Any store with ethics is made up anyway. Capitalism has been “optimizing” out ethics since inception. Not to say ethical examples don’t exist just that they don’t last.
But Capitalism doesn’t inherently optimize out ethics. It just tries to optimize out anything that gets in the way of profit.
When being ethical is profitable, companies will be ethical. Many companies are maximizing profits by making ethical decisions solely because doing so keeps their customers purchasing their products instead of their competitors’ products.
I’d argue that this is a newer feature of Capitalism as well. So it’s accidentally optimizing IN more ethics when compared to 100 years ago.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Capitalism is indifferent to ethics rather than to say Capitalism optimizes it out.
To me that’s a different road to the same answer because it’s almost always advantageous to be unethical, see the correlation between sociopathic tendencies and Fortune 500 company CEOs.
That’s why I differentiate between publicly traded and privately owned companies. In the former, if the CEO’s ethics are stopping profits, they get kicked out. In the latter, if the CEO/owner happens to be a nice guy, it can have an impact on the company as a whole.
Any store with ethics is made up anyway. Capitalism has been “optimizing” out ethics since inception. Not to say ethical examples don’t exist just that they don’t last.
Capitalism bad on lemmy of course…
But Capitalism doesn’t inherently optimize out ethics. It just tries to optimize out anything that gets in the way of profit.
When being ethical is profitable, companies will be ethical. Many companies are maximizing profits by making ethical decisions solely because doing so keeps their customers purchasing their products instead of their competitors’ products.
I’d argue that this is a newer feature of Capitalism as well. So it’s accidentally optimizing IN more ethics when compared to 100 years ago.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Capitalism is indifferent to ethics rather than to say Capitalism optimizes it out.
To me that’s a different road to the same answer because it’s almost always advantageous to be unethical, see the correlation between sociopathic tendencies and Fortune 500 company CEOs.
That’s why I differentiate between publicly traded and privately owned companies. In the former, if the CEO’s ethics are stopping profits, they get kicked out. In the latter, if the CEO/owner happens to be a nice guy, it can have an impact on the company as a whole.
I’m more talking about the ethics of the consumers being factored into the profit equation, which has a very real impact on today’s corporate profits.
Not the CEO. Those guys are sociopaths.