alt Hacker NewsThere is no “ethical” company. They will tend towards making money by means that can be interpreted as being legal. Sometimes they will do things not legal - but those are calculated decisions based on how much the profit from said actions is compared to how much they will pay out as fines.
Ethics and laws are for chumps like us. Because we don’t have the financial and legal muscle to challenge the state.
Replies
jimbo808 • yesterday at 7:08 PM
As far as businesses go, I'd say Palantir finds itself somewhere between "extremely ethically dubious" and "overtly, transparently evil."
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badgersnake • yesterday at 7:09 PM
sleepybrett • yesterday at 7:11 PM
sure.. but there is 'not ethical' and there is palantir...
this take is irritating because it implies that people at companies don't have to bother being ethical or holding the people around them accountable at a personal level for being ethical, as if it's somehow predetermined by the environment, being at a corporation, how you behave.
Certainly it's true that the incentives of corporations push you to ignore ethics. But that's why they're ethics: they're precisely the things you should do that you don't have to do. That's what morality is. Sure, for the purposes of doing things about unethical companies, it might be best to view all corporations as fundamentally unethical because that implies that the right place to make society better is by opposing their behavior with laws. But at an everyday human level everyone is responsible for exactly the things that they do and being at a corporation in no way changes it at all.