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gjm comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong
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I see. I guess I am having trouble following your conclusions from your premises.
Walmart is in a low-margin business and it employs unskilled labor, so naturally they put as much squeeze on the wages as they can get away with. I don't see anything immoral about it, it's just business. Corporations are well known to behave like psychopaths.
There is a 100 year-old solution to this issue, it is called organized labor. While unions are out of place in many other industries, Walmart is a perfect target for unionizing, since individual workers have zero leverage against the company, while a union can fight for reasonable wages and benefits. Same applies to Amazon warehouses, by the way. So, an alternative to increase in mandatory minimum wage (which ought to be increased, by the way, in the US it is currently lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was 30 years ago) and to a guaranteed basic income (which shifts the burden of paying the Walmart employees from the shareholders and the customers to everyone and adds some unnecessary overhead) is to enact policies making it easier to unionize unskilled labor.
It seems to me that either (1) individuals working for those corporations ultimately make the decisions that screw over their ill-paid workers, in which case those individuals may be acting immorally; or else (2) actually the entities with agency here are the corporations themselves, in which case they may be acting immorally. Neither of these makes moral questions go away.
(I say "may be" rather than "are" because these are complicated issues and it might e.g. turn out that one can't do better than Walmart's employment practices after all.)
I think I agree with everything in your last paragraph.
It is rather complicated.
I am not sure I want the corporations to act morally because the moral system they pick might turn out to be one I strongly disagree with. Focusing on money keeps them safe and predictable. And if you want organizations to work towards moral goals, I see no reason for these organizations to be corporations.