Can't a company just do what's best for itself and it's shareholders? Why does every organization need a moral/ethical complex which caters to the issues of modern day?
If we follow your logic to its logical conclusion the only way to change the way a company is behaving is through laws and regulations. I'm getting strawman-adjacent here but something tells me that if you think that a company should only "do what's best for itself and it's shareholders" you might also not like heavy handed regulations either, am I correct? And if so, how do you think the problem of unethical companies should be solved?
By instituting only those regulations that loosely serve a public good (say a carbon tax or sin tax) and then predominantly by customers voting with their wallets.
Yes, you have succinctly described the status quo. My point is that "only pass regulations that serve the public good" is vague to the point of being meaningless. That's akin to saying "cancel all the wasteful government programs" as an answer to the deficit.
Ah, I now see the disconnect. 5 posts or so up, someone suggested strong, targeted, heavy-handed regulation as a cure/control for an unethical company.
My "loosely serves the public good" was meant to suggest that instead you could target carbon or sin taxes, but you couldn't (read: ought not) target a specific company, say Exxon-Mobil or Philip Morris.
IOW, broadly target the thing you want to reduce with policy, not the company that does the specific thing.
I can see based on my text how you reduced it to a vague "pass smart laws", but I was trying to make a specific recommendation on how to do that, but then further leaving the majority of control for ethics to the choice of the consumers in aggregate.
Ok I'll bite, so if your company is based in Saudi Arabia you have to be okay with killing journalists because the charter was granted by the government?
I mean... you don't have to feel okay with it, but if you're paying taxes, you're certainly complicit in it on some level. Similar goes for Americans and the Iraq War.
In the old days, in some countries, we had a device for changing the government when it did stuff you didn't want to be complicit in. I think they called it an "election" ;-). Now, admittedly, even if I take a very broad array of American political parties, from the Greens to the Libertarians, their spectrum on foreign policy still ranges from bloody-stupid to fucking appalling, so I don't entirely blame actively anti-war Americans for the anti-war movement's failure to stop the war.
But that's because the democratic system has decayed to the point where, if you don't want today's fresh new war of choice, you're left choosing between two irrelevant third parties, one of whom puts forth a candidate who doesn't know where Aleppo is, and the other of whom are outright tankies on foreign policy and may be paid by Vladimir Putin.
Yes, but I'm not going to debate this, because I'm already appalled that this comment got +3 while my remarks on the Bayesian brain theory in another thread were ignored.
Well if you're a Saudi citizen and you don't have much of a choice then clearly no, it's just the way things are, you don't choose where you're born. If you're a foreigner and go out of your way to open a company in Saudi Arabia then clearly yes.
Companies should not be relied on to make these decisions. If dealing with Saudi Arabia is immoral, that is a topic of diplomacy and the country should be possibly embargoed. What industries are allowed to do business there should be left up to a nations people to decide.
Many companies believe that catering to the issues of the modern day often is best for itself and its shareholders.
Companies do seem to be taking more and more political stances, though, than they have in the past, and personally I think it's, at least in some cases, naive on their parts. I used to see more of "we'll donate 1% of our revenue to save pandas" type marketing, which is noble and universally applauded, but now it's replaced with taking political stances on things that are often hot-button issues.
Companies like that do exist. Profit at any cost, under the disguise of "serving the shareholders" - everyone/everything else be damned. Recent examples include the pharma companies hiking the cost to whatever levels they please ...
If everyone started behaving this way, it wouldn't be pretty.
Edit: You can downvote all you want, but politics are an outgrowth of human interaction at scale. The idea that you can get a couple thousand human beings running around with limited resources and various goals and not get politics is laughable.