moral weight
I keep finding interesting, or quirky, sentences in things I'm reading eg:
One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear.It's an intriguing concept "moral weight", what do I reckon it is? Responsibility? Doing the right thing? Is that so hard? I reckon the heavy thing is doing it all yourself, making the decisions, having to fill in all your own gaps.
from Paul Graham How to Start a Startup
posted by lynn at 10:27 pm
2 Comments:
People talk a lot about 'responsibility' to others: just suppliers, customers at first and later to employees, lenders. There becomes quite a constituency of 'stakeholders' that embroil one in obligations. Moral weight is quite a good way of expressing this, stresses the morality aspect, ethics, almost.
Most folks I know who are self employed or who run micro businesses are acutely aware of this delicate balance of satisfying a whole host of moral obligations and keeping the commercial ones in balance. Yes, I like it.
hiya apprentice,
I've been thinking about your comment for a while, and thinking about why I found the concept of "moral weight" so peculiar. I suppose I think we all carry around these same responsibilities - as an employee, as a citizen of a country, as a person, as much as any person or people starting a "start up". It just becomes much more obvious when you are the person governing, or employing, or borrowing money that you've got to be responsible.
In some ways I found the phrase odd because I think a lot of entrepreners succeed partially because they are not worried by morality and ethics. Which isn't to say that some people don't have very good, very strong ethically run businesses, but perhaps they take the risk with the weight, they've got some way of outrunning the responsiblity.
*
It's interesting now to look at flickr selling to Yahoo! and think of that in terms of "moral weight" and how people within the flickr community have viewed it see this Flickr Forum Don't let yourself get purchased by an increasingly evil, annoyingly Flash-ad-happy, web conglomerate
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