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by esarbe
1113 days ago
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"Goodwill" is just greenwashing. No CEO has ever been fired for maximizing profits, so CEOs are incentivized to do anything - everything - to maximize profits. Many a CEO has been fired for not doing everything possible to maximize profits. What's worse; the structure of corporations alienates the ones making malicious (but profitable) decisions from the ones executing the decisions. So that even if everyone in the chain-of-command is painfully aware that they are acting maliciously. So even if corporate types don't have to do the shitting thing to maximize profit, they are usually incentivized to do so and provided a fig leaf for their moral qualms. See; Exxon and Global Warming. |
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I'm not saying that corporations won't act in morally wrong ways in the name of profit maximizing.
I'm saying that there is no legal requirement that they act in this way. There is a meme/idea that goes around saying that there is a legal requirement to profit-maximize or maximize "shareholder value" over acting morally. That is false. Anyone claiming that is wrong and probably trying to cover for something terrible they've done. The fig leaf isn't real, and we need to call it out. Doing shitty things for higher profits is not a requirement, and never has been.
Of course it is legal to profit maximize in unethical ways, and some companies will do this, even though they don't have to.
Many a CEO has been fired for not profit-maximizing, but many a CEO has been fired for profit-maximizing while trashing the reputation of the company. Boeing and Equifax are two immediate examples of CEOs who got fired for making extremely profit-focused decisions that were severely unethical. It happens.