Ask Lemmy

No. A good example is phones. They are intentionally designed to be breakable and difficult to repair. Even ignoring the repairabilty standpoint: the glass backs for wireless charging (a feature that a minority use), not giving consumers a phone case, the lack of innovation for "water proofing" the phone; just using glue everywhere (more annoying to recycle existing phones).

That is unethical. The sheer amount of human life wasted needlessly spent repairing and paying to fix these phones, and polluting the environment is unethical. The default should be more repairable, if not more durable, but no.

Companies are not people. They need people, sure. And it isnt automatically a good thing when they lose. But they are NOT people. 1000s of companies could crumble tommorow with no loss significant loss to anyone. They can find new jobs, create new companies. A company failing because they prioritised the consumer isn't "good", but it isnt "bad" either. However, if a company relies on the pollution of people's time, money, and environment? That is unethical.

Obviously not, thats literally the opposite of what ethics are about....

Perhaps it's interesting to flip the problem. What if you made a product that lasted say 10x as long as the competition with a small margin and accepted the market would saturate? Then pivot to the next product, and the next?

I would expect, given the current state of 'capitalism', you would be sued, IP'd and regulated out of existence very quickly. Criminal contempt of business model.

I’m sure someone has the Vimes Principle of Economic Unfairness on hand.

I’m also sure that there’s a slope for every product showing the durability and the price required to achieve it. Then there’s the reputation cost of making a cheap version and expensive version of something. If you make something flimsy for $5, it’s unlikely that someone would buy the indestructible version for $100, even if the cheap version was intended to function as an example of what the expensive product can do. Given an ethical vacuum, I think there’s great incentive to do the mediumest you can, even if you have a monopoly.

The ethics are going to be different for every product and every person. If you care about whales, indestructible fishing nets will seem evil. If you make something biodegradable, it will necessarily be flimsy, and that limits its long term usefulness. When the owner of an indestructible item dies, what’s to be done with it, and by whom? I think society would need to be radically different to even begin to answer this question.

Welcome to end stage capitalism, where the only rule is line go up. Line go up when you use fewer materials. That's why everything is shitty now.

Just engineering something to be garbage for no other reason than so that people will buy more is unethical. That said, there are always trade offs and durability has to be weighed against other priorities.

For example, cars used to have much bigger bumpers which were expected to protect against damage in low speed impacts. Those went away because the requirements changed, the low speed crash test was out, and fuel efficiency requirements were in.

Or there's incandescent bulbs. They were ubiquitous for over a century, and yet they were constantly burning out and changing them was just a fact of life. Manufacturers could have easily made a more robust filament so the bulb would last longer, but doing so would have dramatically decreased the output of the bulb.

There are companies that went broke by making their product indestructible, a notable example being the maker of the wildly popular Instant Pot. They made a product that just didn't break. This is called planned obsolescence failure and has happened to other companies too.

That being said, making flimsy shit on purpose is shady at best.

Think about all the waste that cheap products create. I can buy a cheap pair of work boots twice a year or a good pair every 2/3 years. I believe it's unethical for preying on the poor while also creating more waste.

no.

If everyone built them at the highest quality, then every product would be at the highest price point.

Each reduction in quality makes that product available to more people who couldn't afford it otherwise.

Eventually, the only way to put the product in everybody's hands is to make it so cheap that it only works once, if you're lucky.

Yes, particularly if you're the company creating the "In case of emergency, break glass" boxes.

It really depends on the product Id think. For an extreme example, a packaging company making packaging that does not degrade after a reasonable time contributes to landfill waste in a way that a packaging that eventually breaks down would be less responsible for.

If a product's useful life is limited by some other fundamental reason to the thing simply breaking (I don't mean planned obsolescence here, but more objects only needs for a certain period of time and which customers are almost certain to throw out afterwards), then making the product last longer than needed just turns the extra material needed to get that robustness into extra waste.

If we are talking planned obsolescence, that reasoning flips around to making longer lasting stuff cause less waste obviously, though nothing is truly needed for or able to last forever so there is always going to be a point where making the thing tougher is not going to help the end user any further.

That's a toughie. Go broke with morals or get rich being unethical.

If you started a business and was faced with the same situation, what do you think you would do? Personally, I think I would focus on the money over time