3 ms·
contracts make things legal, not ethical.
by Avshalom 10y ago
contracts make things legal, not ethical.
- tritenonsense3 10y agoUh, no. How does that work? Does signing a contract saying I don't have First Amendment protections remove it (assuming we're citizens of the US of course)? Contracts are a tool to record arrangements between private parties. They're given leeway in law, but they do not make things "legal". They can even be found to include illegal arrangements, and generally cannot "take away" rights granted by law.
- mixedCase 10y agoBy this line of thought, every transaction where an entity gets a better deal than than the other is unethical.
- xtian 10y agoInteresting line of thought.
- Avshalom 10y agoMaybe, and certainly unethical and unacceptable are not synonymous, but no that is not where the line of thought leads. It only leads to not accepting dotted i's and crossed t's as the final word.
- ashark 10y agoI can't be the only person (red state-raised American, even!) to have had serious difficulty reconciling Business, as She is Practiced—including exactly what you mention—with the basic ideas of fairness and justice we're all immersed in from birth. The whole thing, top to bottom, makes me feel pretty icky, and it's only that everyone else acts like it's OK that keeps me operating in ordinary society (which is, I'm pretty sure, a substantial moral failing on my part)
- Confusion 10y agoNo, by that line of thought things that are legal are not necessarily ethical and vice versa. The weird contrapositive you seem to assume it implies only says something about you, not about the statement you responded to.