Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Businesses are in business to make money, plain and simple. They are not, by their nature or design, charities. You don't blame a business for not being charitable enough, any more than you'd blame a dog for not being able to fly.
Charities get started by people who see a need in one place, a product or service in another that can be applied to that need, and making the effort to connect them through its own channels, including private and public support. In the absence of governments or other organizations, charities step in to satisfy that need. Charities and other organizations are already doing exactly this. Any ineffectiveness on their part is largely due to a lack of private and public support, not on any effort by businesses to stifle their efforts.
So don't blame businesses for not giving their products away to Africa. Blame you, and me, and everyone else, for not buying those drugs ourselves and sending them, or convincing our governments and charities to buy and send them. It does matter whose fault it is. Blame us for ignoring Africa... not IP.
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Uhm if I suddenly say that my only goal is to make as much money as a I can does that suddenly stop me being morally responsible? Where is that big moral rule that businesses can't be held morally responsible, just because somebody said their only goal is to make money? Is that part of the same set of dogmas as intellectual property? Businesses are run by people. Actually they are nothing else. Not some mystical entity. And those people have moral obligations when they way they make money means people are dying.
If a medical company has the opportunity to help save thousands of lives, how is that not their moral obligation? Because of intellectual property? Making money is not some God given right even when it means people are dying because you need to make money. Neither is intellectual property a God given right as a necessary tool for a business to keep making money while people are dying.
And you have no idea what I've given for people in Africa, but that doesn't change this medical company's moral obligations. People are dying and we let them in the name of intellectual property. I blame intellectual property for making us ignore Africa. For making us able to hide behind it.