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If I, as a human, only make decisions that are in my best interest regardless of their harm on others, you would not call me amoral. You’d call me immoral. Why
by costanostra989 3y ago
If I, as a human, only make decisions that are in my best interest regardless of their harm on others, you would not call me amoral. You’d call me immoral. Why does this standard not apply to cooperations?
- tyg13 3y agoBecause corporations are not people.
- costanostra989 3y agoCooperations are made up of people, and the equivalence has been a useful and ubiquitous construct. Abandoning that in the context of morality is, to me, just an attempt to hand-wave the immoral decisions and actions made by the real people within these cooperations.
- JohnFen 3y agoCorporations use people as their machinery, but they are not people and don't operate with the same motivations or intent as people. If we're going to draw an equivalency between the two, then we should also take care to recognize that corporations are sociopaths.
- nxobject 3y agoAnother way of viewing "corporations are not people" is the principle, in the American context, that the primary purpose of an organization is maximizing shareholder returns, and more broadly in the interest of shareholders first and foremost (the second of which I think is established legal doctrine in quite a few American states.) You can argue it's questionable from many perspectives – I can be a lot more unfiltered about this – but it tells you how specific of a context large American publicly traded companies work in. If that makes the idea of the large American publicly traded company problematic, that's a reasonable conclusion.
- jabradoodle 3y agoYou are not a distributed system.