Comment by adamtaylor_13
21 days ago
But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.
So I actually agree with the notion that being the big tabacco exec and doing good things with your money, plus helping steer things from the inside is a better proposition than becoming a baker and letting someone who has NO moral qualms with tabacco run the ship.
It’s rarely as effective to push change from the outside as it is the inside.
> But if you won’t be the big tabacco exec, someone else will.
In the public discourse, you'll often see CEOs and founders lauded as incredibly brilliant and rare. As soon as you start to talk about ethics though, they're suddenly fungible. "Someone else would run the orphan crushing factory if not for me"
I think the idea is that if all good people refuse to become a tobacco exec the pool of people willing to take the job will be small and full of bad people, eventually they will run the business into the ground and the problem solves itself. How well this works in practice is debatable.
“If I don’t work with the Nazis, someone else will, so I should be a good Nazi”
Unless you are suggesting selling tobacco is as unethical as torturing and murdering people of different tribes for the sake of them being in different tribes, I do not see what your point could be.
Should people simply never be able to sell or consume tobacco? Even if one’s consumption of tobacco does not negatively affect anyone else?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris
What would be the alternative in this hypothetical be? I'm not clear what the argument here really is.
Are there any social norms that allows immoral CEOs to exist? What incubates an immoral CEO?
1 reply →
“If I don’t work for the Nazi’s they will kill my family, so I will work for the Nazi’s”
There, I fixed your uninspired and incorrect anecdote.
Big tobacco execs are quite literally killing absolutely no one. Last I checked they aren’t sticking cigarettes in anyone’s mouth. Personal responsibility for your own actions is unfortunately lacking in many discussions surrounding things like this.
That's because we have a society have generally decided that personal responsibility is not actually the appropriate lens with which to judge the sale of addictive products.
Nazis were political leaders. So yes, you should try to be a good political leader to prevent the growth in power of bad ones.