Ask Lemmy

I think the question already contains a sort of ideological trap: it assumes that a specific company can be uniquely evil, as if morality were some trait that varies between company to company.

I'm sure everyone's heard this before:

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

It's not just a slogan. It gives us insight into the very structure of capitalism. That doesn't mean every individual act is equally bad, but the system demands a sort of baseline complicity.

CEOs and executives are legally required to maximize shareholder profits. Not just encouraged— legally obligated. So when Coca-Cola, for example, hires paramilitary death squads to kill labor leaders in Colombia, it's not because it is uniquely monstrous. Replace Coca-Cola with Pepsi, or Nestle, or Amazon, or Raytheon.. whatever. The logic of the system would produce the same result. If I gave the same chess position to 30 different Grandmasters.. if there is a best move they will all see it and choose that best move.

Think of an ant colony. An ant colony doesn't decide to be cruel; it expands, consumes, protects its territory, destroys threats. Is it evil when some colony wipes out another for resources? A colony committing what we could term ant genocide? No it's not. The colony is simply acting in its nature. Much like a slime mold would expand in a radius looking for food in a petri dish.

Large corporations are like ant colonies. Complex emergent behavior resulting from a large number of individual units acting by a set of rules. The intelligence or perspective of the individual does not actually matter for the organism as a whole. As long as the individual units follow a set of rules it creates a sort of "hive-mind" pseudo-intelligence that acts in its own interests and has an almost Darwinist natural selection process.

So this is all to say that I reject the question. I don't believe in uniquely evil companies. The horror is precisely that they're all, in a sense, innocent. They act not out of hatred or sadism or cruelty, but because the system itself has carved out the pathways where the ball inevitably rolls down the hill following the path of least resistance.

Like the other comment said, I would love to know some morally appropriate companies, that way I can choose to use them. Boycotting is nice but if you lack the knowledge of where to shop then it's a fruitless effort

DuPont. Here's just a little tidbit:

Between 2007 and 2014 there were 34 accidents resulting in toxic releases at DuPont plants across the U.S., with a total of eight fatalities.[93] Four employees died of suffocation in a Houston, Texas, accident involving leakage of nearly 24,000 pounds (11,000 kg) of methyl mercaptan.[94] As a result, the company became the largest of the 450 businesses placed into the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's "severe violator program" in July 2015.

Monsanto:

In Anniston, Alabama, plaintiffs in a 2002 lawsuit provided documentation showing that the local Monsanto factory knowingly discharged both mercury and PCB-laden waste into local creeks for over 40 years.[220] In 1969 Monsanto dumped 45 tons of PCBs into Snow Creek, a feeder for Choccolocco Creek, which supplies much of the area's drinking water, and buried millions of pounds of PCB in open-pit landfills located on hillsides above the plant and surrounding neighborhoods.

These are the kind of companies that inspired the cartoon villains of the 1980s that just dump pollution because.

Stickermule and uline

https://slate.com/business/2024/07/sticker-mule-ceos-pro-trump-maga-email-surprised-employees.html

After stickermule went full magat the owner started to dox people who left negative reviews or spoke out against them.

https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial

A previously unreported boom in profits for the shipping supply giant Uline has provided the funds for a deeply conservative Midwestern family to bankroll anti-democracy causes around the country.

Herbalife

Mark all corporations off your list. Corporations don't care about the consumer. Only your money, which supports their shareholders.

Virtucon. It's a large telecom that actually is just a front for a doctor who is always trying to do messed up stuff. He's known for cruelly strapping EM radiation transmitters onto fish and then getting them really riled up.

Adobe.

I worked for an investment firm that had about 75 employees, but managed $35 billion in assets. There are a lot of those. Their investments tended to be a lot of the companies ruining the world, ranging from the privatized ambulance companies to the privatized hospice care companies to the emerging-market banks, etc...etc... And that's just one "small" investment firm.

Is that you, Luigi?

I use good on you app to find ethical, bio brands. It's hard to find good companies, but they do exist.

Any franchise or corporation that makes their religion known. So fuck chick fil a, hobby lobby, and in n out.

Any local small business with political signs or flags, or religious things on full display as well.

For the big makers of pseudo-science based bullshit medicine, see Weleda (naturopathy, anthroposophy) and Boiron (homeopathy).

Bank of New York Melon