3 ms·

It’s a big task to calculate the net benefit/harm of one person, much less something like a large company.

• buran77 6y ago
  It is, especially for the people who are harmed. DuPont CEOs surely see it as a net benefit that everyone can cook in teflon pans even if the price was heavy pollution. Same for big oil companies. Because they will always sell the narrative that "the bad had to come with the good". In reality the bad can almost exclusively be traced back to the desire for more profit, not to the ability to survive to deliver the good. A warehouse worker or truck driver don't need to be squeezed for every drop of productivity or underpayed just so you can get your Amazon package on time. They're squeezed so Amazon can make an even bigger profit while you still get the package on time. Turns out that while you can't necessarily come up with a perfectly accurate estimate of benefit/harm, you can come up with obvious candidates for improvement that are consistently disregarded by those successful founders and CEOs who saw the money rolling in and everything else stopped mattering. The bad stopped mattering or even existing in their view. It's not a matter of calculating benefit/harm, it's a matter of them not acknowledging the harm even exists.