It is a principle that applies to every kind of employee. If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
This duty may be overridden by a higher duty, such as the fact that you need to follow the law and report violations of the same. But it is literally what you are being paid for.
If this requires you to do something that you don't approve of, you have a choice of leaving your employment. This is not a joke choice. Many people, including myself, have left companies because we objected to what the company wanted us to do.
And with this we come to a hard truth about capitalism. There is no system of wealth creation that has ever come close to capitalism. It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did. Thus capitalism depends on a legal framework that enables LLCs - literally Limited Liability Corporations. But the obvious outcome is that LLCs enable bad behavior. They put a legal wall to allow shareholders to avoid liability for the natural consequences of their desires.
Thus our prosperity requires capitalism. (And by "prosperity", I mean the ability to not mostly be living at the edge of starvation. Which was the historical norm from the rise of agriculture until a couple of centuries ago.) And our general wellbeing requires additional laws to curb the abuses that capitalism naturally tends to.
All systems have failure modes. The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation. The failure mode of capitalism is abuse, followed by regulations to curb that abuse, followed by regulatory capture, followed by growing corporate power, leading the cycle back to abuse.
As much as I recognize the shortcomings of capitalism, I rather like not starving.
>If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
It is frustrating how these things are always discussed. "The company" is used to deflect blame on any individual as if "the company" is some organism that acts of its own free will. When "the company" makes an immoral request of you, a person is doing that. You can respond to that person by telling them "no". In my experience, I have found this effective. And if I ever run into a situation in which it wasn't effective, that isn't the type of place I would want to work anyway. Sure, this is a stance somewhat made out of the privilege of the financial security my career has provided me, but the original company being discussed here is Meta, the average person making these decisions is likely much better off than me.
> It is frustrating how these things are always discussed.
I did not discuss things in the way that you say you are frustrated with.
If I had, then I wouldn't have said that your duty to the company will sometimes meet a higher duty. Or that you have the option of leaving the company if you do not agree with what it is doing. Or that I've actually done so.
Try giving it a closer read. In the end I'm defending capitalism as a lesser evil. And not saying that it justifies doing bad things.
You said "you have a duty to do what the company wants you to". "The company" doesn't have "wants". Maybe you have a duty to do what your boss wants, but assigning those wants to "the company" is perfectly in line with the type of behavior I was criticizing.
Assuredly you have encountered the idea that an organization with a culture, incentive structure, and specific financial incentives, will act sufficiently like a living being that people find it helpful to talk about it as one. While understanding the actual complexity of what is going on.
Apparently you've chosen to willfully refuse to understand what others mean when they such language. The result of which is a guaranteed miscommunication, and your ability to insist to yourself that you're right.
I will not bother attempting to discuss this further. If you choose to not understand why it is that organizations frequently and predictably act in ways that are not under the control of any individual within them, that is your prerogative. If you refuse to understand the kinds of language that people usually use to convey that idea, that's up to you.
What a weird response. You went from denying that you were discussing things this way to saying I'm willfully ignorant for not discussing things this way.
> The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation.
Why does any criticism of how businesses are run today, no matter how mild, always come back to the Holodomor? Is there a communism equivalent of Godwin's law?
> It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did
I'm asking for executives i.e. high-ranking employees to take more responsibility for their shitty decisions.
This duty may be overridden by a higher duty, such as the fact that you need to follow the law and report violations of the same. But it is literally what you are being paid for.
If this requires you to do something that you don't approve of, you have a choice of leaving your employment. This is not a joke choice. Many people, including myself, have left companies because we objected to what the company wanted us to do.
And with this we come to a hard truth about capitalism. There is no system of wealth creation that has ever come close to capitalism. It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did. Thus capitalism depends on a legal framework that enables LLCs - literally Limited Liability Corporations. But the obvious outcome is that LLCs enable bad behavior. They put a legal wall to allow shareholders to avoid liability for the natural consequences of their desires.
Thus our prosperity requires capitalism. (And by "prosperity", I mean the ability to not mostly be living at the edge of starvation. Which was the historical norm from the rise of agriculture until a couple of centuries ago.) And our general wellbeing requires additional laws to curb the abuses that capitalism naturally tends to.
All systems have failure modes. The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation. The failure mode of capitalism is abuse, followed by regulations to curb that abuse, followed by regulatory capture, followed by growing corporate power, leading the cycle back to abuse.
As much as I recognize the shortcomings of capitalism, I rather like not starving.