3 ms·

Corporations have to be assumed to be amoral, which means that practically speaking, you can assume they'll tend towards evil. At least you have to continually

by bombcar 11mo ago

Corporations have to be assumed to be amoral, which means that practically speaking, you can assume they'll tend towards evil. At least you have to continually monitor them as such.

armonster 11mo ago
Corporations should be assumed to act in line with their interests, which is the bottom line. "Morality" isn't the lens that you need to try to view them through to understand their intentions and actions. But yes, their motivations pretty much always lay outside of any moral good due to the nature of them.
- Lutger 11mo ago
  Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that: 1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations 2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.
  - amelius 11mo ago
    If corporations are not people then why are their ads full of elements that make us feel warm and fuzzy? We're being tricked!
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- jayd16 11mo ago
  Yeah ok, the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight.
  - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ryandrake 11mo ago
      They're lawnmowers[1], not bears. 1: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
    - ptx 11mo ago
      Isn't unified agency the point of forming an organization? The organization generally elects leaders to direct the actions of the organization for some common purpose, e.g. through policies and direct decisions, and they can (or should) be held accountable for those actions.
svara 11mo ago
> you can assume they'll tend towards evil. An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage. And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.
- kelseyfrog 11mo ago
  Evil confers an individual advantage. Pro-social behavior confers a group advantage. That's why sociopaths continue to walk along us. Society can tolerate a few of them, but only up to a point.
  - svara 11mo ago
    Evolution works on the level of the reproducing organism, i.e. the individual. Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit hole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population. This is why you usually see additional stabilizing mechanism(s) to suppress free-loading, in addition to the pro-social traits themselves, even in very simple examples of pro-social traits such as bacteria collaboratively creating biofilms. The genes coding for the biofilms are usually coded on transmissible plasmids, making it possible for one individual to re-infect another that has lost it. You might consider the justice system, police etc. as analogous to that. So yes, in the case where you're part of a functioning society and free-loading on the pro-social behavior of others, that is temporarily beneficial to you - until the stabilizing mechanisms kick in. I'm not saying in practice you can never get away with anything, of course you can. But on average you can't, we wouldn't be a social species otherwise.
    - kelseyfrog 11mo ago
      In your Durkheimian analogy, sociopaths are cancer and while the body usually handles one off rogue cells, it often fails when tumors and eventually metastasis develop.

by bombcar 11mo ago

Corporations have to be assumed to be amoral, which means that practically speaking, you can assume they'll tend towards evil. At least you have to continually monitor them as such.

armonster 11mo ago

Corporations should be assumed to act in line with their interests, which is the bottom line. "Morality" isn't the lens that you need to try to view them through to understand their intentions and actions. But yes, their motivations pretty much always lay outside of any moral good due to the nature of them.

Lutger 11mo ago
Maybe this is taking it too far, but anyway: corporations don't have any agency. They are not persons. The organization and constellation of interests of corporations may be such that: 1. immoral people (such as psychopaths) will be disproportionately at the helm of large corporations 2. regular people will make immoral decisions, because to do otherwise would be against their own interests or because the consequences / moral impact are hidden from their awareness There is no way to act in life that isn't in some sense moral or political, because it also impacts others and you are always responsible for your what you do (or don't do). And corporations are just a bunch of people doing stuff together. To maintain otherwise is in itself a (im)moral act, intentionally or not, see point 2 above.
- amelius 11mo ago
  If corporations are not people then why are their ads full of elements that make us feel warm and fuzzy? We're being tricked!
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
jayd16 11mo ago
Yeah ok, the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > the bear isn't evil but it will still maul you on sight The bear still has unified agency. Corporations do not. (No group of people do.) More than the wind, less than a bear. And I think their flaws are probably shared by all large human organisations.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    They're lawnmowers[1], not bears. 1: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
  - ptx 11mo ago
    Isn't unified agency the point of forming an organization? The organization generally elects leaders to direct the actions of the organization for some common purpose, e.g. through policies and direct decisions, and they can (or should) be held accountable for those actions.

svara 11mo ago

> you can assume they'll tend towards evil. An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage. And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.

kelseyfrog 11mo ago
Evil confers an individual advantage. Pro-social behavior confers a group advantage. That's why sociopaths continue to walk along us. Society can tolerate a few of them, but only up to a point.
- svara 11mo ago
  Evolution works on the level of the reproducing organism, i.e. the individual. Google group selection if you'd like to go down a deep rabbit hole but the upshot is, if pro-social behavior did not confer and individual advantage, the individuals who lose the trait would outcompete their conspecifics and the pro-social trait would not be fixed in the population. This is why you usually see additional stabilizing mechanism(s) to suppress free-loading, in addition to the pro-social traits themselves, even in very simple examples of pro-social traits such as bacteria collaboratively creating biofilms. The genes coding for the biofilms are usually coded on transmissible plasmids, making it possible for one individual to re-infect another that has lost it. You might consider the justice system, police etc. as analogous to that. So yes, in the case where you're part of a functioning society and free-loading on the pro-social behavior of others, that is temporarily beneficial to you - until the stabilizing mechanisms kick in. I'm not saying in practice you can never get away with anything, of course you can. But on average you can't, we wouldn't be a social species otherwise.
  - kelseyfrog 11mo ago
    In your Durkheimian analogy, sociopaths are cancer and while the body usually handles one off rogue cells, it often fails when tumors and eventually metastasis develop.