Where Has Integrity Gone?

FractalAudio

Administrator
Fractal Audio Systems
Moderator
Why does it seem like everyone has no ethics anymore?

Just the latest nugget:
I get an email from SiriusXM that my subscription is due to renew. I see that they jacked the rate up to $500 for two years. Screw that, I want to cancel.

So I go to the SiriusXM website and select "Manage Your Subscriptions" and then "Cancel Subscription". It gives me two options: "Select a New Subscription" and "Transfer Subscription to Another Vehicle". Uhhhh, I selected "Cancel".

Then I see fine print down the bottom of the page that you either have to call or chat to cancel. So I figure I'll chat. It says chat lines are open 8am to 8pm EST. It's currently around 6pm. So I click "chat"... "Chat is unavailable. Please try again between 8am and 8pm".

So I get up this morning and try again... "14 people are ahead of you". Ugh. "4 people are ahead of you". Getting there. "9 people are ahead of you". Uh, what?

Finally get an agent.

Vin,
Hi, my name is Vin. Thank you for contacting SiriusXM.
How may I help you today?

You,
Please cancel subscription.

Vin,
I'm sorry to hear that you are considering cancellation.
May I know the reason for cancellation?

You,
Don't drive that car anymore, too old to get into it.

Vin,
Is there any certain reasons for not driving that vehicle?

You,
Please cancel subscription.

Vin,
Allow me 2 minutes to check your account.

Vin,
Thank you for details.
I see that the radio is active with Select 2 years plan on it.

We donot want to loose you as a customer as you have been the most valuable one for us. What Best I can do is I can offer a promotion which can justify the minimal usage you have .

For the next 12 months, you are eligible to receive our Select package at a promotional rate of $60, plus fees and taxes. That’s like paying $5 per month. Just like the previous offers, this plan will automatically renew and bill at then-current rates, and it will renew to the standard Select package which is $16.99, until you contact us to cancel, which you can do at any time.


You,
Please cancel subscription.

Vin,
Let me go out of my way and offer you the Most discounted offer . I can offer you All Access plan for $2 charge for 3 months .
I am sure you can afford this price.


You,
Please cancel subscription.

Etc.
 
I had a similar experience. My friend always ”cancels” and they give him a really low price near the end of the convo. He’s been doing this for years lol.
 
I got THREE trial subscriptions to Sirius last year. I signed up for a free trial of the app, then a week later we bought a car that came with three months free, then a few months later totaled the other car and got another new one that had three months free.

Every time I would call to cancel it was actually pretty easy to get through to them, but I never tried online. Every time they offered me an extra three months for $1.99 or something, and they also combined two of my accounts and pretty much gave me six months of free Sirius, then the same offer as you got, something like $5 per month.

I'm undecided if I'll keep it as I usually listen to Spotify and I've been liking Pandora as well. I typically only listen to Sirius in the car when I'm driving for 5 minutes at a time (pretty frequent) and too lazy to hook up my phone.
 
I used to do that dance with them every few months, why they can’t just sell it for $5 a month is beyond me if that is what they ultimately want to charge for it. No one in their right mind would pay their regular rates.....

got tired of the same songs all the time though. Mostly enjoyed Willie Nelson’s daughters show on my way to work
 
I used to do that dance with them every few months, why they can’t just sell it for $5 a month is beyond me if that is what they ultimately want to charge for it. No one in their right mind would pay their regular rates.....

got tired of the same songs all the time though. Mostly enjoyed Willie Nelson’s daughters show on my way to work
Yup. If he had said "Okay, $5/month in perpetuity" I probably would've taken the offer. But knowing that I'd have to do the same thing in another six months is just a turn-off.

I'm just really disgusted with the lack of ethics being displayed by, well, nearly everyone lately. I was raised by my father, who was honest to a fault, to value honesty and integrity above all else. Sadly this seems to be lacking today.

Ex. 1
My gym sends me an email from the CEO about their Covid-19 response. The gym is obviously closed. The email is all carefully worded to sound like they're looking out for you. I check my credit card statement the other day and they billed me! I reread the email and it says "you'll get credit for the missed days". So, in other words, they're still going to charge you but if you cancel your membership you'll get credit for those days.

Ex. 2
I go to my yearly dermatology appointment and the co-pay is $50. I hand the receptionist $50. She says "we need a credit card on file". I say "uh, okay". I give her my credit card. She asks if I need a receipt and I stupidly said no. I check my credit card statement and they charged me $50.

Ex. 3
We're trying to get one of those PPP loans. It's virtually impossible. However all these big chain restaurants are getting them and they gobbled up all the money.

Ex. 4
Harvard has an endowment of over $40B (B as in billion). They got a grant because of the Covid-19 act. And then they had the hubris to defend taking the money because "our investments might lose money". And they weren't the only ones. Columbia, Michigan, etc. did the same thing and they all have huge endowments.

"Get off my lawn!"
 
It’s really sad. Same sorta stuff happened to me this month with the gym and different subscriptions. Jumping through hoops to cancel something is a good way to make sure I never do business with you again.
 
Not quite that extreme but I had a similar experience trying to cancel my Amazon Prime subscription last week. After the initial “we’re sorry to see you go” page there’s like 10 different opportunities to change your mind with all kinds of different offers, credit cards, etc. I can’t stand that kind of thing, I just want businesses to be straight with me and have some kind of respect for their customers instead of the sleazy wheeling and dealing approach.
 
Greed, end of, it's the sad life we live. That's why I try and surround myself with creators and products that don't choose this route. I've been a loyal fractal customer for ever and this is a big part of the reason (that and uncompromising product quality). I have to swap mobile vendor, broadband vendor, savings account holder, car insurance broker etc.etc... it's a joke. I know that they rely on people not bothering to swap and the statisticians have done thier maths but as you say it would be great if people could put a vague on ethics and other non monetary value.

In a way I've really valued this lockdown as it has given me the opportunity to support the local companies here in the UK that I promised myself I would but never did due to laziness. Its a much better place to be and i hope i don't go back to my old ways once restrictions are eased.
 
i have to do the same thing every 6 months with Sirius. I think for 6 months I'm paying like $5CAD/month....so $30.

Once the 6 months come up, they bill me regular price, which is $22/month, and I have to call in and go through the BS of renegotiating another 6 months. It's always the same old, "well last time was a special offer and we can offer that price anymore" crap. Then I say just cancel it then, and through back and forth for another 5 mins and wasting my time, they say we will give you the same deal you had last time....but this is a very special deal. Sure.

Tired of going through this, but I drive quite a bit and like/use the service quite a bit. But them (and MANY others) try to squeeze whatever they can from you. No integrity is right. Seems like you have to fight all the time to get something...there is no customer service anymore. These companies all soak you for whatever they can. They don't care at all about the "customer". They try and get away with whatever they can.
 
Ethics aren't good for sales, sales of a subscription service is like national geographic, lion vs zebra. You can't apply ethics to predator vs prey. FAS considers ethics because FAS is people that make a device and sells the device to people, FAS cares about people and the device. SiriusXM just sells a subscription service, doesn't gaf about people as long as the people are subscribed and paying. Primary objective is retain subscription. Ethics don't apply to that transaction/conversation, dude on the phone honestly doesn't count as a person while he's at work for [company x], he's just mouthing the words he's been trained to say to keep the subscription active, "just following orders."

The cognitive dissonance comes from working under the presumption that ethics should be a consideration in sales. The "should be" conflicts with the "what is" in a way that causes the mental short circuit, frustration, disappointed expectation. Consequence remains, sufficiently delayed.
 
Another example is when companies offer "special pricing" to get new people to sign up, but don't offer the same to their long-term loyal customers, the people who've actually kept them in business for a long time. Their logic is "we have you hooked - now we can gouge you." Combine greed with the ability to hide behind the internet and their "customer service" people and this is what you get.

@shatteredsquare nailed it - ethical behavior shouldn't even need to be a part of a conversation. It should just be how people operate. Sadly, many don't... The recent threads about spam and the Maine coon cats are just a couple of sad examples. And yea, let's bail out Harvard, airlines, etc while making it virtually impossible for people who could actually benefit from $10,000 to get it.
 
It is the only moral framework that can be used to justify military force or war.
Hmm. Not holding you at fault, @Donnie B., for the error in that glossary, but that ^^^ claim is false.

The Double Effect principle is applied within the broader Aristotelian (including Thomistic) and the Neo-Platonist (and related Augustinian) ethical traditions. The Double Effect principle absolutely can be and is used to justify military force or war, outside the Utilitarian framework. However, it does create more-narrow limits on the options for justifying going to war, or the kinds of ways a war may be prosecuted. In the Western Canon (philosophical, I mean), these represent the two broad categories of ethical reasoning about Just War, namely, Jus Ad Bellum and Jus In Bello.

It feels sometimes like modern readers are utterly unaware of these traditions even though (a.) they're still alive and well with new analyses published regularly; (b.) stand at the end of a very solid 2400+ year tradition of clear thinking about many topics (though sometimes illustrated with bad examples drawn from the Greek and Medieval beliefs about natural science); and (c.) are the intellectual foundation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, Magna Carta, and English Common Law.

The author of the quoted passage seems either to be pretending that long history doesn't exist, or unaware that it does!

...

On reflection, the quoted claim might have been written by a Utilitarian...and I guess a Utilitarian might argue against these earlier traditions, saying that they claim they can allow for Just War under the Double Effect principle, but that in his opinion, their claims fail for Reason X, Y, or Z. He would therefore claim that the quoted passage was correct in his opinion.

But that would be "dirty pool," as they say, since the quoted passage is in a glossary. It wouldn't be kosher for a Thomist to write a glossary describing every other approach to ethics as "a Hitlerian abuse of moral reasoning" and Thomism, alone, as "wisdom from the gods!"
 
Since you asked man, integrity has gone out the window, completely, especially in America.

There is no sense of honor, respect, or moral values, and that extends onto the internet and resultantly, with people you do business with online

they think anonymity and throw away accounts keep them safe when being slithery, and so they continue to do it without regret, conscience, and often with impunity (e.g. Adam Howard pretended he was “hipiboy” to steal my Axe Fx 3 studio from this very forum but luckily I knew “maurizio“ was an alias along with a throw away FAS forum account)

Now reverb and ebay are scammer wastelands for counterfeits, stolen and chinese Knock offs

That’s why, when I bought my next guitar it was from the Axe Palace, a reputable and authorized dealer whose been a round for decade minimum [and w/ certificate of authenticity, is it at a thousand dollar premium, yes it is, but idc anymore, id rather pay 3k once right, than regret the 1k i spend and never stop thinking about the 2k i think i saved lol ]
 
Why does it seem like everyone has no ethics anymore?
There's a great book by Alasdair MacIntyre called After Virtue which offers an answer to this question (quite persuasively, at least to me).

It's not that bad a read, though I think MacIntyre is sometimes overly-hesitant in stating his thesis. He wastes time prefacing it with too many caveats: "Now, hear me out; I'm not saying X or Y; and what I am saying is only similar to Z in certain respects...," etc., etc.

He describes ways in which the culture has shifted underneath the language, such that we use terms that superficially sound like we're making moral arguments but really aren't (although they used to really be moral arguments when those terms were defined against the cultural context of 500 years ago).

But because certain metaphysical and anthropological assumptions have changed in our culture (not, BTW, by argument or discovery, but merely because the popularity of ideas can wax and wane), those terms can no longer be coherently defined the same way they once were...and our new metaphysical commitments make any new definition for those terms inherently nonsensical or self-contradictory. Yet, we still insist on using such terms! We perversely insist on attempting to morally persuade others -- despite the fact that, given our new culture, the terms we're using cannot possibly have any meaning.

MacIntyre claims that the "Enlightenment project" of Diderot, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, and everybody else right up to Rawls, was thus doomed to fail because those were all attempts to find new satisfying definitions for the moral terms which, given our current culture, just can't have meaning at all.

Given the choice between...
(a.) ceasing to believe in meaningful moral terminology (and thus ceasing to make moral claims in conversation); and,
(b.) continuing to use the terminology in spite of it being meaningless,
...we've persistently chosen the latter. But nobody likes to admit his words are meaningless; so, we spent the last 400 years cycling through various attempts to offer new definitions for these old terms, and after several faulty attempts we finally landed on the only option left: Explaining morality solely in terms of sentiment. ("X is wrong, because it feels icky to me.")

But this also doesn't work, at least not for argument, inasmuch as sentiment is subjective. (If I feel that incest is disgusting, and Mr. X and his sister don't, then according to the Morality-As-Sentiment claim, I'm correct to scorn it and Mr. X and his sister are equally correct to indulge in it. Any argument between us is moot from the get-go. Trying to persuade Mr. X is equivalent to hearing him say, "I feel sick today" and answering, "No, I feel fine.")

But it also means that Ethical Behavior in society at-large will decline, and for good reason: As soon as you convince me that my Negative Feelings about betraying my country or robbing my fellow-man are in the same category as my Negative Feelings about what Americans ludicrously call "Swiss Cheese," then I will be just as willing to commit treason or theft as I am to eat that waxy cheese-substitute ...meaning that I'll usually avoid it, but there are times when I'll do it, if it wins me social approval or a job-opportunity or something else that makes me feel good.

SiriusXM seems to think that their happiness at continuing to receive money from you is a stronger feeling (and thus more important) than whatever mild, quickly-forgotten qualms they might have about how how they achieved that outcome. Thus, they're willing to treat a customer like a rube or a mark: someone who only exists to be duped. Quite logical, if you think moral obligation ultimately reduces to sentiment.

Anyway, MacIntrye's book is worth a read, if you're into that sort of thing. It gives a fresh set of lenses through which to understand a lot of interminable arguments we observe in culture, politics, and the academy.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom