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Its true, in many of the points for which Uber is criticized (including this), Lyft is no better. One might even go as far as to say something along the lines of "there is no ethical consumption under capitailism."

But the point of a boycott isn't to purify one's own ethics, but to get the producer of the boycotted product to change their behavior. To this end it is more productive to focus on the market leader, or the most egregious offender, or some other 'tall poppy' of impropriety, than to try to boycott all actors you believe are unethical.



Lyft donated 1M to the ACLU. That's pretty different about taking action.


And Uber is spending $3 million on legal services for their drivers.


I don't want to take sides, but how is spending $3 million to compensate their own drivers vs. $1 million going to the ACLU which benefits people other than Lyft's "employees" in any way equal?


Isn't what Uber has done better? At least for Uber drivers. They're standing by the people they're benefiting from, instead of an undirected donation.

An analogy: a company has an oil spill, so they donate to Greenpeace.


It's clearly not undirected -- it's explicitly to fight in court the executive order as unconstitutional, which then applies to the entire US and not just their own tiny ecosystem.

Further, 3mil to their own drivers (which I haven't heard about but whatever) doesn't change US law -- so if their driver is booted out of the country, a few thousand dollars ain't much if you're thrown into a civil war or worse.


>"there is no ethical consumption under capitailism."

Imagine there was a competitor to Uber and Lyft that was owned by the drivers themselves in the form of a cooperative, so that any new drivers would have equal say in the direction the service took. Would that not be more ethical than Uber and Lyft?


But that wouldn't be organized as a capitalist company then.


Who cares? John Lewis is a partnership of all 90,000 employees and they are probably the most successful supermarket and department store chain in Britain. They dominate high end food and homeware sales.

http://www.johnlewis.com/customer-services/information-about...


...sure it would? Cooperatives of various sorts are a time-tested method of corporate organization, and plenty of them exist as corporations and make money in capitalist systems.


How do you know it's more ethical before knowing the actual decisions made?


Depends on your definition of ethics, but it's very likely to be more democratically run and have smaller wage inequality.




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