral high ground. I care about continued bad behavior having consequences, society protecting itself from bad actors. This can indeed be done trough various means (non exhaustive):

- Create incentives to act in a more desired way

- Call for boycotts and shunning them socially to try to force them to change

- Change the environment so bad behavior no longer provides benefits

- Create / update law

- Actually enforce the existing law

- Having increasingly big protest movements up to revolution / civil war scale

I'm fine with any combination of those depending on context and/or as different steps of escalation. I just think a bunch of people voicing anger at corporations on the internet doesn't do anything and, on the other hand, in a lot of places the situation is not bad enough to justify violence yet. So I lean towards a middle way using the instruments of these supposed democracies to change things.

> Why do people realistically expect a company to not stretch things as far as legally possible?

What I expect people to do, what the standards I hold people to are often different.

I expect Amazon to push things as far as they are able. I strongly dislike them because of it. My standards of acceptable conduct are above "barely legal" conduct. My expectations are below legal conduct.

I also can blame two entities for this outcome. The law and the courts are awful for allowing this to stand as the settled law on the matter. I blame them for the situation. Amazon is also awful for pushing the law to this point and taking advantage of it. I blame them for the situation, too.

I think, putting acceptable conduct above barely legal conduct for corporations is how they get away with pretty much everything.

A bunch of people on internet being mad at them has in my opinion not proven very effective at changing their behavior and making the people in charge accountable for their acts.

>Why do people realistically expect a company to not stretch things as far as legally possible?

Because doing the right thing is different from doing the legal thing.

If you're only interested in maximizing your profits under the umbrella of law, you are, by definition, not interested in acting morally. Which means you're probably doing many things that many people would consider immoral.

It's a mismatch of motivations.

If the law sufficiently formalizes and enforces a societies moral compass, acting under its umbrella would be, by definition, moral.

And if the real world could even hypothetically fulfill such a requirement, you would have had a point.