"Don't hate the player" is the kind of thing you say about people scraping by at a day job, who hold no real power over the business practices. He wouldn't have gone hungry if he'd behaved acceptably, so he had a choice free of influence by the immediate need to survive. I wouldn't characterize Shkreli's moral failure as a symptom of "the game," but rather one of several root causes of its perpetuation to begin with. In my view, fixing the problem includes denouncing powerful people who fail to abide by the ethical standards that we want them to hold.
I made no statement about "objective" morality. I explained my own morals, and why I'm comfortable encouraging people to blame the wealthy for the harms they perpetuate. Could you please elaborate on how you think this reply is relevant to that?
As slow as it seems to be, my perception is that societal attitudes towards wealth have been shifting over the past few decades. I'm hopeful that one day, the tolerance for their misdeeds continue to dropbenough to inspire progressively more social and legal change, as you suggested.
Public witch hunts are called "witch hunts" for a reason, and it's not a pretty one. It's also known as "mob justice", which despite the name is generally considered to be not justice at all.
It seems poorly considered to characterize social pressure as a witch hunt. It is acceptable to encourage others to share your moral convictions, there is a vast gulf between that and a pitchfork mob.
I definitely would, since the response to Shkreli has been primarily online ranting. He's never been at significant risk for physical harm as a result of the public discourse as far as I can see. I don't consider negative public opinion and castigation for unethical behaviour to be unwarranted or undesirable, so I can't see that rising to the level of vigilantism either.
In my view, society would become severely dysfunctional if we are expected to withhold our negative views of someone's choices, from fear that too many people will share those views.
This is something people often forget, nothing is objectively good or bad as they are social/individual constructs. Even things like killing or theft could be seen as good looking through the right lens.
This is a game theory problem with perverse incentives where regulation and law enforcement are needed. If CEO A (in this case Martin Shkreli) were to take the "moral high ground" and behave acceptably, the board of directors would look at similar companies performing 10x better, fire him and replace him with someone less moral.
If the board were to take the "moral high ground" the shareholders would value the company many times lower, and they'd be bought out for pennies by an acquirer willing to take the low road because that would be a super profitable move.
If moral shareholders refuse to buy the shares of low-road companies, the value of the shares fall, but the profits don't, and suddenly being "amoral" is super profitable for stock investors, and there are always some, and they will be richer than moral shareholders. As amoral investors amass riches, they will deploy greater amounts of capital using amoral valuations, which will then dominate.
So the whole system is broken, and personal ethics does nothing to fix the game. In a nutshell, this is also why libertarianism is broken.
I see what you're saying from a business perspective. From a social perspective though, I don't consider that a reason to withhold my ire towards people like Shkreli. Choosing to be a bad person because someone else might be worse is still a choice to be a bad person, so while your pragmatic reasoning might work well when it comes time to determine a legal response, I don't feel that encouraging people not to hate Shkreli is helpful in encouraging good social norms.
Your ire is not necessarily directed at a personal preference to be a bad person, though. Attributing it to him "wanting to be evil" is easy, especially because he is abrasive.
Due to the incentives above, it might be said we are annoyed by their lack of willingness to be fired in a futile effort to obstruct a system which will carry on regardless--we are annoyed they won't do something pointless.
I have a feeling most people would have trouble taking food out of their family's mouth and literally becoming unemployed in order to tilt at a windmill where your effort cannot win. That's a pretty impossible standard to expect. If Shkreli found morals and got fired, Shkreli2 would take over.
So instead, I say, the problem is the system. Pretending it is about moral failing enables the system to go on by wasting time blaming moral failings instead of fixing it. The system produces bad behavior. We can tut tut each individual person it produces, or we can change the incentives and fix the system.
I really appreciate your reply, you've definitely got the gears turning in my head.
Something to clarify, I'm not really trying to say that people like that want to be evil. People like Shkreli make bad choices not because they like to be bad, but because they're indifferent to the indirect consequences of their choices. I'm extremely skeptical that someone in a position like Shkreli was would be in any serious risk of losing access to essentials like food and shelter if they were to behave more ethically, so I think it's important to set the standard that choosing a job like that when you have alternatives is wrong.
All that being said, I do agree with you that the primary problem by far is the exploitative structure that enables these people to exist in these positions, in the first place. If someone's analysis of the situation ended at Shkreli, I'd encourage them to think deeper. However, I do strongly believe that we don't have to choose between one or the other -- encouraging others to look down on those who choose to be a part of this system can have a significant influence by discouraging others from entering it, themselves. The more voices we have saying "this is not something to aspire to," the more pressure we can build to effect meaningful systemic change.
I appreciate your open-minded approach. In terms of turning gears, I find that a surprising amount of the time, the evil people (greedy bankers, landlords, unions, execs, VCs police) are caricatures held by outsiders who don't see the full set of incentive structures driving their behavior.
Instead, from afar, they become cartoon bad-guys. When this happens, most people take the easy route and decide they are all "evil" rather than looking at the incentive structure of the system, and the behavior it encourages.
Next time you see one of these, see if you can instead see it as a bunch of people in roles mostly acting in their own self interest, and think on whether policy, institutional organization, or law could alter the incentives and change what is in their self-interest in a better way.
