[hungryhobbit]

>Companies, not begin sentient, don't have values, only their leaders/employees do

Isn't that a distinction without a difference? Every real world company has employees, and those people do have values (well, except the psychopaths).

[advisedwang]

My point is that the leaders have constraints on them that prevent them actually executing on their values. E.g. imagine leadership dislikes spam, but an institutional investor on the board has warned the CEO that if there's a sales dip before quarterly earnings and the market reacts badly he'll get fired. So the CEO - against his values - orders the VP or marketing to spam for all his life is worth. This stuff gets so internalized, that we routinely make decisions at work that go against our values because we know that's what's demanded of us by our organizations.

[Lanzaa]

I think there are two key imperatives that lead to company "psychopathy".

The first imperative is a company must survive past its employees. A company is an explicit legal structure designed to survive past the initial people in the company. A company is _not_ the employees, it is what survives past the employees' employment.

The second imperative is the diffusion of responsibility. A company becomes the responsible party for actions taken, not individual employees. This is part of the reason we allow companies to survive past employees, because their obligations survive as well.

This leads to individual employees taking actions for the company against their own moral code for the good of the company.

See also The Corporation (2003 film) and Meditations On Moloch (2014)[0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/