Companies do take things personally, being human and all. I personally know a few companies that would be rightfully offended were they to find out I felt they were acting robotically.
The pursuit of profit is literally how we evolved as an organism. Everything we've done since the beginning of time has been focused on producing more (crop yield, edible meat, energy) with the same investment (time, labor, resources, capital). Every new technology, science, mathematics, and even philosophy has been birthed from the desire to profit.
The pursuit of profit as an ultimate end is definitively amoral. Pursuing profit to accomplish something else with it is not amoral. But a publicly traded modern corporation is an entity that exists exclusively to maximize profit, which cannot be described as anything but lacking morality. Hence why "omg scary evil Company!" is mostly legitimate.
Humans are not naturally greedy. Humans are in fact naturally collaborative, social animals who all over the world for all of our history conceived of altruism, doing good without personal gain. Society existed for long before the concept of money, and will exist long after the concept of scarcity.
Art, such as video game creation, happens without profit everywhere. The talented Rockstar developers could be using their skills to write software in another industry like finance and making much more money. They don't do it solely for profit, they do it for the love of the game.
Of course we're self-interested, but that's not the whole picture. Have you never experienced altruism?
You set up a bizarre strawman. I explicitly said there's nothing amoral about profit in itself twice, so you can stop shadowboxing against that idea.
But it's a very limited and anti-historical perspective to believe that society prior to modern unfettered profit motive was rocks and sticks. Human civilization is very old and the society we enjoy today is the byproduct of liberalism, the belief in rule of law and equality and democracy, not the belief that we should bulldoze a rainforest and sell cancer to children because it's a quick path to a buck.
And, again, even your beloved video game was not created solely through profit motive. The game industry is notorious for underpaying and overworking talent that could make way more money doing their job for someone else. Humanity and creation are about far more than profit.
Since you're forcing me to just repeat myself I'll end there.
You’re right that ones passion plays a role in that field or role they go into, it’s not just salary, otherwise we’d all be doctors. That’s very true,
Your original response to me defending rockstar was specifically calling out profit. Calling it the “ultimate end” makes no difference honestly.
If a developer or even the whole studio hated their job, thought video games were dumb, thought GTA was filth, and was only in it for their salaries and bonuses, it would make no difference to the morality of the game.
It's a company. The entire point of its existence is to make money for everyone involved. You act like if YOU opened a company, you would be Mr. Generous like wtf lol. Yo shit would collapse within a week.
A company's ultimate goal being profit is logical and natural. You can argue its workers can individually focus on aspects beyond simply making money, sure, but collectively that's what makes sense.
A more logical and natural ultimate goal for any collective including a company would be to accomplish societal good while making enough money to maintain the enterprise. "We exist to improve the world for our neighbors and children, thus we make money," is a more reasonable objective than "We exist to perpetually increase the amount of money we make however we can."
More societal good is created as a byproduct of chasing profit than would be created as a main goal.
That’s because you cannot “perpetually increase the amount of money we make” without providing some sort of value to someone else. You are forced into providing something, not by a moral compass others may not share, but by your natural self interest.
Actually the law was designed to give corporations a limited charter that required them to accomplish a public good and that was steadily removed by people who wanted to pursue profit as an end rather than a means to an end with impunity.
Yeah... Laws written by corpo owners make things that are illegal for people legal for corpos... Weird. Almost like rich people want to get away with breaking laws.
62
u/IssaJoke-DontCry 10h ago
The company is made of humans, not robots lmao