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Comment by nf05papsjfVbc | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately, people will behave as per their incentives. As long as the push back and the negative publicity from it threatens a greater loss than the profits from thing they were about to do, they'll back off. Otherwise, I don't think they'll mind letting go of a few people (maybe even to make examples of them) and push ahead.

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Monetary incentives, while very powerful and something that must be reckoned with, are not the only incentives that exist.

And Facebook doesn't have much beyond monetary incentives at this point. There is clearly no 'greater good' they are striving for and any interesting scaling technical work can be found at any of the other big tech companies.

For individuals yes. For the kind of aggregates we call public companies, no. The push there is towards profit, and humans are rewarded or replaced based on that.

I apologize for the late reply. The idea for this response came to me just now as I was absently-minded scrolling through old comments, and I wanted to try expressing it. Don't feel obligated to respond.

I think we agree that individual humans are driven by a diverse set of incentives and motivations, some of which cause the pursuit financial gain, but many of which do not.

It seems that you are saying that a public company is an entity that purely seeks financial gain (at least, as its meta-objective -- e.g. it may take actions that it believes will increase profits in a rather indirect way, with direct monetary loss initially), and that non-monetary incentives are not a meaningful factor. Please correct me if I don't have that right.

Public companies are made up of people, so if your above argument is to hold, it requires that the non-monetary incentives driving those individuals are _utterly and completely_ suppressed, at least for any actions and decisions related to their work.

I can believe that the non-monetary incentives are _heavily_ suppressed by the company, but I don't think this suppression is so utterly effective such that those incentives should be entirely disregarded. I'm not sure how much weight we should place on these other factors, but it certainly seems that it usually won't be 0.

Exactly. Facebook's primary objective is to return as much value (money) to investors as possible. The way they treat the users of the system, their employees, local governments, etc. is all a reflection of that.

That's the fiduciary duty of every CEO: Duties of care, loyalty and disclosure. The loyalty is the most important one because it involves having the best interest of the shareholders in mind. This very simplified means "increase value".

If this is done taking into account all available information, no info is ignored, no info is hidden, then there is nothing more to say. The CEO has done their job.

There is no mandate for a business to be ethical, moral unless this is considered to be in the best interest of the shareholders. Is FB value going up or down if FB decides to be moral and ethical towards the users? That answers the question "why are only some companies moral".

Apple for example decided to take the high road and be the champion of user privacy because they failed to compete with FB, Google, and the likes in the battle for users' data. So adopting a "moral/ethical" position opposing others was the way to bring value to the company.

Companies are not people. Decisions are driven by profit whether in the short or long term.

One might reasonably think there should be mandates to be ethical, moral, etc. Society at large does not benefit from allowing companies to act as amoral predators. Which is what you describe above.

And we do codify some of those ethical and moral mandates in the form of laws and government regulations. Ultimately the only way to ensure that companies consistently behave well is to elect politicians who will force them to do so.

Why not add them to a company's charter? I guess it would scare away potential investors, but maybe other investors would be attracted by them.

I'm in the camp that doesn't believe a free society should be mandating individual morals.

Edit: leaving ethics out of this.

All laws are inherently mandates of ethics/morals.

Edit: to address the parent edit to remove “ethics” and distinguish “morals” for different treatment, the division of subjective preferences into “ethics” and “morals" (and “aesthetics”, for that matter) is fairly arbitrary and subjective in any case.

Good laws are conservative codifications of consensus morality. A just legal code forbids only what the vast majority would consider wrong regardless of the law.

When the law forbids what people don't consider wrong, it becomes tyranny.

> A just legal code forbids only what the vast majority would consider wrong regardless of the law.

I don't think that's entirely true; legal codes often specify things on which there is a strong preference for uniformity (or benefits which can only be gained by uniformity) but where the details of the uniform rules are not themselves a near-universal consensus independent of the law. I don't think this makes them bad legal codes. (Prohibiting driving on the left-hand side of a public roadway in the direction of travel, for instance.)

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