[themodelplumber]

You're referring to big-picture practices and conflicts, which are different.

Also, think about businesses where morality simply isn't a day to day concern of customers, not because they are rotten customers, but because their set of concerns is another facet of the benefit spectrum. "I am their customer because of X and Y." Not _your_ X and Y, but theirs.

In that light, perhaps you can see how much of a blind-spot crutch it can be to end up defending morality as a kind of forced issue by dint of your own subjective focus, which while commendable, isn't the point here.

It's an issue of what else there is.

This is also probably very difficult to understand if you yourself naturally focus extremely hard on giving a clean deal to your customers. As is common in that mindset, maybe you often find yourself the martyr, taking a loss here or there to quietly test your own generosity in that way, for example. Or maybe you enjoy mentally pairing yourself with "good people", those you rate via your conduct system as individuals with whom you feel more free to conduct the generous business that makes you see the world in a better light.

In such a case, of course you have a good argument for branding around that personality facet.

And at the same time, you are still way different from a lot of other businesses...

...which from even this beneficial-morality lens can't be said to come out the worse by some basic psychological calculus. "Be like me" still isn't a fair business assessment tool.

(I know it can be a bit of a frustrating heartbreak to have access to those morality tools, and enjoy demonstrating that benefit in a crooked world...and then hear that a successful business can focus on entirely different facets and psychological processes without cheating their customers...)

[simple-thoughts]

It’s certainly true that branding as morally pure isn’t usual beneficial, but even businesses that brand themselves as sinful or evil have internal processes to maintain moral principles. Often to a greater extent than non profits that are selling morality. An example: casinos request regulation to enforce rules about payout odds, while unregulated casinos create mathematical proofs that their outcomes are honest. They also often run programs to provide assistance to customers suffering from gambling addiction. These actions aren’t because casinos are “pure” or making sacrifices; it’s because the expected payouts to the owners are higher by enforcing these processes.

It’s also important to remember that customers are not the only agents that matter to an entity’s survival. Public opinion, regulators, employees, shareholders, etc also matter. One instance of this in crypto is the lack of assassination markets. There’s been theoretical work on how to build anonymous assassin markets since the early 90s but no one has done it even though there’s proven customer demand. Why? Because for someone with the ability to build such a market, there exist better options that have higher payouts due to lower regulatory enforcement, easier access to capital, cheaper labour, etc. Again being “pure” has nothing to do with it since people with those skills do build dark net markets that sell other illicit services which are viewed as not really wrong by a large percentage of the population and as less severe to regulators than assassins.