13
votes
Comments talking about "they're a business" in relation to corrupt actions taken by companies annoy me
You can't talk about stupidity in corporate culture anymore - certainly on Reddit - due to the hoardes of people who will comment saying "They're a business, what do you expect" or occasionally "Capitalism at work" and general low-effort replies. Like yeah, I get it. I know why company x does greedy thing y. Obviously it's to make money. Your comment doesn't contribute to the discussion. Yes companies have to make money but that doesn't mean they should sacrifice all their morals to do it.
Yes this is especially annoying, it's either coming from people who have gave up on changing things which is pretty sad or even worse people who have took one Economics class and think they now understand every decision made by a business ever.
Or, worst of all, people who think that profit is a justification for corporate misbehavior.
The point of such comments is that they inevitably do. The ones that succeed financially are the ones who have the least morals. It's the companies fault that they were immoral, but it's the current socio-economic system's fault that they became successful.
The whole point is that no matter how angry we get at the companies, we need to change completely the system that enables and encourages harmful behavior.
That's all fine. I just hate how such comments are everywhere. It has a habit of kind of shutting down the discussion.
Did you have a specific company or incident you wanted to talk about? Why not see how it plays out on this site?
No, no specific companies. The thing I'm talking about is common to all discussions like this.
Completely agree. Yes, profit is king, but we as a populace and consumer base have the right to demand more of companies. Quality of goods and services may come first, but unjust practices should be rewarded what they deserve.
This is kust how the world works. Someone says, We need to address issue x. And then everyone berates them and tells them, Quit conolaining. So the issue never has to be addressed.
Agreed!
And a similarly annoying one "it's society".
While I agree with you in a way, I believe the problem lies with the general populace more than the companies. We've chosen to reward companies for their bad moral practices both passively (ignorance, indifference) and actively (it's cheaper/better so I don't care; which arguably is the same logic utilised by these companies) to the point that only companies willing to play fast and loose with ethics and morality succeed. Only a small minority of people would rather pay more to support ethical behaviour hence as a people we have implicitly decided that our only true moral is money which is what the corporations reflect. It is an especially big problem when most of the unethical behaviour is targeted at people far away from the consumers (Africa/Asia) because then most people can justify it as "Well its their governments problem not mine" while conveniently ignoring the fact that often these corporations are economically larger than those countries which gives them an undue influence over the policies of those countries. I also do realise that a lot of times no ethical alternatives exist but that's because there is barely any market for ethical businesses which is why they mostly just die off if they are formed in the first place. I think the problem also stems from the fact that morals are very hard to quantify so it's very hard to translate ethical practices in monetary terms or use it for competing with other corporations which makes observing ethical practices unattractive to companies. This is why I am a huge proponent of government regulation of businesses as people generally suck at rewarding ethical behaviour and are generally very unethical themselves so an authority is needed to ensure that a level playing field exists where some basic observance of ethical practices and rules does exist so that no company is at a disadvantage just because they want to do the right thing.