Corporations don't have ethics. They're amoral monsters run by literal psychopaths that have an insatiable lust for money and absolutely nothing else matters to them. They'll sometimes pretend that they care about something other than money, but only when they think it'll somehow make them more money if they do.

Has this always been true of the decision makers at all corporations for all time?

I suspect societal morals do still carry some weight. And the corps do listen if the backlash is loud enough.

Not really and not all companies are like this even today. E.g. I knew someone who ran a business repairing some equipment for other businesses. He wasn't hustling. He wasn't interested in expanding globally. He wasn't battling competitors or doing anything like that. He was friends with his clients and workers, and ran a business that brought in enough to pay everyone fairly and that was that. Probably 25 workers I'd guess, if that.

Of course its different when you are a public company or take on a lot of investor money.

Most corporations are not run by psychopaths (even the big ones); the idea that they are has become a sort of meme, with little evidence in its favor, and a great deal against it. There's even a book about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychopath_Test

Perhaps psychopath might be an exaggeration here but the primary desire for many is to grow income. The options chosen generally favor the path of least/resistance.

Until there's a law mandating morality in business decision making, why should a business entity care? Perhaps it might find comfort in using morality as a differentiator, but the companies that primarily focus on morality are the exception, not the norm.

i don't think you'll find widespread agreement on what's moral or not. what's moral for you maybe abhorrent to someone else. there's not necessarily any absolute good or bad, it's all a matter of perspective.

Consider the lamentably frequent situation where a corporation does something that would get a human person sent to prison or be subjected to a severe fine, but escapes with a token punishment. In some cases corporations become repeat offenders because the statutory penalties, though still for an individual, are small enough for a corporation that they can be accepted as a cost of doing business.

Sure, morality is subjective to an extent but not every company is Ben and Jerry’s or REI, two companies that are the poster-children of the more-ethical side of corporations.

One company actual advertised that they were looking for a psychopaths to fill their new business media sales executive position because they wanted someone who was money driven and willing to do "whatever it takes".

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/psychopath-...

Don't know how many of big biz leaders are psychopaths, but many of them don't seem to be nice people

Elon refusing to pay ex-Twitter employees what they are owed in severance, Zuck wasting Billions of dollars on his shitty Metaverse idea while firing tens of thousands to save money at the same time, Facebook/Google etc hiring thousands of people during Covid without any plan except to pad their numbers (and prevent competitors from hiring those employees) only to fire them a couple of years later, people like that WeWork dude (don't even know where to begin), apps like Uber screwing over their drivers, forcing people to commute to office for no reason.... and on and on

The question is about the 'pretending' - if they pollute less or exploit their employees less to make more money based on the good PR, is that 'pretending'? I would say no, if we're interested in results more than motivation.

It's still pretending. Sometimes it works out for us, but don't forget that as soon as they feel that they'll make more money by polluting more or exploiting workers more they'll do those things.

Be cautious about putting your faith in an image spun by PR campaigns and advertisers. Corporations have shown time and again that they're perfectly happy to lie, greenwash, and spend huge amounts of money to keep up their PR appearances while not always living up the that image. If we're interested in results, we need better transparency and accountability than what we have. Too often what we get is just a comforting fantasy.

That's fair, but if they backslide we can at least serve up bad PR to bring them back into line, possibly? I agree though that there's always the chance they'll calculate the savings from being evil out weigh the costs of bad PR...

or because whataboutisms are extremely accurate criticisms of trying to blacklist a whole country over a matter unrelated to investment and revenues when your country or "the West" has objectionable things too, often the same things, sugercoated as due process

You're pretty heavily downvoted, but I agree to some extent. Really, I'm just pointing out how marked the trend has been. The line in the sand with Saudi has just blown away in the wind ... of perceived easy money.

I don't agree with the point on blacklisting countries. We boycotted South African goods back in the day when were were pushing for the fall of Apartheid. And I'll be boycotting Israeli goods right now. And I'd stop my boss working with Saudi if I could.

Bring the grey'ness ...

I’m sure I would have a different opinion if I was around for the consumer South Africa boycott and feeling like that succeeded

but nothing remotely close to that has occurred in 30 years and trade is more interlinked as not to really affect countries the same way even if it did occur

with that in mind, how I feel is that harboring that sentiment requires having major blind spots about all the other places you do business with. and the disdain is 100% misapplied to other people or your employer. For example, its one thing if its the Prince’s investment fund, its another thing if its a random private equity fund or private office in Saudi Arabia. The boycotter’s broad, cognitively negligent, generalizations seem far more insensitive than the person disregarding their complaints about human rights abuses.

So you don't feel it is an issue, when you say "prince fund bad, random fund good" that it is fraught with all kinds of ethical issues to bring money and knowhow into a country that has public beheadings?

ah exhibit A: and The West has public extrajudicial executions, as well as semi-public ones more formally

…where is your boycott of Silicon Valley? you don’t feel it is an ethical issue to bring money and knowhow into that country? which country passes your standard exactly

A laughable false equivalance, at least in the West you won't be executed for "crimes" such as apostasy and homosexuality.

why would you not do business with private organizations in one country but not the other over what the state enables?

why would you vilify other people choosing to do business with those private organizations based on their nexus?

Because there are levels of brutality, that's why! It doesn't just matter that you kill people, it also matter for what, and how!

And public beheadings are truly medieval and barbaric.

Why are “investment and revenues” so important that we must ignore other considerations?

they're not so important to ignore other considerations, just when you apply that standard to countries and individuals within country you happen to respect, you'll find the same reasons to boycott

the unwillingness of boycotters to see that makes me more willing to ignore them

I humbly suggest that ethics are not universal but heavily culturally dependent.

That’s true. And how the Saudis choose to run their society is none of America’s business. The feeling that America is intruding into their societies is in fact a huge source of anger in the Muslim world.

But nothing about the principle that societies are entitled to decide for themselves how to govern themselves requires people in America to accept Americans doing business with other people who have very different values. That’s a completely different matter.

That would be fine if we didn’t selectively pick which countries we apply those rules to. China is an ethical nightmare but we have and continue to do business with them, why change that when it comes to the Middle East.

What makes you think people who disapprove of getting in bed with the Middle East approve of getting in bed with China? Did you ask them? Or did you want so badly to accuse them of hypocrisy that you simply assumed it to be the case?

There aren’t any people left in business in the US who don’t approve of “getting in bed with china”

- this message was made in china, like your shirt, your shorts, your socks, and so on snd so on.

There's no people who deny travel reimbursements that use Saudi gas.. Does that mean we all need to fly to Saudi Arabia to plan future businesses and garrison death squads in our houses?

I think there's a difference between doing the minimum that is not a disadvantage and making a relationship with an ethical discount country your competitive advantage.

The U.S. has done far more business for far longer with countries in the Middle East than it has with China.

I don’t think your example supports the point you think you’re making.

It is HNs business to speak about middle eastern countries except for speaking about Israel, it's suddenly very political and no longer HN worthy.

Except we have regular posts related to Israel with hundreds of comments in each.

> And how the Saudis choose to run their society is none of America’s business.

By "the Saudis" you mean the ruling family? Those are the only people who are deciding anything in SA.

And if a societal model causes catastrophe and collapse it contains that failure? If it wastes human potential and is a free loader compared to free societies? What then?

absolutely. it's a matter of perspective. thinking that you and only you have the "moral" high road, just leads to oppression. good and bad are relative to who's making the judgement

I mean, Plato may have a word (or a few thousand) about that idea.

You don't make many friends being a moral relativist

It seems that the "Global South" much prefer moral relativist than moral purists that cant stop lecturing others

The vast majority of philosophers don't believe in moral relativism. It's actually usually the amateurs early mistake and you can read alot of the critique of it easily online.

The vast majority of philosophers believed that men were superior to woman and that those of lighter skin were superior to those of darker skin and in general that philosophers were superior to anyone who was not a philosopher. They either didn’t spend time debating this because they all agreed, or in cases where they did, their arguments are not hovered in teaching material because we “want to focus on the pats that are actually true”.

> The vast majority of philosophers believed that (...) those of lighter skin were superior to those of darker skin

Source? We don't know the actual skin tone of Ancient philosophers, but it's likely that Greek and Roman philosophers (many of which were born in and lived in Middle East or Africa) were of darker skin than the Germanic barbarians, whom they considered inferior.

I wouldn't trust most philosophers' judgment on the matter at all unless they were also deeply familiar with evolutionary biology and game theory. I suspect most of them are not. I'd much prefer Richard Dawkins' opinion on the matter.

But philosophers from where?

Show me culturally dependent beheading please

I would argue that beheading is a more merciful execution than the electric chair or lethal injection.

Justifying the beheading done there is just evil. By Sharia if you're just an apostate or kafir paying jijiya who has done some miniscule mistake which might include affecting the feeling of an Imandar(i.e Muslims). Now anyone can be a kafir because the definition of being a muslim is extremely vague in Quran and hadiths, so that's why you see violence between shia, sunni, ahmediya and all others. Even different factions between Sunnis.

I'm not defending capital punishment in the Middle East, but pushing against the "culturally dependent beheading" quip.

how?

The electric chair and lethal injection have both resulted in torturous, prolonged deaths for some victims. If beheading is done correctly, you essentially die right away.

I would argue that the masses of people that flock to see the beheading also result in some stress towards the victim. But the fact that it is not a clean room beheading but a public one culturally dependent too ...

If we argue which type of death is more or less pleasant we've directly descended into not just the Middle East, but the Middle Ages.

I'd take a few beheadings for some of the laughable sentences given in 'leading democracies' for like rapist, child rapist, murderers.

Who would have thought that cutting someone's limbs off as a punishment would result in nearly very little theft in those countries too.

Until you realize that there's about a 5% error in the justice system and if you're unlucky you don't just spend a few years unjustly in jail, not you are also maimed for life.

People that don't realize that can just crawl back to their cave and live out the darwinistic dreams there. (Just speaking/ranting generally here now.)

> Who would have thought that cutting someone's limbs off as a punishment would result in nearly very little theft in those countries too.

Only people that don't read up on the science. Draconian measure affect crime rates much less than immediate negative feedback after the crime (which doesn't need to be draconian).

I mean Singapore has draconian punishments for crimes too but they correspondingly have next to no drug use. We lose tens of thousands of people to fentanyl every year, whole towns are devastated etc. Hanging a few drug smugglers is definitely the lesser evil.

That being said, I enjoy my individual rights in the US and wouldn’t live anywhere else but there is a valid argument to be made that our ethics are sometimes a little too short sighted/individualistic and not holistic enough.

(I’m also definitely against the death penalty, just trying to make a point)

The thing is, the death penalties in Singapore are in the single digits per year (out of a population of 6 million, effectively higher as this excludes non-citizens). People are not killed without thought, there is careful and lengthy investigations in each and every case.

The deterrence does work and saves countless lives that would have been taken from ODs and cartel-ish activities

Sure but it’s a smaller country and you’re making my point for me about the effect of draconian punishments.

Plenty of places with extreme laws have terrible drug abuse, also.

Not true at all, I worked there for a week. Clearly very wealthy African group on top of the marina Bay sands where we were paying like NZD$30 per vodka soda and these guys had multiple magnums of champagne, openly smoking weed.

Singapore = if you have money all of their supposed laws etc do not apply (just like so many other places).

Reading that article I'd say that ethics are easily displaced by money. No surprise there though, sadly.

Best to find another job that doesn't enable human rights abuses or enable despotic regimes that whip women if they dare to drive car and import slave labor.

Edit: It's a gray area of engineering ethics that can only remain intact by avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. If it feels bad, then it's work or business best avoided.

Or throw gay men to their deaths from buildings.

The world is a horrible place.

Even Schmidbauer is working and endorsing KAUST now

Well, it was like that all the times, the pr shield was just better in china.