From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Jun 06 2002 - 17:12:10 MDT
Samantha continues the high moral crusade:
> Malcolm Morris wrote:
>
> > The company as an entity exists to make money for its shareholders. When
> > they play out the legal charades to delay patent expiry the executives
>
> Yes, so by that statement, it is amoral at best and may ignore
> many other quite real and important values. I think this near
> definition of businesses is itself symptomatic of what is wrong.
I was going to ask, What do you expect to accomplish by
the endless sermonizing about how bad greed is and how
afflicted the world seems to be with it, but your focus
on "business" here starts to answer the question.
> [Malcolm again]
> > As I see it the injustices will continue as long as the goals of the
> > drug companies (and oil, tobacco, arms &c) are limited to acquiring
> > money. If the corporate missions could be expanded to include some
> > variant on "creating the greatest good for the greatest number" then
> > licensing generics would become easier.
>
> Yes! We agree.
Fine. Then let's pass a law saying that every company
and corporation must have "creating the greatest good
for the greatest number" in their company charter.
Now, of course, afterwards, when you saw that this achieved
nothing, it would be necessary for some proper moral body
to seize control and censor the companies' activities that
violated this ethic. Shades of 1917.
> [Malcolm again]
> > Unfortunately that would require not just reform of the patent and legal
> > systems, but the capitalist system, and probably human nature as well -
> > and that isn't happening till the singularity!
>
> If it doesn't happen sooner I am not sure we will ever get to
> singularity.
Aha! We get to the point. Down with capitalism, eh? Yes,
one might admit that capitalism can be pretty evil, but it
happens to be less evil than anything people can think of
to put in its place. (How else do you explain that every
single person reading this is living under capitalism?)
You may be saying, "surely it can't be that hard, I mean,
even I can see how improvements can be made". Well, I don't
think that you or anyone else on this list is as brilliant
as Mr. Lenin or Mr. Marx or Mr. Mao, and they all made a
hundred megadeath mess of things, didn't they?
Lee
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