> pulled out (...) to avoid reputational damage to their brands.
French retailer Auchan did not move out of Russia and I have some friends who stopped shopping there and are quite vocal about how noone should shop there.
Because the company decided that the risk of reputational damage was smaller than the value of their Russian operations? The fact that they decided to stay put doesn't mean they support the invasion.
Calling out anthropomorphization of corporations when related to morality or politics while attributing rationality or self-interest is a contradiction.
Corporations have no self-interest or do not think. Corporations are human artifacts composed of human beings that have specific rules applied to them in the great game in our societies, and tend to behave accordingly. This behavior have patterns that we as humans recognize unsurprisingly as human, because they are composed by humans. A corporation is a as rational as a group of humans can be.
Corporations do not always "act" in their self interest, and we can (and in my opinion should) expect moral obligations from them as we do with humans.
Even if you don't want to anthropomorphize the company, it's still the smart decision to take action as if they were in this case. Social and reputation repercussions were evidently not weighed heavily enough so if we want them to take a different action in the future then we as a society needs to respond to change that weighting in the future. If you just pass it off as a company being a company seeking profit as if it were a force of nature and don't do anything about it, then you remove one of the incentives for a company to align with the morals of greater society.
> The fact that they decided to stay put doesn't mean they support the invasion.
How about with taxes paid there?
German chancelor Olaf Scholz halted $10b Nord Stream 2 project and plans to stop fossils import from Russia to cut cash flow to Putin's regime. Other repercussions' goal is similar: to stop indirectly funding Putin's invasion.
Everyone paying Russia could just "stay put" but this wouldn't be inaction.
How about taxes paid in countries with more civilian kills in unjustified wars?
Are people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sub-sahran africa less horrible to kill than from Ukraine?
I'm not whatabouting, I'm just clarifying what this idea implies
The actual reason why it's "okay" to pay taxes in U.S. is that the media don't demonize U.S. as equally as for Russia, Iran, Taliban, etc..
Therefore, public opinion isn't really going to affect their $$
Don't anthropomorphize corporations.