“… I don’t feel superior to anyone… . … evoked some feeling of shame from you isn’t my problem.” You can’t even pretend to be an honest person without trying to suggest other people are less morally pure than you. This is not a simple life, it is a dishonest one. I will not be responding again, obviously. There’s no conversing with people who lie to themselves.

It’s difficult to read this and not feel less empathetic toward you. Such desperation to feel superior without any clear indication that you are invested in actually embodying a set of morals yourself.

If you care, you should take the time to explore inconvenient explanations for why this happens and refuse satisfaction with actionless answers.

This is a good question to ask. This person is not very critical of what they’ve said and is clearly satisfied with liberal (as in liberalism) explanations for people’s behaviour.

Their point is that people are just fundamentally bad and that is why these companies make profit despite an apparently universal condemnation of their actions. It’s shallow, inaccurate, and is only useful to feel morally superior to some imagined decadent group that they believe is the source of this problem.

I think it’s a bit self-indulgent to consider that this is big-brained or world-shattering to people. You’re just repeating the dominant explanation for why these companies can make profit despite their immorality, it isn’t challenging or new.

It’s important to make a distinction between liberals who strive for moral purity through performativity, and people who value human life by recognizing the inequalities in labour and material security under capitalism. Narratives that reproduce the idea that people are just fundamentally impure and can’t stick to their values only strengthens liberalism’s claim to morality.