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Is a Moral Compass a Hindrance Or a Help For Startups?
Nerval's Lobster writes As an emerging company in a hotly contested space, Uber already had a reputation for playing hardball with competitors, even before reports leaked of one of its executives threatening to dig into the private lives of journalists. Faced with a vicious competitive landscape, Uber executives probably feel they have little choice but to plunge into multi-front battle. As the saying goes, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and when you're a startup that thinks it's besieged from all sides by entities that seem determined to shut you down, sometimes your executives feel the need to take any measure in order to keep things going, even if those measures are ethically questionable. As more than one analyst has pointed out, Uber isn't the first company in America to triumph through a combination of grit and ethically questionable tactics; but it's also not the first to implode thanks to the latter. Is a moral compass (or at least the appearance of one) a hindrance or a help for startups?
I think you're equating capitalism with avarice. It is possible to run a business while maintaining a sense of morality. Lots of people do and make a living that way. However, if all you want to do is make money, and continue making more and more of it, for no reason other than to keep making more of it, then yes, morality must, at some point, be tossed out.
Proverbs 21:19
You raise a really good point that gets ignored often.
As a startup, you're fighting not just for money and customers, but also talent. Speaking as your typical tech person in the bay area, I'll say that the place is lousy with startups doing interesting tech work where I could solve interesting problems, and it's full with a plethora of places that will pay me well. One thing that I consider in companies is their moral and ethical profile. I work where I work because, irrespective of the crazy wages and the problems, I feel like it leads the way in ethical and humane management of high-performance engineers, and its approach to its customers is transparent and ethical. I wouldn't work for a company I considered evil, or whose execs I had serious ethical problems with -- and Uber falls into that category.
Summary: Not appearing like you're ethical will noticeably impact your ability to compete for talent.
Companies don't have "moral compasses" - the people working in them do.
If you have a moral compass that works, are you willing to toss your morals aside, or work for/with people who do not possess the same values?
If the answer is no to the first part, then you don't need to answer the second part.
If the answer is yes to the second part, then you're just negotiating the price at which you are willing to prostitute your "morals."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Early on in the life-cycle of a company, getting a reputation as being too immoral can hinder your ability to attract employees, customers, and investors. You need to make the most of your benefit of the doubt when you're small and no one knows about the people running the place. Once you've become a significant or dominant part of the market you're competing in, the public's perception of your morality doesn't matter as much.
In other words, your true nature as a heartless bastard shouldn't go public before your company does.
. Anything that reduces individual freedoms is less moral than anything that increases individual freedoms.
Your entire argument hinges on that premise being true. Its not true. The rest of your argument falls with it.
Suppose I and my friends have all the money, all the property, and all the food, and you don't have any of it. What exactly are you free to do?
I am not taking away your freedoms. You are absolutely free in every sense of the word. Now how are you going to live without somehow infringing on my and my friends freedom.
You can offer us you labor in exchange for something, and if we feel generous we might take you up on it. Or not. Lets suppose not. Now what do you do, exactly, with all your freedom? How are you planning to pull yourself up from your bootstraps? You can't work the land, because its mine and I don't need you to. You can't forage, again, all the property is owned, and you aren't welcome to poach from it.
How you make it past a week is beyond me. The charity of others to clothe and feed you I guess. So you may live at their whim and sufference, and should they decide you no longer amuse them, I guess you die.
Yes, that sounds like a good system upon which to found civilization.
- tell me, how did you arrive to a situation in a free market capitalist economy where you and your friends have 'all the money' and 'all the property' and 'all the food'?
How did I arrive at that state? Its the DEFAULT state.
We are all born naked and with nothing. And everything in the world is owned by others.
For me to make it week into infancy, I'm already imposing upon someone else.
Presumably, you are in favor of passing the burden of clothing and feeding a newborn to its parents. So are you already, now reducing their freedoms to maximize their own profits to support your life??
Ah, but they're your parents... so that's special.. if they didn't want that obligation they shouldn't have had you right? Ok... so lets say your fathers dead before your born and mom dies in childbirth. The hosipital and funeral expenses wipe out what little she had. You certainly don't expect me and my friends to bury her for free do you?
So there you are still naked and penniless.
Your move.
In a situation when a person appears out of nowhere
Its usually out of a womb via one of a couple routes.
It is unacceptable to declare some form of moral authority based on theft and initiation of violent force.
So the parents shouldn't be obligated to take care of the child? Who exactly should be? And how would you structure this so that it wasn't based on "theft and the initiation of violent force"?
Charity run orphanages and such? Because if that's your "solution" then you really are just advocating the "You get to live as long as you amuse me and my friends, until we decide we're bored of you, and stop. Then you die."
And its not just infants that appear "out of nowhere" countless children grow up and move out with minimal or no assets (the clothes on their back). And nobody has to look after them. One mistep and their meager fortunes eliminated. And they too get to live at the whim of me and my friends.
In a free market capitalist system you are born a free person, a family or a charity is taking care of you or you while you are a child
Why should they? What if they decide not to? Nobody can force them, so what happens then?
and eventually you learn from peers and become an apprentice in a business, studying it, learning the skills necessary to provide others within the same market conditions with the output of your own labour.
Nobody is required to take me as an apprentice. Nobody is required to hire me. Your vision is a defective as pure communism and fails for the same basic reasons. In pure communism, it is argued no one is motivated to work or do undesirable jobs so they don't and it collapses. But your capitalism fails just as hard, nobody is required to hire you. Nobody is required to need your labor. Being willing and able to work doesn't mean anyone
You don't 'own everything', you only own what you can earn and with time your earning potential increases.
Consider "me and my friends" to be any population. Collectively we do own everything. It is not a 'bizarre' circumstance, its the way it is for all of us all the time. Most everyone (aside from immigrants bring external wealth) added to the population comes at it with NOTHING and only has what the rest GIVE them. If they don't choose to give them anything, what exactly are they supposed to do?
Furthermore wealth concentrates. In any capitalism a smaller and smaller proportion of a population controls more and more wealth, until eventually someone has it all. The game monopoly is actually a reasonable (simplified) model for why this happens.
Consider the "losers" in monopoly; what could they do differently? Consider why it never reaches a steady state, and a winner is eventually inevitable.