Not sure what part of my statement you're agreeing with, as the two points seem contradictory :)

The fees and penalties at 60 and 90 days that are common in contract terms like we're talking about are there for when the client doesn't pay by the agreed 30 day term, aren't they? 30 days payment is the behavior that the company wants, pretty clearly. Yes, they're also agreeing to limited penalties if they don't meet the original terms, but those penalties don't apply until they've not meet the terms they agreed to (pay in 30 days). It's not a sliding interest rate scale - it's limited penalties (likely as a result of consumer protection efforts over time). Yes, of course paying by 89 days is handled in the contract. Likely so are additional penalties/repercussions for payment after 90 days too (ie the debt will be sent to a collection agency at 120 days), but that doesn't make paying on those terms 'okay', because they were covered in the contract.

I'm calling out the idea that there's nothing bad (immoral/unjust) going on if someone doesn't pay within the ordinary term expected unless it's been explicitly agreed to otherwise (not as a penalty, but as an acceptable payment schedule), aside from other moral arguments about extenuating circumstances, etc that might mitigate the responsibility for payment.

> I'm calling out the idea that there's nothing bad (immoral/unjust) going on if someone doesn't pay within the ordinary term expected unless it's been explicitly agreed to

When I first founded my startup, I was vigilant about paying all of my contractors and vendors perfectly on time or early. As a business owner, I wanted to provide a great product and didn't want to chase people for money, and tried treating companies and people I worked with similarly.

What nice thought, and so utterly silly.

My company was largely geared towards large enterprises. When I started, I naively assumed that our relatively small fees, with easily cancelable month-to-month terms, would be so easy to stomach that these large enterprises would pay without issue if they found value, and would simply cancel if they did not.

But I found that the bigger the company, the more difficult it is to get them to pay anything. Big companies are more likely to wait until the day to pay, pay late and ask forgiveness, pay late and then ask for a discount to continue the service, or drag on a free trial as long as they can. These companies negotiate harder, spend more time going over insignificant line items, and generally create far more friction than much smaller companies.

I've had a relatively small $10k/year deals with big companies, where multiple attorneys negotiated agreements and haggled over price, their fees earning them multiples of the total contract value. Pushing folks to the limit, using disproportionate force, begging for leniency, and just generally playing dirty is the norm for large companies. Assuming morality plays any part in it is laughable.

Right, but all of that behavior by those people is immoral/wrong/bad. I said nothing about whether moral behavior should be expected at all times (or any time) from large companies or frankly most of the people we do business with.

I'm trying to point out that people who think there's nothing bad about it (as the original post I replied to stated) are completely missing something about the basic definitions of bad behavior. It's like some shared delusion or psychopathy that people seem to believe, because it's in their self-interest to believe it.

> It's like some shared delusion or psychopathy that people seem to believe, because it's in their self-interest to believe it.

A business is not an individual, it's a collection of individuals each doing a specialized task that collectively make up a large system. Applying moral principles that are generally applied to individuals to organizations just doesn't work. There needs to be a different set or prioritization of moral principles to be effective in a large organization or system.

In my example (highly paid attorneys spending inordinate amounts of time negotiating a tiny contract), the attorneys themselves were not bad, they were instructed to zealously negotiate every contract. The finance folks that paid late are not bad, they were charged with keeping high cash reserves and to tolerate a certain level of legal risk.

As a straightforward example for reducing out-right fraud: Most individuals already know that fraud, lying and cheating is bad. If an individual scams someone, they are bad. In contrast, for a business to be "moral", it must routinely audit their work processes to make sure that fraud cannot accidentally occur, and also provide safeguards when "bad" individuals do it intentionally. If there are no safeguards (regardless of whether fraud occurs or not), the company is "bad". Conversely, if stringent and proper safeguards are in place, and yet someone within the organization is nevertheless able to devilishly get around them and commit fraud, then it's possible that the business is still moral.

The point here is that individual morality is not the same as organizational or systems morality. Lots of moral people can come together and become an immoral organization. Similarly, a moral organization can withstand lots of bad people within their ranks.

That's an interesting look at it. I guess I still feel that the finance guys that are paying late are still doing something objectively bad, even if they've been instructed to do so. 'just doing my job' doesn't seem like a valid excuse from moral obligations (even if they weren't the ones who signed the contract). But I agree with the basic premise that you're making about the distinction between individual and organizational morality.

I personally prefer to think of organizations as being groups of people, each of which have moral obligations, and leaders have moral obligations to ensure that their organization as a whole (sum-of-parts) maintains moral behavior. So not so much the idea that the organization has some moral mandate, but the individual leaders. That view might fall apart in really large organizations; so I'm not sure.

Another twist is that large organizations (as clients in some theoretical exchange) might say : our payment terms will be 120 days, take it or leave it. That's bad on a different level (taking advantage of power imbalance), but if the vendor accepts the contract at that point I don't think one could point the finger at the payment behavior as being immoral in and of itself (assuming they keep to their stated terms). Some (many??) people would not put nearly as much moral weight on the act of using their power imbalance ("isn't that what competition is all about?") compared to the act of breaking their agreement, just because they can get away with it (another form of taking advantage of the power imbalance, but seemingly more sinister).

All that said, I'm just a dude in an armchair at his keyboard that finds this topic interesting, and willing to think about it a bit. I've never studied the philosophy of morality - although I guess I have a fairly strong internal sense of it for myself :)