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Why You Must Separate Personal and Business Morality
- jimfl 16y agoCorporations cannot behave according to common human morality, because they are accountable to different systems. They must create profits simply to continue existing against entropy. But it is not necessary to have the system in which corporations operate so divorced from morality, that's just an abstraction that we have allowed to continue. We don't count things like pollution, destruction of small businesses, resourse depletion, etc. as being unprofitable, even though they certainly are. If the so-called bottom line were redrawn, moral ideas could, in fact, contribute to profit and loss. For example, if every single current shareholder in BP could be held accountable to some degree for the current catastrophe, things might have taken a different course.
- gte910h 16y agoThe premise is bad as it assumes corporations have to act within today's legal framework, when in fact that's a human created framework, and when they did that changed how they'd worked until that date. Corporations existed for decades with the public good at their heart (and were chartered for a specific, public oriented purpose). They were enterprises designed to create a good (or goods) that small businesses run in the sole-proprietorship could not, such as railroads, public works, and social institutions. It is merely by a perversion of this, given by a gilded age supreme court decision, do we get the "You have to make profit or you can get sued" companies of today. This could entirely be changed via another supreme court decision or remaking the corporate sphere to allow non-money centric organizations.