Comment by foerbert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foerbert | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's both reasonable and important to criticize companies for behaving unethically even when it's not illegal. At the end of the day the "company" itself is incapable of doing anything. Humans are the ones actually making these decisions and then actually carrying them out.

Unfortunately we don't and likely won't ever know who exactly did what. The best we can do is point at the company as a whole and say that some people over there decided to do bad things, nobody else in that group stopped them, and then some of those people went and did the bad thing. I don't see why that's not a reasonable critique when we cannot be more specific.

I think that it is also important to do so. The more we perpetuate the idea that companies can't be blamed for bad-but-not-illegal behavior the more we help enable people to make those sorts of decisions as part of a company. They can't be blamed personally - it was the best decision for the company and that's what companies do, you know?

We also help reduce negative feelings towards the companies when they do behave unethically. You can't actually blame them - they're a company after all, right? But this actually helps enable companies to get away with it. Negative public perceptions can impact the ability of a company to make money. I don't see why we should be trying to reduce this kind of influence.

I agree with you. I think it is perfectly healthy to criticize companies and even boycott their products if we don't share their values. This is what I referred to by "controlling the market". Unfortunately this has historically provided very little results imo.

What I was referring to is the expectation that this criticism can make the difference; I don't think it can, for mostly one single reason: if you happen to make progress and magically turn 99% of the people running companies ethical, you have created a huge incentive for being evil. Someone acting unethical will reap the benefit without competitor.

I tend to see these dynamics as balances and movement from balances when something changes. I think changing laws changes the balance point and after a shake, the system will settle somewhere else. Trying to persuade managers to be ethical it's just a fight against the balance that you will eventually lose.

Public criticism does not change things only via boycott. I agree with you about boycotts and their at-best questionable usefulness.

The more meaningful aspects are the fact it creates a negative reputation, and that reputation impacts all interactions with the company. A bad reputation adds an additional cost to interacting with you (be it customers, workers, or business partners), and that needs to be constantly paid for somehow.

Additionally, there's some level of 'acceptableness' for the individuals of a company to do unethical things, which also plays a role. You addressed this in your 99% hypothetical, which I would agree with if it was done in a vacuum. However it's not. In practice if 1% of businesses were behaving in some way the rest refused on ethical grounds, lawmakers would be be falling over themselves to address it. Obviously such an example is unlikely to appear, but I hope you get my point. Moving the needle on acceptable behavior also moves the needle on what acceptable regulations of behavior.

I also largely agree on many of these factors being a dynamic balance. It's just that public criticism is already a factor in the current balance. Some level of criticism is required to maintain it, lest we move towards a balance that sees even more bad behavior.

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