> Businesses are activities undertaken by people but they are also legal entities which have no need to abide by ethical or moral standards, shielding the underlying people from liabilities incurred by such entity. People can't do that.
I don't understand the concept of assigning moral agency to a pattern of activity. The legal entity is itself just a conceptual framework under which actual people operate, and not a concrete entity capable of autonomous action.
The individuals who own and operate the business are the moral agents, and I don't see how they are shielded from the consequences of their own actions. Limited liability just creates a distinction between personal and business assets for the purpose of financial liability, and does not have anything to do with ethical or moral standards.
> their only motive is profit-motive,
"Profit" is just a quantification of net gain in subjective utility experienced by people, in whatever form that takes. Fundamentally, "profit motive" is a redundant phrase, because "profit" refers to the fulfillment of whatever motivation you had in the first place. Whether that's good or bad overall isn't a function of the pursuit of profit -- profit consists of fulfilling the pursuit of anything -- but rather what was being pursued, and what moral boundaries were crossed its pursuit.
Some people seem to bend over backwards to create conceptual frameworks aimed at externalizing the causality of human behavior. Perhaps those who want to create utopia need to find the fault in our stars, not in ourselves, in order to hold out hope that all the world's problems can be someday solved, so they blame abstractions like "capitalism" or fictional characters like the devil for the unethical behavior of human beings. But none of that is really valid -- all of the problems of society are rooted in the fallibility of human nature, and there's no way around that. Unscrupulous, ambitious people don't go away simply because you've altered the form of some abstract system -- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.
This makes sense along with piva, probably because there is enough inconsistency in the familiar system as it has developed, that it's less possible all the time to make black & white judgments.
>Unscrupulous
>-- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.
A more sophisticated chef with a dish completely unfamiliar but irresistible can still be disruptive. Whether or not it's a brand new concoction or a rehash of something so out-of-style that it's simply long forgotten.
I don't understand the concept of assigning moral agency to a pattern of activity. The legal entity is itself just a conceptual framework under which actual people operate, and not a concrete entity capable of autonomous action.
The individuals who own and operate the business are the moral agents, and I don't see how they are shielded from the consequences of their own actions. Limited liability just creates a distinction between personal and business assets for the purpose of financial liability, and does not have anything to do with ethical or moral standards.
> their only motive is profit-motive,
"Profit" is just a quantification of net gain in subjective utility experienced by people, in whatever form that takes. Fundamentally, "profit motive" is a redundant phrase, because "profit" refers to the fulfillment of whatever motivation you had in the first place. Whether that's good or bad overall isn't a function of the pursuit of profit -- profit consists of fulfilling the pursuit of anything -- but rather what was being pursued, and what moral boundaries were crossed its pursuit.
Some people seem to bend over backwards to create conceptual frameworks aimed at externalizing the causality of human behavior. Perhaps those who want to create utopia need to find the fault in our stars, not in ourselves, in order to hold out hope that all the world's problems can be someday solved, so they blame abstractions like "capitalism" or fictional characters like the devil for the unethical behavior of human beings. But none of that is really valid -- all of the problems of society are rooted in the fallibility of human nature, and there's no way around that. Unscrupulous, ambitious people don't go away simply because you've altered the form of some abstract system -- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.